Hello Fellow Eldinites!

     Welcome to the first volume of our continuing publication of “Spy on Staff”, an ongoing weekly blog on things discussed and things in progress. Before we get into some juicy details, lets talk about what it is that our staff team does on a daily and weekly basis.

     Because each of our roles are a little different but still very much interconnected, we have a staff meeting every week to ensure that the whole of Eldin staff is on the same page.  We hold each meeting every Saturday afternoon to allow for our staff’s ranging time zone challenges and discuss everything from unban appeals to in-depth conversation of topics brought up by the community as well as updates coming up for the benefit of Eldin’s players.

     This is a lot to keep up with and discuss, so in order to streamline our progress we end up delegating tasks out based on the interests of the staff member. This way we can use our talents best for the things we can have the most impact on. Now that we’ve talked about what all the staff does on the day to day exchanges and weekly discussions, lets talk about the actual meat and potatoes. The good stuff ya’ll even came here in the first place for: The meeting discussion notes.

     That’s right! After every weekly meeting, we will now be compiling all the notes of our discussions and posting them into new blog volumes for you to browse and enjoy! Typically, most of our meetings involve a lot of discussion on multiple points.

     This week’s meeting was especially long. Moonson opened up the floor with her fleshed out proposal of non-alcoholic “brewing” recipes. She brought forward a very strong argument that not everyone might want to brew alcohol to enjoy the alchemical components of the brewing plugin.  Our discussion did lead away from the brewing plugin itself, and it looks like should this be implemented it would likely be a brewing stand recipe or maybe a crafting recipe. There is still a lot to discuss about this topic as we fine tune its details.

     After a good bit of time on that, we transitioned into discussions of our “Big Update”. Right now we cannot disclose a whole lot to you, as we really want the majority of these things bundled into this massive update to be a surprise for you.

     We are excited to announce festivals will be coming back very soon! Our Festival grounds are already in the works, and should be launched midsummer, along with all the other features of this massive update. We talked a little bit this week on the games that we should update and include, as well as the prizes and token system.

     Dungeons are amazingly close to being released with our newest, largest dungeon “The Lost Pyramid” in its final stages of completion, with two more smaller dungeons being discussed and  production of these will be starting very soon. We talked on where the development of these dungeons were, what kind of mobs we would include, and what the prizes of these dungeons should be.

     We also talked about the work that Cerberus has done towards the Mob Arena updates. That a new class will be added within this update, along with some fixes and changes to the waves and bosses. You can expect to see this change rolled out with the rest of the “Big Update”.

     The expansion of map borders was also brought up this meeting as around this time every year we do take a look at expanding the map. This is an event that many Eldinites look forward to each map, as it allows for more ores to be mined, and more exploration to be done! We decided this will be done during the big update.

    Finally, we talked about how the community discord needs a revamp. Some of the more major changes that we plan to do will start with the launch with the big update, but this is a major project that will probably take several waves to overhaul completely.

    This meeting took up almost two hours, and for some perspective, our average meeting time typically takes about 45 minutes to an hour. It should be mentioned that a lot of the things we talked about, especially those things that will be included in the big update have been in the works for quite some time, with “The Lost Pyramid” dungeon starting development as early as last map.

     We hope that this has been a refreshing look into our process and we think with the creation of our Eldin Community Trello and with the publication of our meeting notes in the form of this blog, we hope that this will increase visibility and transparency to the players.

    As hinted at above, our Eldin Community Trello is literally a list of publications and tasks that we are actively working on and moving down the pipeline. That’s right! You will now be able to check and see, in real time, the production and progress of these updates that we discuss here in this blog! You can always check and see what we’re up to here.

     We appreciate you reading through to the end on this one. We promise most of our blog submissions won’t be this long-winded, but we wanted to start off this project with a very strong foundation on how we plan to deliver information to you in the future.

     Thank you for spending the time to read Spy on Staff. You can expect to see this updated, at the latest, Sunday Evening CST. Thank you all so much for your continued support and spirit in our community. See you in game!

~NeoTokyoNora <3