Welcome one and all to The Champions Council Dev Blog! We hope you all had an amazing Christmas and New Year. The team are back at SIG HQ working away on our upcoming patch V0.12, we can't reveal much at the moment but there is going to be a lot in this update!
The Champion’s Council
For those of you who may not have seen our original post you can read the details below from our Steam announcement.
“We’ve never done anything like this before so it’s an experiment for all of us, but we’re hoping it will be a lot of fun!
Without further ado I introduce to you “The Champions Council” a way to celebrate the most dedicated community members!
The Champions Council
The Champions Council was created as a way for the Dev team to say thank you to the most dedicated members of the community and to bring together a core of group of players whom we can equip to help us build The Black Death.
We want this journey to involve our community as much as possible. Giving insight to our community on our direction and goals in the development of The Black Death is very important to us. We want to show our community that we are listening to their feedback and suggestions.
How do I become a part of the Council?
There is no specific way of signing up to join the Council. Your involvement, behaviour and overall impact within the community will not go unnoticed. If we feel that you have had a positive and lasting impact on helping to shape The Black Death and have a friendly attitude towards helping other players, taking part in gameplay and feedback discussions it will be noted by the team.
What is the role of a Champion?
- Strive to create an engaging and positive atmosphere within the community
- Act as a conduit for voicing the opinions, thoughts and feelings of the wider community directly to the development team
- Communicate with the wider community to judge what issues are most pressing and communicate them to the dev team. Be as unbiased as possible, purely because an issue is affecting you a lot doesn’t mean that this is the most serious issue that we currently have
- Be friendly and approachable help players enjoy their time playing The Black Death
- Organise and help run in game community events
- Aid the dev team with testing and hunting our problematic bugs
Are there any perks to being Champion?
- Golden name text in The Black Death
- Your real name and/or Steam username in the credits
- Access to Champion rank and channel on official Discord server
- More involved in the development of The Black Death
Introducing The Chosen Champion's Council Members!
It was a tough decision but we have voted on the first members to join the Council. Join us as we welcome and congratulate the new Champions Council members!
- Spoderman
- Defearr LLTS
- Dezzi
- VJ (Sam Ari Tan)
- Beyonder2k9
- Pink Guy / Cookies Need Love
- Sir Issac Jewton (The Gaming Gospel)
If you do not see your name above do not fear! We will continue to be on the lookout for new members to join the Council as time goes on. If you are wondering how you can become more involved within The Black Death community then check out our original post over on our Steam forums and join us over on our Discord server and spread the plague!
The Black Death Steam Forums: The Champions Council Post
The Black Death Discord Server
Champion's Guidebook
This is still in development but once finished this will be a handy guidebook and point of reference for members of the Council to read and follow from. It will be updated with extra information and answers to questions as time goes on.
Weekly Q&A
How many bugs have been destroyed since the game released into Early Access?
As of writing (05/01/2017) there have been a total of 1310 bugs that have been fixed!
The idea of questing has been discussed within the game. If this happens and it is implemented would you make a forum post asking for questing ideas?
We have discussed the possibility of adding quests/missions to The Black Death in house on several occasions. It is something we would consider for the future of The Black Death. They could be used for tutorial/starting out and also for class specific tasks too and maybe even rare quests that give valuable rewards. We of course want to involve our Community as much as possible in shaping and creating Mercia! We would love to see your suggestions and ideas for quests and missions.
When will the last classes be made? Classes such as the Outlaw do not yet have a tier 3.
We do have plans to create the remaining classes and their respective tiers. When creating a new class we discuss its impact on the existing classes and how they will all interact with one another in terms of balance, crafting and gameplay in general. If the remaining classes are not complete when we release into full launch they will be added in a later update. As adding classes to TBD is a big task there is currently no exact time frame on this.
Will there be something that can help us to clean out areas of the Plague to help make the cities safer or to make other areas more dangerous?
This is an interesting concept! There are currently no plans to make the plagued areas clean and safe. The threat of the infection ties into our survival mechanics. For example the more dangerous areas such as Wapentake and Skenfirth are riddled with bandits and obstacles such as piles of plagued corpses. The risk is higher but the rewards can be sweeter if you choose to venture out into these bad lands. An interesting idea if we had a new area would be to allow the players to clean out the village by burning corpses, killing bandits and making these zones safer for NPCs to move in.
The Black Death: Infographic Part 1
The Black Death: Infographic Part 2
Tavern Tuesdays!
We are introducing a new segment that we will be running every other week. This event will be known as Tavern Tuesdays! Along side our Weekly Q&A section in our Dev Blogs we wanted to create an event that would take place in game where the Community could talk with the team on a more interactive level. What better place to host this event than in a tavern! Every other week on a Tuesday the team will be relaxing in The Black Goat tavern in Raven's Reach ready to answer your questions, suggestions and feedback.
We hope to be streaming this event live on Twitch and we hope to see you there!
More details such as the time of the event will be announced soon so watch this space!
...See you in Mercia!
// Pete
// Emily