Revision 20: Blog Post IV

[Guest]

Welcome to the fourth and final blog post of revision 20! We are presently 131 days into the revision and ushering in the final month of gameplay. We're going to look at all the news and happenings since the last blog post and review all of the stats posted before with an update!

News

Revision 21 Announcement

We have recently announced our tentative reset date for revision 21 as Friday, September 22nd. This means that we're currently aiming to reset from this date although if something goes wrong between now and then, the date will be pushed back. Once we get closer to this date and feel more confident in our chances then we will reaffirm this date.

It's been very exciting to hear where everyone is looking to build next revision so far! We'd love to hear from you too!

Admin Hunt Event - 26th August

Following the success and fun of our new admin hunt format back on 29th July, we're currently planning to host a second admin hunt on 26th August. We have 10 confirmed admins attending and two new tiers of prizes to choose from. Additionally, there are now 6 villagers to trade with for prizes to bring down the queuing. Click here to view our full announcement post.

Easy Rider Improvements

Totemo has brought an update to EasyRider on P for a few quality of life changes which further improve the experience. The primary addition is the use of /horse-next (or) /hnext to see the effort required to level up in all three horse abilities. Read the full announcement here.

Gnome Depot Spawn Gift Shop

Come one, come all! The Gnome Depot gift shop at spawn has opened up, allowing you to purchase novelty items from the ground floor! Additionally, this shop presented a retrofit at the rear of spawn, completely opening it up so that you can pass through spawn while riding a horse! Click here to read the original post.

Livemap Icons Updated

Based on a suggestion box submission, we've gone ahead and updated the grinder icons on the livemap to appear as skulls for this revision. Read the full announcement here.

Meteor Storm / Alien Scavenger Hunt Events

While the fundraiser was underway, we worked on bombarding the map with 30 meteor clusters and setting up an alien scavenger hunt starting at spawn!

All of the meteor clusters have been mined up, mostly due to a very diligent tompreuss! Additionally 10 people have completed the alien scavenger hunt so far, congratulations to (in order of completion): CairBirb, C2Talon, Keiluss, King_of_queso, Blue_Avocado, iNerd71, Ruthlesssss, bermudalocket, cujobear & buzzie71!

All of the serious prizes which can be obtained are at spawn on floor 3 inside the Adventurer's Guild Prize Trading Shop. You can read the original announcement here.

Mob Skull Stacking

Due to Pez's efforts, you can now run the /fixskulls (or) /fs command on P while holding all of your skulls in your inventory to make them stackable! Click here to read the original post.

PvE Revision 20 Awards - Map Contest

From the past few weeks, Cujo has launched category submissions as well as a category survey for the PvE Revision 20 Awards.

Now though, we are looking to invite you to participate in the map contest! From now until the end of the revision you can design a map in mapworld to create and submit a trophy for one of the awards categories. Click here to read the full post.

Revision 19 Cartograph

This announcement may have been a little later than expected! Nevertheless, you can now access the revision 19 cartograph. Read the original post here.

Facts

During this section, we'll be revisiting all of the stats that Pez has been kindly tracking and providing to us, which appeared in prior blog posts. Didy has put together a few infographics to showcase your achievements, enjoy!

 

Community

We return for a final time to focus on the most important part of the blog, you!

Since our last blog post, many people have been working together through the various events on P. Buzzie has even gone so far as to create this fantastic movie poster for those participating in A.L.I.E.N.S! On a similar note, despite the gold-filled meteors raining down on P, the Uberproject Scarab has been assembled!

Tict0c's Trivia has continued to run into week three where Kaosinc had won the prior week! Furthermore, King_of_queso won week three! Week four is available now too!

If you're looking to schedule a sparring match then Hyrule is the place to go! With their completed PvP arena open for civilised bloodsport. However, if you're looking to gain your wings then you could participate in the Lazuli Shores elytra course. Just remember to take regular breaks and to visit the food truck while they are serving!

Onto the miscellaneous sightings around P, there have been a council of birbs convening for regular meetings. What could they be talking about, possibly their plans to take over the Metal Mountains' spooky castle? Maybe it all ties into describing how the Pez manneqin became so popular at Gnome Depot?

Haven, with assistance from Pez have established a hex grinder! Nearer to spawn, Zomise has created a public post office where you can leave gifts for one another!

On a more serious note, it's been wonderful to continue to see individuals reaching out for help and others coming to their aid. We have had a returning member of the community open themselves up and a new member entirely sharing the experiences. We're glad to be a part of the same community as you!

Padmin Q & A

Just under three weeks ago, we asked for questions that our team could answer to better provide insight on how we approach building a new revision. While we only received two questions, we've added in some of our own and have answers ahead from each of our team to the respective questions. We hope that this provides some insight to our approach!
 

Submitted by: JamesMcProgger
The map this revision is amazing, clearly divided by biomes, but very rich in all of them, Once installed on a location you dont have to go far to gather any needed resources.
Is the end of the rev a fix date or do you guys decide that according to the percentage of the map taken or with builds?
[cujobear] Revision duration is decided by many factors: the amount of map used,player retention and time just a few of the things we keep in mind. Revisions usually go anywhere from 4-9 months. With knowing the history of previous revisions we can know rough estimates, but we never know the exact date until a lot closer to when we announce it to the community.

Other things you may not realize we consider, is availability of staff. It takes a lot of time on the part of all the padmins, some of the techs and many of the moderators to get the revision running so we have to look at our personal schedules as well to make all hands are available to get the map uploaded, spawn added and spruced up, plug-ins tested, and all the little background bits to make sure things run as smoothly as possible the first night.  
[defiex]  Both Cujo and Barli put it very well.  I would point out that it is rather suspicious that the next rev doesn't start until I'm finished whatever build I'm working on.
[Barlimore] Revision durations are a mix of factors for us. One of the most important factors is player retention. We look to see if people are still logging on to play in any significant numbers on a steady basis.

For the current revision, we’re fortunate enough to have 19 prior revisions of data so we have a reasonable idea for how long it takes for a revision to wind down. Based on this, we planned a date for rev 20 ending, back in March when we were still in rev 19.

Once we started rev prep for revision 21, we re-evaluated this date and checked in with our tech admins to see if it still worked for us. It did not so we have chosen a different date instead. Fortunately, we were only a week out.
[didy] Not much I can add to these comprehensive answers - sufficed to say we have a tentative plan, but it's flexible dependent upon circumstances.

Submitted by: Herr_Fawkes
How does the spawn design process work? Is it like the lobbies, where several are designed and one chosen, or is there a committee process to design and then build one?
[cujobear] We discuss spawn theme during our early revision planning meetings and decide who will be the lead on finding a design and creating a spawn. Usually the spawn is built separately and then pasted into the world once the map is finalized and uploaded. From there the moderators are allowed to help bring the spawn area to life with decorating.
[defiex]  Spawn themes/requests from the playerbase and ideas are all brought in to play when designing new-spawn.  We learn from our mistakes coughlag-spawn-of-lagcough and try to take suggestions and requests into consideration. Rev 21 Spawn's theme was discussed early in the rev, as spawn discussions go! We're excited for it!
[Barlimore] In the past, typically there was an order to how spawns were built where the newest padmin would be given full control over building their own spawns. That hasn’t strictly been the case from revisions 18 to date though.

Similarly though, for revision 20, one padmin was designated to take the lead on setting up a spawn and working with staff to coordinate the sprucing that happens typically in the weeks before a reset happens.
[didy] I have observed a great deal of discussion around spawn buildings, and consideration of feedback from players. Aesthetics and functionality are key concerns, and for next rev, theme has been important too.

What do you most look forward to when creating a revision?
[cujobear] Watching it all come together. Seeing these sometimes crazy ideas we came up with as a group come to life.
[defiex]  I agree with cujobear.  It's a tremendous amount of work, but it's fun. It's brilliant seeing ideas and discussions become a tangible creation that other players can enjoy and explore.
[Barlimore] For me it’s the possibility to try something new or to make some changes that may bring about an improvement to P. Some of the more recent examples would be our attempts at improving transparency with our changelog updates, public notes from our padmin meetings (especially for people who may not have been aware of them even happening!) and having the blog posts include a wide variety of our community.
[didy] For the most part, I look forward to launching the new rev and seeing reactions to the things we have implemented and created.

Which are the more challenging aspects of the revision that you have faced?
[cujobear] knowing that no matter how many notes you have and how many lists you follow, there will probably be ONE thing you forgot to do that won’t be realized until the map is live and the community is already playing. So the most challenging thing is to not let that happen.
[defiex]  Trying to balance real life and game play/administration.  The hard, hard, hard work of documentation, discussion, more documentation has made what has been, for me, a difficult couple of months much easier. Document driven meetings make me are warm and tingly inside.
[Barlimore] One of the more challenging aspects from my experience is on the documentation side. Specifically for ensuring that all of the information we are putting out in the subreddit information post, the wiki information guide and the in-game helphelp pages are all singing off the same songsheet.

Focusing on this revision alone (20), we have an 11,636 word document that we proofread. We focus on ensuring that the information is clear, correct and all matching up, to the best of our ability.
[didy] Researching and collating past and present feedback into a coherent review document was quite time consuming, and in general it's the paperwork that requires a lot of self-motivation. I also do not enjoy when a player, or players, are unhappy with some aspect or experience they have had, and do my best to make sure that doesn't happen often.

How do we go about incorporating feedback into a new revision and could you share one piece of feedback that you’re looking to address into the next revision?
[cujobear] Feedback is very important to us when we look at creating a new revision. Even though it is mostly impossible to make changes that will make everyone happy, we always want to do what’s best for the community while trying to keep the game fair and balanced as possible.

The feedback I am looking to address in the next revision is the ore generation. We tries using the Biome Bundle’s default generation this rev and got a lot of feedback about it so I am working with Pez to see if ore generation can be fixed for this upcoming rev.
[defiex] Because you can never have too much documentation, we have a handy dandy document that has rev 17-20 feedback responses that we combed through to see if there were any repeats, any specific requests or anything fun from the past we couldn't implement then, but maybe could do now.  Biggest piece of feedback that I think we received was to turn down the lag machine at spawn!  We're working on it!
[Barlimore] For revision 21, we have collected feedback from revisions 17 through to 20 so that we have a historical record of suggestions that may be being repeatedly mentioned.

We’ve personally responded to everyone who took the time to share feedback in our revision feedback topics so we have a good idea for what you’d like to see.

After reading again through all of the feedback from revisions 17 through to 20, we made sure to discuss revision 21 with all of this feedback in mind. Some ideas are not viable at present sadly but we’ve made a point to thoroughly discuss them all.
[didy] Feedback was extensively reviewed and discussed. I am personally focussed on seeing what we can do with the Nether.

Give us a hint for something coming up in revision 21!
[cujobear] ALL THE THINGS!
[defiex]  NI!
[Barlimore] The theme for next revision will not be somewhere you’d expect to see a modern-looking building.
[didy] The underworld does not give hints.

And finally, what has been your favourite experience of the revision so far?
[cujobear] watching comments on day one as the community got to see the map for the first time was pretty amazing. Creating NITWITS and watching players discuss and solve the puzzles was pretty great too!
[defiex]  Words do not describe how much fun I had with the new admin hunt.  Being unable to breathe from laughing when someone hopped across the yard as a melon block, trailing players was well worth the pulled muscles.I absolutely can't wait to do it again!
[Barlimore] I love seeing people having a good time, it makes all the late nights and 3am meetings worth it. Everything from launch onwards has been fun to observe.

One of the best moments for me was the grand expeditions where a group of people came together from across P to explore the many settlements, builds and individuals that make up our world.
[didy] As a player, I very much enjoyed constructing the East Road out of spawn. I hope it allowed more people to settle there. I enjoyed visiting great communities such as Metal Mountains or Lazuli Shores, who were easily accessible along the route.

As a PAdmin, I have had a great deal of fun watching people slowly lose their sanity to the Alien Scavenger Hunt. I hope to be able to do similar events in the future.

[Trooprm32]

Quote

[Barlimore] In the past, typically there was an order to how spawns were built where the newest padmin would be given full control over building their own spawns. That hasn’t strictly been the case from revisions 18 to date though.

Just a historical correction; Rev 15 was a collaboration effort among the team, I wasn't strictly alone in building that spawn, so the path of deviance started there. But I'm sure there is probably even further back examples from before my time as well.

Edited August 23, 2017 by Trooprm32

[CROCKODUCK]

On 8/23/2017 at 4:48 AM, Trooprm32 said:

Just a historical correction; Rev 15 was a collaboration effort among the team, I wasn't strictly alone in building that spawn, so the path of deviance started there. But I'm sure there is probably even further back examples from before my time as well.

Yeah I am 99% sure it was like Thrawn and Devevian and a whole mess of admins (and/or including Barli) who built the magical rev 10 castle. 

[Guest Former Staff]

8 minutes ago, CROCKODUCK said:

Yeah I am 99% sure it was like Thrawn and Devevian and a whole mess of admins (and/or including Barli) who built the magical rev 10 castle. 

I cannot take any credit for the revision 10 spawn but it's interesting to hear about how it was built!