Hello everyone.
Priorities and Updates
We’re super excited to see how all of you have been progressing in BitCraft and the fact that we keep hitting new peak player counts shows that this is just the beginning for BitCraft!
The team has been firing on all cylinders taking the mountains of feedback, suggestions and bug reports you’ve given us, and working to put the most effective dent in them. There’s a near infinite amount of stuff we could do next and so this is where prioritization is key to make sure we are focusing on the right stuff to improve the game the most with the things we do next.
Updates
As we enter the second week of BitCraft being released into Early Access we are moving to the next stage of update cadence. While in the first week, we were focused exclusively on near daily highest priority fixes. We are now entering the beginning of a more predictable weekly update schedule. In the coming weeks, we will be releasing an update each week, which contains new content, bug fixes, and other improvements and balance. We will continue to release ad hoc updates for the highest priority issues. Updates will roll out over the course of Wednesday-Thursday with new client builds starting on the preview branch (Steam betas) and content/server changes coming on either day depending on if it is backwards compatible.
Our goal is for these updates to focus on the following categories of changes:
- New Content
- Balance
- UX improvements
- Bugfixes/Performance Improvements
While we aren’t planning huge system additions in the coming weeks, we do have some larger content updates on the horizon which will come as we begin to add more substantial monthly updates into the mix. Some of these include Player Housing and PVE Dungeons.
Balance
We feel as though we are past the serious server instabilities we experienced in the first few days and so we will be reverting the temporary claim maintenance cost change. This change was a reduction of more than 10x in the supply cost of claims. As we revert this though we are also planning to make a balance tweak based on feedback from the last week. We will be retaining some level of buff for small claims (max size T1/2) but we will add a ramping cost as claims grow in size. This was always the intent and will keep large very populated claims in a healthier equilibrium. If you find your claim drain is too aggressive you might need to downsize a bit. As always, we welcome feedback and this will probably need further balancing to get perfect.
We’ve also seen some claims taking advantage of the much cheaper banks to add multiple to their claim. The developer intent was not to allow many banks per claim, instead this is balanced out by storage of claim itself, deployables, and player housing (in the near future). We fixed the bug that allowed this to be possible and will be removing claims which have more than 1 bank per claim for fairness. We will refund the cost of the writ and any items players have in the bank will be sent to item recovery. If you are a claim who took advantage of this we recommend saving us and your citizens the trouble and removing the extra banks.
Griefing
When it comes to cases of players griefing or causing conflict in the world, our policy is to take the stance of “Moderate don’t mediate”. This means intervening and actioning cases where players are doing things against the rules or community guidelines of the game, but not stepping in in places where the tools in the game are designed to facilitate sandbox player interactions.
At the Character and Settlement Scale, doing something using in game mechanics which has the express purpose of bothering another player and has no in-game remedy for that player to take, is considered griefing and will be actioned as a form of moderation. In the medium term we aim to remove these cases through game design, but in the short term we will take action.
Example
- Using a claim totem to prevent another claim from expanding.
Doing actions which have a remedy or are under player control we will not take action and is considered part of the sandbox experience of BitCraft
Examples
- A player you gave permission to on your claim, taking a bunch of items and leaving the claim.
- A player removing pavings from a road you built on an unclaimed area.
At the Empire scale we currently believe that anything goes (between empires), but if it comes up that there is something players are doing with no fair recourse that others can take we will make it clear. We do not intend for Empires to affect or do battle with Settlements and vice versa. We understand there are undesired cases right now where Empire watchtowers can affect claims, but that is not our intention and we aim to resolve these issues as soon as we can.
We hope this update is informative and we’re excited to be releasing the first weekly update later today, stay tuned!