Hi everyone,
I wanted to provide the community an update with what’s going on in Politics & War. I have received feedback from many of you, and am aware of the general consensus that I have “abandoned” the game and that development of new features and content has largely been at a standstill for a considerable amount of time now.
I’d like to apologize for that – part of that is some things in my personal life that have impacted my activity in the game, and part of it is other work I have been doing unrelated to P&W. But ultimately, I take responsibility for neglecting P&W, especially in the past year or so.
I am working on reorganizing my priorities to ensure that P&W gets more time, love, and attention from me to ensure that the game does not continue to decline. Realistically, that process is going to take most of this month to tidy up my other responsibilities and really get to diving into P&W headfirst again, but I wanted to make you all aware of my intentions there. I have some big ideas for new content and some reworks of existing features to make the game more fun and engaging for everyone.
Now, I have a few announcements for you all:
Staff Promotions
We have recently completed a round of hiring for several of the moderation teams. I would like to welcome Arima and Jordan to the Discord team. Arima, GVH, and Ultraodan to the Reddit team. Adrienne, hidude45454, MinesomeMC, Ultraodan to the Wiki team.
Community Manager
Additionally, long time staff member and moderator DrRush has been promoted to a new role as Community Manager. The goal of this change is to free up more of my time from much of the daily workload involved in game's moderation/management. He will also be working to organize community events such as the annual pumpkin carving contest on a more regular basis.
Game Economy
It has been noted by myself and the design team that the game's economy is not currently in good condition and we are going to change some things to help rebalance that in a more healthy way. The design team has identified several factors that have contributed to current situation and a number of possible adjustments. The first batch of adjustments will be in the next week or so. These changes will be mostly small adjustments to existing factors like resource production and consumption. As we monitor the impact changes have we will slowly add more complex adjustments over time until the market returns to a healthier equilibrium. In addition, we’re going to work on adding more new content that will increase demand for resources across the board.
War Module
Over the last few months Village has been hard at work on a complete code rewrite of the war module. While it has taken much longer than was initially hoped, it is close to being completed and will be moving to testing in the coming weeks. As part of this testing phase there will be a full wipe and tournament on the test server. This rewrite comes with a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements, QoL changes such as displaying enemy military counts on the war page, and a variety of game balance adjustments which will be detailed by Village in a dev diary soon.
Summary
Politics & War is a big ship that has been heading in the wrong direction for a while now. I, along with everyone on the Politics & War team are going to be hard at work here in the coming months to turn that ship around and really get things going again, but realistically it is not going to be an overnight change. But I want to let you know we are here, we are paying attention, and we are going to get this done and get things back on course.
