What is a “Discord”
That’s the community Discord chat. I don’t like it much myself, too offensive for my tastes, but it’s very popular around here. Here’s a link to its forum post if you want to join: Chat With Us On Discord!
Let me start this post with something real quick: these are my personal opinions on the matter and don’t fully represent the entirety of my developers. Mainly because they are all asleep from being up till 5AM working about 20 hours straight on the next patch that we couldn’t get out just yet until we were sure it didn’t cause more issues. That wasn’t some sort of banter either, just laying out the facts here.
I also know the letter was not finished.
I read everything on the forums. @Caboose700 tells us everything we miss as well while we’re working through bugs. We know the issues, we know what needs to be worked on and we know how you all feel.
Crashes and major bug fixes have been our #1 priority right now. We can’t make a great game if it keeps crashing so often or has 2D voice that where people can just easily ruin the experience of others.
Right after that, we want to improve the lobby. If you remember during the alpha we had a max of 40 concurrent players and we just barely were able to get them into the lobby together. It was really hard for us to test and gather input on the something that wasn’t fully there. After having 1300 concurrent players - things had to be addressed quickly. We have been spending about 18+ hours EVERY DAY since the release of the game on fixing major critical bugs. Testing with 40 and testing with 1300 is quite a different ballpark. We’re really humbled by that.
Anyways, enough about us and what’s been going on behind the scenes. Let me answer your statements directly.
Early Access is the best way to get your word out on what is the most important aspect here. I could literally go through each feature and tell you why it wasn’t put in the Early Access release one by one, but I can tell you it’s not because we didn’t want them in the Early Access. Time was a huge factor.
We aren’t done with the game. Seriously, we aren’t. We aren’t done. I don’t know how many times to say it. It will get there. Just hang in there.
The trello, in its current form, is all estimated stuff. I wanted to go through it more with the team after launch, but we’ve been REALLY busy with bugs. We haven’t even had the time to get the Game Worlds on the Trello. We have deadlines in mind internally. Game development is a tricky thing to estimate for. You could say laser tag would take you a week, but it could take 3 weeks to fix one bug with laser tag before it’s done.
In short, the Trello should be taken as estimates (as each list stated that) and it’s going to be tweaked to meet the demands of the community. Use the voting system for it! It’s the best way to move something forward or back!
So, I know this was a touchy subject, but I’m personally very glad we did this FOR NOW. Plaza is a mess and if we didn’t have those games on the menu right now, people who don’t know anything about GMTower would think the game is completely broken and empty.
We still want to keep the games on the menu, but we have an idea on how to keep the community aspect while keeping the games on the menu.
The games being on the menu helps with people who don’t really care that much about the virtual world aspect and the community and just want to play the minigames. We can’t really get them to care much about the virtual world in the first place and we shouldn’t force them to.
Our solution, right now, is to make playing games from the menu generate 0 Units. I’m open to additional suggestions on how to improve this aspect of the game.
I think it’s important to have when the Lobby is being hammered by players. I think it’s important that a game should be playable at any given time.
I also think it’s important to keep the community together, we just aren’t finished yet.
This is just because the Peer2Peer stuff is still being worked on. The doors don’t fully work yet and we had to disable Lobby to Condo chat due to some major bugs. We’re working on it. Peer2Peer stuff is really difficult, but we have the best people working on it. Our next patch addresses a few issues with the Peer2Peer stuff.
Again, we only had so much time. If we implemented a game in the Plaza last minute without fully testing it and it broke the entire game, wouldn’t that be worse? I think so. The casino is a lot harder than GMT as well because we need to ensure the payouts are legit payouts which is a very tricky problem to solve when you have so many different Plaza servers.
We worked really hard on what we could and after the major bugs are fixed (probably by the end of this week) we’re gonna go back and start working on the games for the Plaza.
If you are talking about the backer rewards, they deserve their items because they’re the reason we’re even here with a game in the first place. If you aren’t talking about backer items, I don’t know what items you are talking about in this context.
The game is not finished. It’s in Early Access. You’ll have to be more clear what features bother you and how to improve them. We know a lot of things that aren’t done yet and why.
Polls would be nice, just let us get out of this bug nightmare first. I plan to do one soon.
I am that representative. I read everything and I’ve been there since GMTower. PM me and I’ll make your voice heard.
We plan to keep doing them, we just haven’t scheduled it yet. Most likely will be next Friday the 22th or we could start this Friday if we’re not all passed out.
I’ll talk to the team and see how they feel. I’ll make an announcement when it’s decided.
We did have a 3-4 hour stream while we were launching the game.
Anyways, I look forward to reading the final letter. PM me and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.
Thanks!!!
18 Likes
I appreciate the response, but I had reported this thread several times to be closed/deleted. I was requested to do this so that the new letter would come out so you could read that instead of this one.
1 Like
It was up for hours and I had to reply to it.
If you look at the bottom of my post I state:
2 Likes
Thanks Mac and the rest of PixelTail for making an awesome game and putting in a lot of time just for the players. 
@macdguy
2 Likes
If I may offer my two cents, I suggest there be a threshold of time spent in a lobby for that to shut off, if you’re going to implement it. What I mean is, someone joins a game direct from the menu but hasn’t been to the Lobby yet. They get no Units. Then they join a Lobby and play games from there. That gets them Units. They visit a different lobby and don’t play any games (or they do decide to play games, and that still gets them Units). The time spent in both lobbies is added together and after a certain number of total hours in lobbies (maybe two or three?) they can get Units from directly joining games from the Menu.
The logic behind this is if people don’t care about the Lobby, they probably won’t care about Units. But if people spend enough time in Lobbies, they probably care about them, and about the game’s economy. This works so that if a player has a “home server” and they can’t connect to it for whatever reason, but they spent long enough on it to make it a home server, they aren’t locked out from participating in the game’s economy just because of a server crash.
2 Likes
guys
Mac gave me a like
(I am actually excited about this I am not being sarcastic right now)
2 Likes
I strongly disagree with the claim that this game has lost its vision. They’re still finishing the skeleton ffs, theres no need to make a song and dance about your ideal scenario 10 times over.
EDIT: [quote=“profbonkars, post:1, topic:6776”]
Promises of rides, a full boardwalk, and customization beyond relief left most of us in awe. But that was the past.
[/quote]
A bit of a contradiction, don’t you think? Considering there’s a bunch of boardwalk attractions in place, just need finishing.
I got a like in one of my messages!
Not even kidding I was super happy!
< Image
1 Like
Really this letter just doesn’t describe fully what we’re trying to get across
Though it’s harsh to say it because this wasn’t the full version of the letter that PoliteWhale has that many people helped create
2 Likes
I don’t need someone speaking for me.
4 Likes
And please upload the streams to YouTube as well, as they won’t stay in Twitch for long.
Why does there have to be drama… Come on guys, it’s just a letter. Leave Bonkars alone and let him make his letter the way he wants. We’re all family here. Be happy.
1 Like
didn’t they do that in the past?
How is the letter related to a drama? It doesn’t look like it’s related in any way:
Drama is the specific mode of narrative, typically fictional, represented in performance.[1] The term comes from the Greek word δρᾶμα, drama, meaning action, which is derived from the verb δράω, draō, meaning to do or to act. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception.[2] The early modern tragedy Hamlet (1601) by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus the King (c. 429 BC) by Sophocles are among the masterpieces of the art of drama.[3] A modern example is Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) by Eugene O’Neill.[4]
(taken from Drama - Wikipedia)
1 Like
Clever. Very, very clever.
Not in a while.
Holy shit, you don’t need to give me the definition, you don’t understand.
There has been a lot of drama in the Discord, and it has spiraled out of control because of this letter. I never said this letter was drama, the respones were drama.
Thank you for being a smartass though.