State of Bane Q2 2013

Hello! It's that time again. The last announcement was March 12th. Let's see what has been happening during the second quarter of 2013!

New Team Members
We've added seven new team members this quarter!

It's been a great quarter for new developers! Please welcome sael, SparrowHawk, uberom, purgatory, Shadowpryo to the development team. We can't wait to see what you can do!

The test team has also gained the knowledge and experience of spazgar. Welcome aboard!

We have two new community representitives! Vervandi is still on the design team but has agreed to help out with CR duties. Contraband is a brand new member bringing some fresh eyes to the project.

Progress Report
Now, let's have a look at what the teams have contributed to the game this quarter.

Development

The dev team had previously been focused on fixing annoying bugs on CB and on hireling management for cities. Unfortunately, the latter has been slow due to a lack of recordings to draw game data from. The team has agreed that a change of pace would be beneficial for everyone, so focus has shifted to implementing the prescheduled battle systems: banes and mines.

During the last monthly meeting, we asked the developers and admins how specific things are going. Here are some of the meeting logs:
Quote:
How and why have development goals changed this quarter?
How? not sure. Why? demand.
I think the main goal has been switched to focus on what's more in demand
The focus has been on cities, banes, and mines.
Quote:
How far along along is the cache server?
Well, I can run it on CB right now. I need to commit what I have. The version in the SVN is old.
It still needs some work before it's ready for production.
I've solved most of the crashing issues.
I think I've gotten all the memory leaks, so it's stable. It needs a basic GUI on it to fancy it up.
Quote:
What does the cache server actually do?
It does two things: it makes the net messages smaller so it uses less bandwidth and it caches objects so we don't have to keep re-sending them (which further reduces bandwidth)
Think of it like a middle man. Your client connects to it and it connects to the game server.

Testing

Testing has been extremely efficient at identifying bugs, and they have their work cut out for them now that the Developers are working on new territory.

Quote:
How many new bugs have been added in Mantis since last quarter?
I'd say around 70 about since mid April
bunch more that have been updated
though we do still have some troubling bugs related to the newer content
Quote:
What were the most annoying bugs that you saw fixed this quarter?
Walls that auto-rotated when placed , shrines building backwards
Vault crashes?
gold loot crashes?
Water buckets work properly now.
Stone reflects correct times for standoff
Stone and tree take correct amounts of damage now.
Destroy trebuchet, it stays destroyed whereas before it would instantly rebuild to replace destroyed one.
Rubble now goes away after reset.

Closed Beta

Closed beta was expanded again earlier this quarter. The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] hosted a screenshots contest. The top 10 screenshots earned a spot! Congrats again to dajjal1983, Valmiyr, Cecil, siberain, Vinny, udopi, AriusSerillious, Aesir, Gadarkman and zeroos18ve.

We asked current closed beta testers to reveal some of their feelings in regards to the status of the game. Here are some thoughtful responses I thought would provide a good picture of what it's like to play on CB for those who are still waiting:

Do you get the feeling that the project is making good progress?
BazookaTooth wrote:
I think it has considering it takes the time of people willing to put in free time, the emu is not really that far off from the live version if you view it as a whole.
Vinny wrote:
slowly but surely based on what I read and peoples comments it is looking very solid!
Cryfowl wrote:
Not really overall. I understand it's gotta be like hearding cats for you guys some days but I think things are moving forward extremely slowly.
Skoot wrote:
Yes, compared to CBDalgoth, this phase of beta has been incredibly productive. Banes and the possibility of mines show very good progress along with other hotfixes that are put in.
Blyster wrote:
Yes, but still a lot left to do. More than people think. But love how far it's come. Really impressed with Rich and Papah's sacrifice of time and dedication. This has to feel like a full time job that pays nothing to them. So all we can offer is appreciation and respect. I wish more developers would help work on the project to speed things along and take some of the burden off those two.
When is your prime time and is the server very active at that time?
CB Member wrote:
I'm thinking 7-8PM EST, and usually the server is pretty active.
CB Member wrote:
My prime time is from 7EST to 11EST. it seem's that the majority of players prefer the 9EST to 1EST weeknights so i do get a bit of an overlap.
CB Member wrote:
7pm-9pm EST, server is very populated
CB Member wrote:
11pm to 1am Eastern time. Activity levels are pretty good in those hours.
CB Member wrote:
4-7 pm EST and not lately no but i contribute that to general population decline (again).
CB Member wrote:
My primetime varies. Monday - Thursday my primetime is from about 7PM EST to about 11-MIDNIGHT EST. The server has peak activity at that time (I feel)
Which bane has been the most fun so far and why?
ManAgainstTime wrote:
That's a tough one to call. WM's bane on Validation was extremely fun. WM's bane on CT probably would have been the best since they did try to fight us NvN and the fights were very exciting, unfortunately the bane itself was mostly unplayable due to some server-side problem.
Alinoe wrote:
All of them
Zenjah wrote:
No single bane stands out for me yet. I think I've actually had more fun skirmishing in the hot zones so far.
Since some of the team members play on CB, we asked them too!
Team Meeting wrote:
I think it was probably the 2nd bane event
WM vs Validation, can't remember who was defending
validation defense
was good bane


Design

With the advent of bane mechanics, a pressing need for in-game support has cropped up. Admins with flooded inboxes have reached out to design to implement a CCR team for in-game assistance.
Quote:
Please explain the duties of the CCR team
They'll be handling the requests from the help requests forum, mainly
I think that would be best for keeping things documented
What do you think about utilizing the petition functions?
I didn't think about that. We could also tie the petition system into a webpage using php so that we can track the petitions
Quote:
How is the CCR team held accountable?
We'll be having slated access groups; CCRs will have access to the bare minimum they require for their specific role.
1. We'll be using the help request forum and posting all changes made there.
2. We'll be adding a comment on to the end of all dev commands and making the logs public
CCRs accounts will be separate from game accounts making it easy to log. All commands will have comments.
Further, the command use log will/may be made public
We've only held it back so far because of demands on the database
We'll just have to offload the logs somewhere else to display them to the public
Yeah, I think "can't trust each other" is too negative interpretation. Its because we want it to be public so there's no question about honesty to the community.

It had also come to the attention of some of closed beta testers that mob camps have incorrect compositions.
Quote:
How will mob camps be changing this quarter?
We'll be combing mob zones that are currently allowing people to level higher than they should be.
alongside this we'll be discussing the possibility of reverting one or two of the "high level" mainland zones to pre-nerf status

Questions? Comments? [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]