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Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to Dev Post Wednesday (feel free to suggest a name in the comments, but if you do please accompany it with discussion about the topic of today)! Starting last week with this post, we’re keeping to a strict weekly schedule to keep you guys up-to-date on development and to engage with the community as we head toward the launch of First Light. Dev posts may be accessed at this page on the subreddit wiki which is also available in the top bar next to the 3.0 map download, or for those not using our CSS at the top of the sidebar.

A cornerstone purpose of these posts is to get your feedback on the various things we plan to implement into the game, and in that vein today’s post will be a discussion about the rewards planned in First Light. We would like to know your opinions on them, and what else you think would be a good addition that would incentivize yourself and others to play.

Purpose

The goal of the reward system is threefold. Firstly, they are to get and keep people on First Light for its full duration in order to fully stress-test the plugins. Secondly, they are to reward people for taking the gameplay seriously in order to keep the quality high enough for our playerbase to enjoy. Thirdly, they are to get people invested in CivEx for the long term into the next iteration. The reward system is not by any means the only method by which we intent to strive for those goals, but if done well we believe it could be quite fulfilling for the players and productive for development. Thus, when making suggestions relating to rewards, we ask that you keep these goals in mind.

Rewards and Qualifications

Each reward is tied to a qualification, that being some standard the candidate(s) must pass in order to receive them. Some rewards we are willing to give out to many people, and others only a single person may achieve due to their… relative juiciness. Thus far, /u/Sharpcastle33 and I have come up with the following rewards and qualifications, but we have yet to tie any together.

Qualifications

• Pass dedication requirements
• Individually prominent players
• Large and prominent nations
• Largest amount of HiddenOre drops
• Well-written and expansive player lore
• Nation with the Largest Coffers (most valuables stored away)
• Most beautiful structures
• The nation that wins the first major conflict (in which all sides are legitimate nations)
• Bug identification
• GitHub contributions

Rewards

• A temporary boost to player essence gain for the first week
• Custom Brews
• Ruins and Lore based upon player actions/constructions/lore in First Light
• Coordinates of the center of a biome of your choice
• Work with the staff to design a custom mob to be added to the game
• Player Lore incorporated into the lore of the next iteration
• Reserved slots for launch day
• A fracture in the next iteration based upon the ruins of a city/structure and its surrounding area in First Light

If you have a suggestion for either a Reward or a Qualification, feel free to add any number of them to your comments below. However, we mostly want to know how each of you feel about each reward in order to gauge how the community values each of them, and to see where we might be lacking. We are also asking for suggestions as to which rewards might be tied to which qualifications.

Development Update

This week has been a little shy on material for progress. I’m just on Spring Break and Sharp just got off his. We have however made some progress; most notably the bug report/ticketing system has been set up thanks to the help of /u/Kenshin_Woo. You may access it with this link. It should be familiar to you guys as it is the same system as you are used to from the past. Feel free to open a ticket for anything you might send a modmail for, but certainly once First Light starts we would like it to be focused primarily on bug reports. We have yet to decide if it will also be used for ban appeals and the like.

As a reward ^{pardon the pun} for reading through this whole post, or rather for skipping to the end to see if there’s a tl;dr and finding this to be grievously lacking, here are a few more pics from First Light:

Map Pics