Hello Paxians,
We hope you had a nice start to the year, exploring the world of Gallia and having fun in Lyonesse, while crafting lovely little Yule goats.
We wanted to follow up on some important points that have been discussed over the past weeks within the community.
Pending Issues
The issue affecting the spawn of the Mournel trees in the NA region took some time to be fully identified, and as a fix was deployed yesterday on the live shards, the situation should now be back to normal.
Our team continues to work on resolving the issues with NPCs spawns that are not working as intended, as well as an issue with players getting stuck in the shrines when TPing to them, and doors in the PvP area that can be opened by non-clan members. We expect to have fixes in the coming days. In addition, we are still investigating the issues reported regarding the in-game chat and should be able to provide an update pretty soon.
Valley-wide Markets
As mentioned in the retrospective, one of our plans is to have valley-wide markets in the near future. We understand this feature is controversial and have read the feedback thoroughly. This is why we have decided to postpone the deployment of this feature and prioritize other elements. We will revisit it and explore how we can adjust it to better appeal to a wider audience.
Nonetheless, we want to explain the reasoning behind the feature, so you understand it’s not coming out of nowhere and has a real benefit.
We realize that the current market system doesn’t work for new players. Participation relies on hidden knowledge and prime stall locations near Petra Dei, making it hard to know what to trade, how to sell effectively, or even whether using the market is worth it. As a result, many new players never meaningfully engage with the economy at all.
The change we wanted to make by turning the markets valley-wide isn’t about slower progress but non-participation. Lowering friction is about converting non-participants into participants, which is essential for a healthy MMO population. Market health depends on liquidity: how easy it is to buy and sell. While geography and distance should matter for production and regional advantage, they shouldn’t prevent transactions themselves. Requiring travel to individual stalls causes many sales to never happen, eliminates impulse purchases, and makes low-value goods not worth listing or buying, which especially hurts new players.
The change would not remove geography and, in some cases, would strengthen it by making regional advantages more valuable. We think it would also prevent abusive behavior like listing items at inaccessible stalls. Overall, we feel that allowing purchases within a market area would turn latent demand into real transactions, increase participation, and create a healthier, more resilient player-driven economy for everyone.
Now, we understand this isn't what most of you expect, so, as mentioned above, we’ll put the development on hold for now.
Permissions Changes
We know this is a hot topic, and something that’s highly requested. We already said we’re working on it, and we’re making this a priority for the next Verse.
Our plans are to add more ranks to the Clans, with the possibility of defining different permission levels for each rank. We are also looking into the possibility of allowing the Clan Alderman to rename the ranks to make it more immersive.
We should be ready to share more on this when we get closer to Verse 6 timing.
Last but not least, we know you’re quite eager to see where the game is going and what’s cooking: we should have an updated timeline for the first half of the year in the coming weeks, with more details on what’s coming for Pax Dei.
Pax vobiscum, The Mainframe Team