Marindor
Well-Known Member
Dear Humans and Elves,
The year 2016 has been an eventful year for us in many ways and we would like to thank you all for your contribution to that! We've had successes and we've had challenges but we couldn't have done it without you, our dedicated player fan base! Please for the sake of sentiment, let us recap the last year!
January
We started the year with some quite important performance improvements. Hardware acceleration was enabled for all users (remember the times you had to do this manually?) and instead of having to maintain 2 engines, we switched to 1, which made the game more stable and playable than before. Also, especially for you (our Beta community), we made a big change by giving you diamonds for your bug reports. This by the way, had a very positive result on the number of bugs that are reported!
February
In February we introduced the last big game feature that was needed to get the game officialy to the "1.0" state: Spells! Although not everyone is very fond of the Magic Academy and spells (yet), they will become more important in the future and were the last "puzzle piece" that was still needed in this phase of our game.
March
Dwarves had to make room for our new Guest Race: The Fairies in March! Also, a lot of small bugs were fixed (mostly around quests). There was also a bug which made buildings become "invisible" and this one was killed as well! Nevertheless, this was our busiest month in terms of support tickets, with over 750 support tickets on Beta.
April
Remember our newest app: InstaElf? April Fools! This one was of course a joke, but we did get another big feature in April: Tournaments! Finally completed provinces became useful for getting extra KP, relics and more! And of course don't forget the Fairies' Ancient Wonders! Our artists also had a nice month, introducing the beautiful background images for the Ancient Wonders we have built in our cities. In April, Krevan joined our team as a Game Moderator.
May
In May we implemented some more additions to the game: The treasure chests to other players' cities for example, when you're performing Neighbourly Help, but also the new Ancient Wonders in Chapter II and last but certainly not least: the Gold Mines that appeared on abandoned parts of the World Map.
June
June was relatively quiet, though we did implement the Ancient Wonders in chapters III and V. At the end of the month, the "Contest" questline was launched (basically an extra quest line to get prepared for our first real event ever). Another small but nice enhancement we made, was the avatar you see on buildings that have received Neighbourly Help, indicating who helped your building. Ancient Wonders also granted Ranking Points from now on. Tyrone joined our team as a Game Moderator.
July
Orcs and Goblins had found their way to our cities! From this point on, Orcs were also needed to negotiate in far away provinces. A change in premium expansions was introduced as well, no longer binding them to your Main Hall level (though it was altered a few months later again). This month Krevan left the team again.
August
It was time for our very first ingame event: The Summer Solstice! By collecting Moon Splinters and opening chests, we could get some very nice rewards in our cities! We also introduced the Ancient Wonders for Orcs & Goblins and the Magic Residence & Magic Workshop buildings. August was also the month were we introduced a long awaited solution for abandoned places on the World Map, by implementing our Player Movement system! Noffe joined our team as a Game Moderator in this month.
September
September was quite an "interesting" month for us. After months of preparation, the first part of our new Battle System was launched. It brought quite some big changes to the system and, among other things, started limiting players in how far they were able to scout ahead of their cities, for balancing purposes. This made quite an impact on our communities, but was needed to preserve the future of the game. The new system also made it possible for us to implement new battle units, making battles more dynamic. Also in this month, the "Wonky Walter" questline was introduced, giving you the opportunity to win a special circus tent for your city and a major bug with quests that require you to build or upgrade buildings, was finally resolved! For our team it was an interesting month as well, as @Muf-Muf was promoted to "Lead Community Manager" for Elvenar world wide and @Marindor followed in his foot steps as the Community Manager for Elvenar Beta.
October
In October, our Ideas & Suggestions forum was restructured, making the flow of ideas more transparent and allowing us to catch up with our backlog of ideas again. In the game we also had some exciting developments with the WoodElves arriving and our very first Halloween Event! New battle units were also (finally) introduced and the Wholesaler was changed, though the changes didn't last long. Based on your (Beta) feedback, we decided to turn back these changes even before they were implemented on the Live versions of our game. Other changes are planned for the future though. This month Darkstar left our team to focus on his duties on one of our other games.
November
The Ancient Wonders for the WoodElves were introduced in November and upgrading Magic Workshops and Magic Residences became possible. New battle units were also introduced, as well as improvements to battle screens, helping to explain the battle system more. Our first Winter Event also hit Beta with "King Snow and the Snow Flurry", bringing some very exciting new event buildings! This month we had quite some changes in our team. Aelfwine left our team to focus on her duties on Elvenar US. Ibra Gonza II joined as a Forum Moderator, Naomi and Hastra joined as new Game Moderators and Tajanstvena and Haiken joined as QA Moderators.
December
Game version 1.20 was released, bringing quite some big bugs with it. Thanks to the efforts of our Beta community, we were able to find and fix the majority of those bugs within a few days, preventing them from going to our Live servers. Thank you for that! In December we also announced some planned changes to our tournaments system, turning them into a Fellowship feature! Due to time restrictions, Haiken already left the team again.
Nice to know
Now please let us share some general things with you. This year on Beta we handled well over 3500 support requests/tickets. More than half of them were about bug reports, which is good because that's what we're here for! In general you seem to be very satisfied with the help of our support team, giving us well above a 4-out-of-5 stars rating, of which we're very proud To maintain high service levels, process bug reports faster and be able to answer you more quickly, we've increased our number of supporters on Beta from 7 to 11 this year.
This year on Beta we found 420 bugs in total, of which we were able to fix almost 400! In total we credited over 35000 diamonds for bug reports last year!
On our forums we had over 1650 monthly active users on average, with October as a peak month at 2298 active users, mostly caused by the feedback on the new Battle System. Over 13000 posts have been made this year, with 1991 in the highest month, October. All these posts have been liked more than 7750 times. More than 1850 threads were created. More than 380 members have registered for our forums in the last year, with March as the peak month (69 registrations).
In Closing
All in all we're looking back on a very exciting year and still have lots in store for you in the upcoming months (like the Fellowship-based tournaments system, exciting new events, our new Guest Race and much more, of which we will be able to tell you more soon!) I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for playing, giving us your feedback (which has been very valuable!), reporting your issues and showing us patience. I'd also like to thank our entire Beta team for the amazing job they've done in the last year. I'm very proud of both our team and our community and the way we all work together. Because of this collaboration we have been able to report and fix a lot of bugs before they would have been released on live, have been able to prevent negative changes from reaching our Live servers (like the Wholesaler changes, e.g.) and have hopefully been able to improve the communication between the company and our most dedicated fan base, here on Beta. Thank you all for your efforts and from our entire team, we wish you a very merry Christmas for the people who celebrate it and all the best in the new year. Feel free to reply in this thread and keep on playing!
Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Beta Team
The year 2016 has been an eventful year for us in many ways and we would like to thank you all for your contribution to that! We've had successes and we've had challenges but we couldn't have done it without you, our dedicated player fan base! Please for the sake of sentiment, let us recap the last year!
January
We started the year with some quite important performance improvements. Hardware acceleration was enabled for all users (remember the times you had to do this manually?) and instead of having to maintain 2 engines, we switched to 1, which made the game more stable and playable than before. Also, especially for you (our Beta community), we made a big change by giving you diamonds for your bug reports. This by the way, had a very positive result on the number of bugs that are reported!
February
In February we introduced the last big game feature that was needed to get the game officialy to the "1.0" state: Spells! Although not everyone is very fond of the Magic Academy and spells (yet), they will become more important in the future and were the last "puzzle piece" that was still needed in this phase of our game.
March
Dwarves had to make room for our new Guest Race: The Fairies in March! Also, a lot of small bugs were fixed (mostly around quests). There was also a bug which made buildings become "invisible" and this one was killed as well! Nevertheless, this was our busiest month in terms of support tickets, with over 750 support tickets on Beta.
April
Remember our newest app: InstaElf? April Fools! This one was of course a joke, but we did get another big feature in April: Tournaments! Finally completed provinces became useful for getting extra KP, relics and more! And of course don't forget the Fairies' Ancient Wonders! Our artists also had a nice month, introducing the beautiful background images for the Ancient Wonders we have built in our cities. In April, Krevan joined our team as a Game Moderator.
May
In May we implemented some more additions to the game: The treasure chests to other players' cities for example, when you're performing Neighbourly Help, but also the new Ancient Wonders in Chapter II and last but certainly not least: the Gold Mines that appeared on abandoned parts of the World Map.
June
June was relatively quiet, though we did implement the Ancient Wonders in chapters III and V. At the end of the month, the "Contest" questline was launched (basically an extra quest line to get prepared for our first real event ever). Another small but nice enhancement we made, was the avatar you see on buildings that have received Neighbourly Help, indicating who helped your building. Ancient Wonders also granted Ranking Points from now on. Tyrone joined our team as a Game Moderator.
July
Orcs and Goblins had found their way to our cities! From this point on, Orcs were also needed to negotiate in far away provinces. A change in premium expansions was introduced as well, no longer binding them to your Main Hall level (though it was altered a few months later again). This month Krevan left the team again.
August
It was time for our very first ingame event: The Summer Solstice! By collecting Moon Splinters and opening chests, we could get some very nice rewards in our cities! We also introduced the Ancient Wonders for Orcs & Goblins and the Magic Residence & Magic Workshop buildings. August was also the month were we introduced a long awaited solution for abandoned places on the World Map, by implementing our Player Movement system! Noffe joined our team as a Game Moderator in this month.
September
September was quite an "interesting" month for us. After months of preparation, the first part of our new Battle System was launched. It brought quite some big changes to the system and, among other things, started limiting players in how far they were able to scout ahead of their cities, for balancing purposes. This made quite an impact on our communities, but was needed to preserve the future of the game. The new system also made it possible for us to implement new battle units, making battles more dynamic. Also in this month, the "Wonky Walter" questline was introduced, giving you the opportunity to win a special circus tent for your city and a major bug with quests that require you to build or upgrade buildings, was finally resolved! For our team it was an interesting month as well, as @Muf-Muf was promoted to "Lead Community Manager" for Elvenar world wide and @Marindor followed in his foot steps as the Community Manager for Elvenar Beta.
October
In October, our Ideas & Suggestions forum was restructured, making the flow of ideas more transparent and allowing us to catch up with our backlog of ideas again. In the game we also had some exciting developments with the WoodElves arriving and our very first Halloween Event! New battle units were also (finally) introduced and the Wholesaler was changed, though the changes didn't last long. Based on your (Beta) feedback, we decided to turn back these changes even before they were implemented on the Live versions of our game. Other changes are planned for the future though. This month Darkstar left our team to focus on his duties on one of our other games.
November
The Ancient Wonders for the WoodElves were introduced in November and upgrading Magic Workshops and Magic Residences became possible. New battle units were also introduced, as well as improvements to battle screens, helping to explain the battle system more. Our first Winter Event also hit Beta with "King Snow and the Snow Flurry", bringing some very exciting new event buildings! This month we had quite some changes in our team. Aelfwine left our team to focus on her duties on Elvenar US. Ibra Gonza II joined as a Forum Moderator, Naomi and Hastra joined as new Game Moderators and Tajanstvena and Haiken joined as QA Moderators.
December
Game version 1.20 was released, bringing quite some big bugs with it. Thanks to the efforts of our Beta community, we were able to find and fix the majority of those bugs within a few days, preventing them from going to our Live servers. Thank you for that! In December we also announced some planned changes to our tournaments system, turning them into a Fellowship feature! Due to time restrictions, Haiken already left the team again.
Nice to know
Now please let us share some general things with you. This year on Beta we handled well over 3500 support requests/tickets. More than half of them were about bug reports, which is good because that's what we're here for!
In general you seem to be very satisfied with the help of our support team, giving us well above a 4-out-of-5 stars rating, of which we're very proud To maintain high service levels, process bug reports faster and be able to answer you more quickly, we've increased our number of supporters on Beta from 7 to 11 this year.This year on Beta we found 420 bugs in total, of which we were able to fix almost 400! In total we credited over 35000 diamonds for bug reports last year!
On our forums we had over 1650 monthly active users on average, with October as a peak month at 2298 active users, mostly caused by the feedback on the new Battle System. Over 13000 posts have been made this year, with 1991 in the highest month, October. All these posts have been liked more than 7750 times. More than 1850 threads were created. More than 380 members have registered for our forums in the last year, with March as the peak month (69 registrations).
In Closing
All in all we're looking back on a very exciting year and still have lots in store for you in the upcoming months (like the Fellowship-based tournaments system, exciting new events, our new Guest Race and much more, of which we will be able to tell you more soon!) I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for playing, giving us your feedback (which has been very valuable!), reporting your issues and showing us patience. I'd also like to thank our entire Beta team for the amazing job they've done in the last year. I'm very proud of both our team and our community and the way we all work together. Because of this collaboration we have been able to report and fix a lot of bugs before they would have been released on live, have been able to prevent negative changes from reaching our Live servers (like the Wholesaler changes, e.g.) and have hopefully been able to improve the communication between the company and our most dedicated fan base, here on Beta. Thank you all for your efforts and from our entire team, we wish you a very merry Christmas for the people who celebrate it and all the best in the new year. Feel free to reply in this thread and keep on playing!
Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Beta Team
