Reborn Weekly #3

**Lunati** · 02-05-2016

Reborn Weekly #3

Another week, another weekly update! With some notable events coming around the corner, we figured there’s some topics we could touch on before heading to our main issue.

First of all, Alpha testing will be coming out in a few days, the 10th of February to be precise. We’ll be focusing mostly on working on all the bugs that pop up during testing, as well as fine-tuning some of the systems of features we’ve added so far. For now, testing will only be available to a small selection of people, however when we are ready to go into Beta we may release a public testing build.

With Alpha testing we are also confronted with one of the largest obstacles to any private server project, that being the funding for the server. As you all know, hosting a vps can be quite expensive, and to most of the people working on this project it’s a hobby that they don’t want to stick too much money into. For Alpha, we will have the costs covered for at least a month or two, but eventually we will need to stimulate efforts to fund the project if we want to continue testing in future months. We are looking into the options we have to set up a reliable and beneficial donation system, and we’ll give more information when we have some more info worked out. If you are willing to support the project we would be very grateful to have your help, and of course there will be some sort of reward.

Two updates ago, we didn’t mention the development team, so we’d like to give credit to our current team of developers. Please know @Organized Chaos, @Omniraptor, @sacredmike, @Versss, and @VoOoLoX for their work on this server! We'd also like to mention @BlackRayquaza for his helpful assistance in this project!

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the server itself. This time I want to talk about one of the biggest problems that plagues RotMG Production.

When one starts their first RotMG experience, everything seems fresh and new. There are many different classes that do many different things, there are tons of dungeons and a huge overworld. However when one actually plays for some time, they quickly realize that much of the content in the game becomes bland, and isn’t really that worthwhile. Why run ten pirate caves when it is far more efficient to just teleport to the godlands and gain the same amount of experience in less that ten percent of the time? The entire overworld ends up just existing to create distance between enemies, but there’s not much else to do in it. The dungeons that are worth doing end up becoming boring after you learn the patterns and you end up spending most of your time rushing to dungeon after dungeon in order to max your next character. The entire game is a cycle of getting to level 20, and then doing dungeons repetitively in order to obtain potions, while hoping you get a rare white bag.

There are two ways that you can fix this issue. The first one is by limiting progression so that someone can’t simply get to the max level by going to the godlands and finding a crowd of people. That way you force the player to play through lower level content in order to progress efficiently. The main problem with this approach is that a lot of the low level content is boring and uninteresting, even when you are at a lower level.

The second approach is to create a much more diverse and fun end-game for players to enjoy, so that they aren’t just stuck in an infinite cycle of potion collection. RotMG Production attempted to do this through the creation of “Elder Realms”, however sadly that project was cancelled.

Phoenix Realms 2 will be using both of these solutions. First off we will be making a much more fluid character progression, where one can not simply get to the maximum level by teleporting to the godlands, let alone being able to survive in the godlands. We will be increasing the difficulty curve so that you will have to be experienced to actually have a chance at fighting among the god. We will also be redesigning every dungeon and enemy in the lower levels to avoid the problem mentioned earlier.

Secondly, we will be adding a very large amount of content to the end game, and we’re not talking about Oryx numbers 3 until 99. We will be making very difficult, well thought out end game dungeons that higher levels will be sure to take a few tries on before getting close to succeeding. You will need a great amount of teamwork and skill to pass these challenges.

That’s all we’ve got to say for this update, but come back next week again for more info. As always we’ll be leaving you with a picture that probably has more to it than meets the eye.

Thanks for reading.

~LunarShade