Best Of

Lusternia has turned twenty years old! By Creatrix, that is certainly an accomplishment and we'll continue to go strong! As always, we're holding a series of games, contests and more to celebrate this momentous milestone, with the in-character celebration known of the Festival of the Creatrix.

All contests bar the Great Hunt and Battlechess award 300 credits for 1st place, 200 credits for 2nd place and 100 credits for 3rd place. In addition, 1st place will receive 5 glowing presents, 2nd place will receive 3 glowing presents, and 3rd place will receive 1 glowing present. Great Hunt rewards are in bound credits, scaling from 500 for 1st to 100 for 10th in each tier, whilst the organisation that wins Battlechess receives the famed Chessboard of Libertas. All prizes have been increased this year a bit!

13th October (Sunday)
- 10pm GMT: The Festival of the Creatrix begins, with the opening ceremonies, pinatas, and the return of festival wares.
- 11pm GMT: The Wayfaire arrives.
- Weave: Ironbeard arrives and lotteries open.

14th October (Monday)
- Weave: The Great Hunt begins. Enjoy the double experience gain. See HELP GREATHUNT for more details.

17th October (Thursday)
- Weave: Great Hunt Ends.

18th October (Friday)
- 10pm GMT: Chicken Hunt. Careful, the chickens peck.
- 11pm GMT: Treasure Hunt. The first to figure out the clues, wins!

19th October (Saturday)
- 9pm GMT: Death Challenge. See the bottom of HELP ASCENSION RULES for what this entails. This will be a no-pk event.
- 10pm GMT: Battlechess. Each city and commune competes in this game to win the glorious Chessboard of Libertas.
- Weave: Mystery Event. Await your invitation.

20th October (Sunday)
- 4pm GMT: Harmony Challenge. See the bottom of HELP ASCENSION RULES for what this entails. This will be a no-pk event.
- 10:30pm GMT: Festival Quiz. Test your knowledge of all things Lusternian.
- Weave: The Festival closes. Takes place after the Quiz, should it run long.

Server time (as seen on TIME) is considered the point of reference for GMT, we will also ensure that Discord events line up with the above outline.

This is going to be a big announcement and a big change in many ways but we want to emphasise that you should read all of the upcoming announcement posts carefully before forming an opinion. This first one is a general announcement and explanation of the immediate changes, and the second one will be a detailed look at what this means for the game.

Lusternia is officially joining Starmourn and Imperian in Legacy Mode. In Legacy Mode, Lusternia will continue, but purchases such as credits and artifact packages will be disabled to ensure that the game can continue to run without ongoing financial strain. In essence, the game will be run by a fully volunteer team and be entirely free to play. This will entail a variety of changes to make gaining everything the game has to offer through in-game means viable.

As the two games above have already gone through this process, we have a template for the kind of changes that are needed and know how things have turned out for them. While Imperian has no support at all, Starmourn does and their volunteer team has been working tirelessly to produce new content and revamp their systems ever since.

What this means exactly in terms of immediate changes:

1) The retirement values of all characters are forever frozen.
2) Characters elsewhere will not be able to retire into Lusternia.
3) You can retire out of Lusternia into Achaea or Aetolia with the full 100% of your retirement value. Your retirement value is safe here and will remain that way, so you can do this at any time in the future without worrying that the value will be lost at some point.
4) Purchases are turned off as of this announcement, and the credit market is disabled.

The team here is not going anywhere, so if you choose to stay with Lusternia we promise that this is going to be a smooth transition full of new opportunities. If you choose to retire to non-legacy games, we know you will be welcome wherever you go and thank you for your time here.

Uilani

Welcome to the first proper update post!

After last month's legacy mode news, we have been working hard to figure out what that means for the game as a whole. We've made some immediate changes to lesson, wondercrystal, and credit gains, but those barely scratch the surface of how deep monetisation has been woven into the fabric of the game. The reality is that much of the game's systems were centered around monetization and many choices, some not beneficial for the game's health, were made over the years. From our perspective, legacy changes are not just about replacing what is now missing (credits, etc), but addressing many of these problems as well. Not all of these are easy decisions to make and not everybody will agree with every one of them, as such we want to explain our thoughts and ask for input where relevant.

First of all, no changes are going to happen overnight. We are a small and entirely unpaid team of volunteers, with our own lives and priorities. So we would like to preface the release of this roadmap with a note that this is merely the first phase - the items which require addressing more immediately. Iteration and feedback will be part of the process, and we have to account for everything happening behind the scenes as well, so we will not give timelines for anything below.

If you feel something is urgent but not mentioned below, it may well be reserved for a future implementation phase, but please do mention it anyway. The more input and discussion we have, the easier it is to set priorities around your needs and pain points. This update will create a post on the forums for you to comment on as having comments in one place makes things a lot easier for us. Understandably, many valuable comments will be made on Discord too, but those get lost very easily. Please be sure to transfer your thoughts to the forums later.

Legacy Roadmap
------------------

Credit Availability

Credits require immediate addressing as the primary way to receive them has been removed, as has a tertiary method in the form of the credit market. This limits the availability of lessons, artifacts, and similar to players. This is a top priority for us to address, and the current consensus is to make immediate use of a system to tie them to a set gold cost. This gold cost will be set at a reasonable amount and is considered to be a soft upper limit. We will be encouraging players to sell between themselves and make use of org credit sales (see Announce #2909 for how orgs gain these now) for discounted credits as well, and daily credits will continue to exist.

Going forward on the roadmap, we also intend to look toward improvements to the daily credit system, such as adding new ways to receive daily credits and some way to mitigate the fear of missing out that comes with a daily reward system. We definitely want to add more social ways to gain daily credits and want to stick to the golden rule that doing one's dailies should take no longer than the prescribed 2 hours, no matter what the final max daily credit limit may be.

In addition, we will be making changes to contest rewards. While all details are not written in stone, artisanals and bardics are to have their prizes doubled starting with the September contest. All player helper positions will also see their rewards adjusted - those being guides, reviewers, builders, and coders.

Aethergoop

Aethergoop (and previously Dingbats) were added primarily as a secondary premium currency which was not directly sold on the website in order to make use of in promotions. Later on, due to player demand, systems were added which in their unchecked and unbalanced state caused an excess of aethergoop to flood the game, heavily devaluing it while also making it difficult to handle as a premium currency. Given our new reality of not requiring this separate premium currency, as well as the difficulties that have been created by this system in general, we intend to retire the currency altogether, as well as associated systems such as aethertrading.

At this time, the plan is to convert aethergoop at a set ratio to credits automatically. The amount that is to be converted is likely going to be a capped amount, as due to the aforementioned unbalanced systems a small number of outlier players have hundreds of thousands (and in a few cases, millions) of aethergoop on hand. Once this is officially announced, we will give you an adequate amount of time to decide how you would like to proceed with your stockpile - use it up or leave it for us to convert.

Systems which interact with aethergoop such as aethercrafting of candies, scarves, and buttons will be moved to interface with gnomish trading instead to help encourage the use of aetherhunting in changes which may happen later down the line. All goop producers will also be adjusted accordingly. That said, there is still a need for discussion and input around these changes, and we will be opening a report for thoughts about this change, as well as exploring sinks for those who are more interested in spending their aethergoop rather than having it converted.

Artifacts

We are sure everybody reading this post can, with very little effort, think of at least one artifact which they would label as unhealthy for the game. The coal trowel's pit effect, nature discs, and the massive glut of artifacts with trueheal effects are three examples which are likely near the top of the list; items so notorious for their effect on the game that they have to be balanced around.

While many of us certainly have our own thoughts on them, a larger discussion is certainly required to determine not only which artifacts are problematic, but also what to do about each of them. For some, changing the effect may be more appropriate, while for others removing it entirely may be best. To best address this, we will be raising an initial report to gather player opinions on existing artifacts, and based on this feedback and internal observation and statistics, we will initiate the changes or, in some more extreme cases, open reports for player feedback regarding individual artifacts.

General Roadmap
------------------

While the three above are the most immediate, we are not sitting still on the rest of the roadmap. Other items we are looking into and prioritizing include, but are not limited to, the following:

Newbie Experience

It is not wrong to say that our current newbie experience is confusing for new players and non-ideal for returning players. The Pools quests have usability issues, the intro barely covers any subjects while also locking you in if you already know all of it, there is little guidance on what to do past newbiehood, and collegium experiences are very inconsistent across orgs. We are looking into solutions for these issues to assist with retaining new players. Alongside that, we will be further improving the newbie experience vis a vis legacy changes with additional lessons for tasks and college quests, and other catch-up mechanics so newbies are not on such a hopelessly uneven footing with established players. Tis might, for example, involve a newbie quest that rewards an artifact vial/rune to help outfit newbies with what is often considered the bare necessities.

Development Process and Prioritization

Our current development process is very much ad-hoc and there is no formal design philosophy written down; instead, it changes by the coder and project. Likewise, there is a large number of systems that got implemented and immediately abandoned, which has led to massive bloat of half-finished features. While this is a less visible change to players immediately, it is a huge benefit for the long-term health of the game as it gives us a framework to decide how to make changes and ensure systems remain supported.

Helpfile Modernization

Many of our helpfiles have not been kept up to date with changes being made over the years, or do not give information that is necessary for players, creating an almost invisible oral tradition which makes the game near impenetrable for players. Then there is also the wealth of changes necessary for legacy mode. We have already started an audit of helpfiles which are out of date, and are looking to expand the scope of the helpfile system altogether, both in terms of mechanical features and the scope of topics it covers.

Org Development and Health

Many of our orgs are in a situation where they need attention or have requests sitting for some time. Addressing these is a priority. As mentioned before we will start with an audit of requests - first internal and then with org leadership - and see how to move forward.

Combat and Conflict

Combat-focused reports have been sporadic in the last few years due to limited resources. As mentioned previously, we have mortal coders who have been instrumental in finishing the last batch and who have a high interest in focusing on combat balance. We are working with them to determine the best schedule for further reports.

The most recent batch is almost done, but two reports from it have been put on hold due to legacy mode changes taking priority. That's report 565 and 568. We will get around to them but we need to wrap up some legacy changes and other reports first.

Other

The above are just our immediate plans for legacy mode, and not an exhaustive list of everything that we are working on. We plan to take player input and rely on our own observations and statistics to decide where to go next.

Thank you,
The Lusternia Team