Hey there, fellow ylanders.
Today I would like to continue talking about some of the concerns you have voiced and the problems that you’ve faced.
One of the most common complaints was about the quality of the servers; progress being lost or wiped. I know this did happen quite often in the past (especially with Exploration games after 1.5 - that’s one of the reasons Exploration was marked as “experimental”) but with several fixes released post 1.5, we believe this shouldn’t happen anymore. There still may be some hidden bugs that under some circumstances require a server restart, but I promise we'll do our best to eliminate these as well. Due to how the game works now, even if a restart happens - in no case should the player lose more than around 10 minutes of the progress. If your current experience differs, please let us know on our forums and feel free to PM me. I will do my best to help you with that.
Another thing I promised to talk about is the size of the Ylands community. By focusing on the platform more than on Exploration in the last few years we've lost a lot of the players we initially had. We also made some unpopular decisions such as going F2P, that caused the community to shrink further. At the same time, we didn’t really try actively to bring more players to Exploration because we wanted to fix it, improve it ... but never really got to it until now.
So our plan right now is to release 1.6 before the end of this month. This update will bring a lot of cool new features to Exploration and fix many of the issues you've reported (missing smoothing tool, overpowered propeller pack, and more). We hope that by fixing and improving Exploration, we will eventually get to an amazing experience that you all be happy with. We have already started working on two major features for 1.7, which are directly based on your feedback and will, without any doubt, make Exploration much better and closer to what we all want it to be. We will start talking with you about those immediately after 1.6 is released.
We are so confident about 1.7 being a major Exploration improvement that we are planning to actively start bringing players into Ylands again. At that point we would like to ask those who have left at any point, disappointed by the state of the game, to come back and see what we’ve done with it with the last 3 updates. At the same time, we will let even those who don’t own Exploration to try it in a limited way (currently we’re thinking of limiting them to their starting yland, however, we will allow other players to visit them - if they own the DLC).
So that’s our plan. I understand the disappointment of those who were more interested in Exploration than Editor, but I truly believe that if they spare a few minutes to check out the new Exploration this summer, they will be pleasantly surprised.
That's it for today - next week I will tell you more about what great Exploration features you can expect in update 1.6. Until then, as always... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!