Sprint #6 (Dev team) - 4/2 to 4/8

[MysteryMan]

This is a one week sprint meant for R&D and the oddities that come with preparing for PAX East. Normal two week sprints will return to the dev team on the 9th.

This team is focusing around getting this live by June and I'm making sure they ignore as many distractions as possible. The alteil web team is the team working on the auction house and has their own sticky (come Monday night, hopefully).

Alex: Create proof of concept to use SignlaR with Unity 3d. Failing that, a substitute networking model that never gives a "you have been disconnected" message unless the user has been disconnected for over a minute.

Igor D and Jeff:
Technical: Get off Azure. Make use of AppFabric cache layer.
User facing: Make it so a user can type partial card names instead of just the card id in the card search page.

[tetron]

If you get noticed by penny arcade peoples, the game population would definitely rise

[harvest4god]

If you get noticed by penny arcade peoples, the game population would definitely rise

Kongrate would be another good one.

[Callonia]

Mysteryman, That's an awfully nice new chatroom you set up...



It'll be awfully (word of your choice here) if someone noticed they can upload NSFW pics on it.

So far I have suppressed my mischief.

[MysteryMan]

Update on Alex's end: While SignlaR is amazing for html5 stuff, it may not be the best solution for our particular needs.

We are looking into alternatives, such as Photon and a .NET library that uses AMF data.

[MysteryMan]

Well that was a short sprint.

Sprint planning meeting will happen tomorrow and normal 2 week sprints will resume for all teams.

[Aoi]

Um just wondering what happened to Ud is it gonna get fixed?

[hexagram]

However I feel that there are much more important things that needed to be soughted out first and therefore have higher priority.

1) Getting new players and improving new player retention. Games survive off having a playerbase. It is important to also have many free or very low spender players as they provide opponents for others. Also few people will invest or continue to invest in a community/ game that is empty / small playerbase. New players now cannot even find any opponents in crest as it is empty. I suggest when players below lvl 14 play verse npcs it is 100% treasure battles for maybe the first (1-3) game everyday make a new button for lvl 15 under -random battle npc treasure.


2)Fix underdog. Will increase variety in folrart and encourage more people to play. Not sure what happened with this. I suspect they took it down to stop people getting up to 10 pt cards every 2 weeks or it broke and they could not be bothered fixing it/forgot about it. If this was the case I suggest reducing the point card reward to 5 while keeping the wins the same 10 or maybe reducing them too as ud also encourages people to play and provides much need variety and non meta files.

3)Auction house. Very important so people can target certain cards at a premium price compared to random purchase options. However there needs to be a high enough minimum price for each rarity and high enough transaction fee that alteil still profits. Also everyone should be able to use it as otherwise it would be unfair to free players and may cause them to rage quit (unless you implement the spenders of 0.50+cents rule can purchase/sell indefinately)

4)other arenas: possibly a 2star and below arena but I think this is counter productive atleast in the short term as the playerbase is small and even arenas like crest are empty most of the time. Being able to get a game whenever you want is very important in folrart arena and it may affect this atleast unitil we get more players

[ForgotPassNotWorking]

I want to point out that AH although a real improvement if done right, it doesn't fix the game on its own.

[hexagram]

1) Getting new players and improving new player retention.

If you look at the most succesful 'free to play games' they attract and retain free players e.g. league of legends, world of tanks, uraban rivals...... As the games are casual or casual games can be played and everything is unlockable albeit over a very long period.

Free players are essential for survival and growth of such games including alteil.