Welcome to yet another Spying on Staff blog post. Last week our meeting was canceled because Cerb was on vacation.

Azher opened up with our current progress with the big update. Click here to see the current progress. This week a lot of the Festival area has been finished up. This includes areas like Spleef, Parkour, Build contest, and PVP Region. Additionally, Zephyna has started to set up the mob arena, and Azher is currently trying to set up a new Maze layout. We also talked about adding some new player heads to the player heads shop in the big update, as AwesomeBrendan has been working on finding some new heads. You might also have noticed that we started rendering areas outside the world border as we are gonna expand the world border from 7500 to 10000! That’s an area increase of more than 56%!

We quickly talked about redoing the PvP rules to make them more clear but decided that it is a complex issue that we will discuss further in our upcoming meetings. We have been debating removing the rules all together as Cerb doesn’t really think they are needed.

Moonson_ has started working on showcase videos for our custom mobs which will be displayed on the website; as well as other places. For now filming for Rhino Beetle, Shark, Reaper, Mimics and Bluebird has started. Hopefully, these videos will both help new players learn about these mobs as well as show new players what Eldin has to offer.

Most of the meeting was spent talking about our Instagram account which Bad_Cereal has been great at managing, though posts have not been made in a while. We talked about the 2 major issues we currently have with Instagram: 

  1.  Instagram’s new discovery algorithm which was added last Christmas has made it more difficult to get discovered. We discussed some ways for us to improve and thankfully some staff members are fairly familiar with how it works.
  2. We have an internal goal of posting at least once a day on Instagram but the lack of images makes it difficult to accomplish. While we did quickly find some images we can post now, it’s clear that we need a long-term solution that we will try to figure out at the next meeting.

We talked Quests, as it’s one of our big goals to meet for the year. As we dig into quests more, we are discovering that it is a huge undertaking and fairly complicated the way the plugin works. We are 100% committed to the idea of quests though, and we will be discussing how we should handle (IE who should handle) the different roles in making quests (story writer, objectives, rewards, npc dialogue, etc). It is far too big of a plugin / task for a single person to accomplish.

Azher brought up the subject of a questionnaire to be put out at the time of the big update. After the big update, we will slowly start preparing content for the next map. It would be nice to know that what we have lined up is what you expect and want, as well as feedback on other areas of Eldin.

Thanks for reading 🙂 Next week we won’t be having a meeting (Cerb out of town again) so no volume of Spying on Staff next weekend.

~Azher