Hey Everyone,
As some of you probably remember, a few months ago we held a poll to decide what we should do with the legacy GP in the system. If you're unfamiliar with this, when we assumed control over the server in 2020, we refunded all of the Global Points (formerly Cash Points) that had ever been spent, back to the players. In addition to that, we took a lot of steps to make the game more free to play friendly. We made Wagu Coins drop, fixed the Wagu Point shop and implemented the Gambler title track to give discounts to players who used a lot of Wagus. We added a dynamic, daily rotating shop to the fourth tab in the WP Shop, and we reduced prices in the GP Shop and added many, many, many new cosmetics to it. We even made a 2x Wagu event that we rotate through every few weeks, and added Adventure Passes that give players a generous amount of cosmetics and Wagu/Event Coins.
The end result of all of this is that the legacy GP, the ones players were refunded back almost five years ago now, are essentially not moving. Every month, much of what is newly released, the players get for free. Many players with a lot of legacy points just buy tons of the new item for free and sell it to the rest of the players for Zeni. This has flooded the game's market with dogis and cosmetics, and devalued many of them. There are many players with hundreds of pages of dogis. We knew at the time that we refunded the points that this would happen, and the consensus was that it was a necessary evil to soften the blow of wiping the server amidst the general turmoil back then.
You may also remember that we attempted to do a fundraiser for a player who needed surgery, last month. That fundraiser failed. However, I paid for the player's surgery out of pocket. We got lucky this time, as I may not always be able to withstand an economic blow like that to continue to help out the community. I would much rather have a plan going forward for this sort of thing in the future, so that it's not quite such a close call when one of us needs help. The world is becoming a tougher, darker place these days, and we need to band together and help each other out through it. At the risk of a Farquaad meme, if all we have to sacrifice for that is having less free dogis, then that is a sacrifice I'm happy to make.
It's not just helping players that has prompted this post, though. In the coming weeks we'll be moving to 2.0's open beta test, and shortly after that you guys will be able to see the first roadmap we're going to be working on. That roadmap will require considerably more of my time and monthly resources than the server has cost me up to this point, because we're going to be implementing new, more technical things that are going to require more storage and processing than we currently have access to. The problems we're solving and systems we're implementing are becoming more costly, and the current system we have is stretched pretty thin.
For five years, we have operated mostly at a loss so that you guys could enjoy having as many free cosmetics as possible. Almost nothing is changing about our philosophy for free to play vs pay to win. The game is not going to become pay to win, and the systems you're using will most likely not change. We are discussing an increase in cost of the WP Shop Wagu Coins, and maybe a nerf to the drop rate. The main thing on the chopping block here is the legacy GP. I know that you voted against removing this legacy GP, but recent events and the roadmap solidifying have made it necessary for me to enforce a compromise, I think.
It's not a decision I make lightly, and I've had many discussions with staff about it over the last two months. I don't like going against player votes, but I will if I need to, and I have become convinced that in order to pull off what we need to this year, it's necessary. With that said, we have a design that should be fair to the people that want to make use of their legacy GP, what was awarded in December of 2020. This implementation involves a relatively slow, weekly decay of the points over time, to give you plenty of time to use them on what you'd like.
There are many hundreds more items in the shop than there were when the points were refunded, so there should be plenty of value players can get out of them should they choose to. The decay should be slow enough that anyone alarmed by this message can hop in game and use up all their points to get value out of them with plenty of time to spare, before they are decayed. The only points in question are the ones that were refunded in 2020, on accounts that have never since donated to us. Any accounts that have donated since then are safe.That means that some of the legacy points are actually still going to remain, on accounts that had a lot of legacy points + donated to us. I won't be doing any advanced query to try to split old points and new points, so if you had a lot of points before + donated to us sometime between December of 2020 and December of 2024, you'll get to skate by with your legacy GP.
We are also planning some steps to help make dogis retain more value in the future, including a new tier of dogi that exists somewhere between the current tiers and anniversary. I am not a fan of FOMO so we won't be doing time based shenanigans for anything, other than the usual yearly anniversary dogis. The current plan for this is a tier of dogis that are only released to the GP Shop, never the Wagu, Token, or Mudosa Shops. By decaying the old legacy points, and offering a small subset of cosmetics that are GP only and can't be obtained for free, these should retain more value. The vast majority of the things we release will use the current system, so they'll still be released to the GP Shop, Wagu Machines/WP Shop, Token Shop, and Mudosa Shop as normal.
There will be some more changes in future to hopefully increase the value of dogis and other cosmetics as well, namely that the 2.0 founders are going to function like the 1.0 founders did, and not be available in the GP Shop directly. They will get automatically delivered via the web depot to the Event Manager, for those of you who are familiar with that process. This is a further attempt to help preserve the rarity and Zeni value of them over time.
I apologize for going against the community poll on this one, but I haven't found a design that will solve these problems that still allows for the considerable legacy GP in the system. Hopefully this slow decay and somewhat premature post ahead of all the other 2.0 news coming will split the difference by giving you guys time to make use of the points before they decay.
2.0 News
Speaking of 2.0, I thought I'd give a little update on it. Testing is progressing quickly and I believe we are in our last round of bug fixes before the open beta test of it. I will make another post later as we get a little closer to the open beta, which will tentatively be in mid February unless the testers find a new round of bugs for me to squash. Of the bugs we are currently tracking, we are down to just below 50 remaining that I want to get fixed before we open it up to the entire community for testing. There are also still a couple of pending features and some security considerations. I'm hoping to be able to complete all that in the next couple of weeks, but we'll see. The number of bugs is mostly meaningless because any one of those could be a heavy hitter that takes me a while to fix, it's just there to give you context in that we're several thousand bug fixes deep, so we're almost at the end of the internal closed beta test. With that said, the last 10% of software development is often the most critical and time consuming, so it's possible at any moment a delay could happen. Bear with me on that. Any delay that happens before release is a potential critical issue that you won't have to suffer after release. As some of the other servers have kindly demonstrated to us, a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad. As always, thank you so much for playing and supporting us! Expect a lot of news and changes coming over the next year, starting within the next few weeks. I'll see you in game!
TL;DR
- Legacy GP on accounts that haven't donated since 2020 will be slowly decayed each week, starting next week (be gentle with me)
- New tier of GP Shop only dogis coming soon, along with potential other secret changes to increase the Zeni value of cosmetics
- Possible increase in cost of Wagu Coins in WP Shop, possible nerf of Wagu Coin drop rate
- 2.0 open beta almost ready