A month ago, we had a successful release. It was exciting to see a huge number of players at launch, and getting to know some of you since then. To avoid pushing the release window, we decided to leave out key pieces of content and instead deliver them with later content updates. Given the number of bugs though, it has been challenging to release meaningful content at the pace we had hoped. Features like anvils, crafting houses, or alchemy have all been implemented, but unreleased due to our focus on bug fixing. Our core development team consists of 3 members (Tom, Alex and I), all of whom were relatively busy with our personal lives as well. To avoid staff burn out and overstraining our team, we will be making slight adjustments to how content is delivered. Below is a list of management changes, hoping to make for a healthier project in the long term. Community Project: No more bi-weekly updates Ahead of the release, we moved to quite an "official" approach, with clear bi-weekly release windows and regular content updates. We will be stepping away from bi-weekly updates, instead focusing on the milestones ahead. We will be letting our staff work on those at their own pace. While this may mean less regular updates, I hope this encourages staff to contribute to the project and be happy about doing so. In the long run, you should see more gameplay-related content than in the past. Patreon Suspension: Rethinking donations and rewards In view of the changes, I didn't feel fair to charge Patreons on a monthly basis. We will be pausing our Patreon memberships until we have a solid baseline experience. The project never required any outside money to keep going, so we want to make donations a fair, transparent system. This may mean stepping away from monthly memberships, or rewards altogether - simply allowing people to chip in for the server costs (which are relatively low). Development Milestones: Creating repeatable encounters MF was designed as a highly curated, epic roleplaying world. While still focusing on immersion, authenticity and attention to detail, we will be slightly changing our development philosophy. We will be shifting our focus towards repeatable, gameplay-driven content. This includes randomly generated dungeons, repeatable emergent quests, structured PvP and more. Our goal is to provide long-lasting, fresh content with less reliance on our Events/Dev staff to generate content by hand. Player-Driven Content: A world designed by you Now for the exciting news. Who else better to design a fun, immersive experience than you - the players who spend countless hours on MF every day. Our MF plugin enables easy content creation. We built the software to let us easily implement hundreds of items, recipes, or NPCs. It was also built with collaboration in mind - multiple staff members are able to work on their own itemizations regardless of each other. There is nothing stopping us from releasing this toolkit to the public. More information is coming soon, but expect the ability to submit your own content, which will appear in the Live environment after an approval. That way we stop imbalanced or inappropriate content from ruining MF, while giving you all the power of our plugins. We will start by giving players access to three tools, accompanied by tutorials: Item Creation: The ability to design your own items, including lore, gameplay attributes, special properties and more. Recipe Creation: A simple tool to define recipes, allowing your items to become ingredients. NPC Scripting: A toolkit with virtually no limits, allowing you to create your own NPCs, quests, or whole factions. The staff will then focus on providing the gameplay features, lore and builds to house your creations.
