As a relatively new player I had never created a forum account. I had seen people mention the shoutbox but never understood where I could find it as I had never created a forum account. Now that the server supposedly is online, according to the website, I find that a number of people including myself are unable to login to the game. I read numerous posts on the forum referring to the shoutbox that the game is undergoing maintenance. I had to create a forum account to see why I cannot login to the game. Which in my opinion is absurd. Please refrain from using the shoutbox when announcements are made that affect the whole community. Not everyone has a forum account, and therefore can't read the shoutbox announcements.
I wouldn't mind if the messages were posted on the main site as well as the shoutbox but I think you make a decent point.
I think the game itself constantly reminds (the RoyalTips lol) you to check out the forum to keep yourself up to date with latest news. It's not an obligation for you to do so, but it is to your best interest to do so.
I think it would be better to keep the minor updates / details in the shoutbox and the major / final updates within the Patch Notes thread on the website to prevent spamming on the updates.
I'm not sure that I agree, I think everything that is relevant to know about MapleRoyals should be posted on the forum. Even if they are small details, everyone should be able to know these details.
The shoutbox is very convenient for brief announcements. Being front and centre on the homepage saves you the trouble of having to navigate to a specific thread just to check the latest status update. Hiding it defeats that purpose. I suggest making the shoutbox publicly available but require an account to send messages. Or maybe just the announcement section so at least that's visible to everyone including those who are at an inconvenience to log in.
Then we'd still have the problem of having to be online for the announcements, what if i'm at school and miss it? I can't scroll back that far, not that I would want to. I still think that when there is something worth knowing posted in the shoutbox, it should also be posted on the forum.
Shoutbox announcement are way to easy to miss. Any small updates could just be posted in a general "patch update" thread where one or two GM's keep updating the first post of the thread. Something along this format would have done very nicely 1-1-2017 Due to unforeseen circumstances it looks like we're going to have to expand the patch with another 24 hours. The database transfer was successful however, it is other issues with the new source we need more time for. 2-1-2017 We're forced to extend the patch by another 48 hours, we're very sorry for the inconvenience. Once we've got the server up and running again we will post a more detailed log of events. To summarize, once we fixed one bug we found another. This cascaded into a series off issues that we're going to need to fix that are taking much more time than foreseen. Any questions you have can be posted here and we will try to answer them either now or once the server is up again. 4-1-2017 Close to the deadline we're going to need yet more time, however we're getting close to a playable server. The patch notes are up though (insert link here) Once the server launches a great many features will still not be available, however we feel that players have waited long enough so we're going to open up the servers anyways. This will also serve as a stress test. 5-1-2017 It seems the server didn't make it past the initial opening and we've found more serious issues, at the moment Kevin is working on solving them. Our last estimated times ended up being wrong, so this time we're not including a time. Again we're sorry for the inconvenience and will try to answer as many questions as we can either here or in the shoutbox. In the mean time we're working hard on fixing these issues. ----------- Instead players had to mix and match information from the shoutbox, website announcements and forum posts and make out themselves what happened exactly. This is a great way to start rumors, especially on top of unpopular changes in the new source that haven't been defended in the slightest. A topic on the patch notes with reasons and arguments why boat rides are suddenly mandatory, the FM button is removed, merchants are not permanent any more and pets expire would not only have been nice, but also would reduce player outrage significantly. While I understand that there's a lot of pressure on the staff at the moment to just get everything to work, I'd really urge you to work on streamlining your communication towards the players. It might not be easy to make a comprehensive message that doesn't give away too much information, however just putting all information in one central topic shouldn't take more than 15 minutes of your day. You could even outsource that to a GM that isn't involved with the actual server update.
^ yeah it'd be good to have a dedicated thread like this, and preferably updated in timely intervals of maybe every 4-6 hours depending on how free you guys are, so people who feel the urge to get updates will not be asking every minute or so if there has been no progress then a simple status-quo update can be done too. the latest announcement should still be on the shoutbox, together with the link to the thread so it'd be easier for players to view the update log im not sure how much work this would be but i reckon it wouldnt take up too much time and given the fact that i've seen some of the staff communicating quite frequently with the community on the shoutbox, i assume there should be spare time for such an initiative imo it could help release tension on both the staff and the players
I totally agree here. A box with such announcements should be displayed on the actual site when something's going on, so players are informed. With that said, people writing in the chat box asking why they can't log in, status etc. while the info is just above with huge letters proves that the information won't reach everyone no matter what. This is not something I'm saying to oppose (because as I said, I totally agree), I'm just pointing it it because it's.. you know, funny.
