Plans Ahead

[Nozemi]

I would just like to inform you that so far things are going according to plan. I'm making progress on the new website. Some of you might question my decision to work on a new website instead of finishing the new server. More on that later.

First of all, I would like to clear up any potential misunderstandings. Ivan and I are on good terms, though unfortunately we couldn't seem to work together. Then the question was, who is going to take charge. Decision fell on me, because I know how to program, Ivan doesn't. So I hope that I can deliver on my previous promises.

Server Reset - Do note that we're not resetting the server!
Some players have expressed their concern about the current state of the economy, and even stats. Some wants a reset. However the staff team doesn't share the same thoughts about solution to the problem. We do however know how bad of a state Dodian is in at the moment. We found a potential solution, and we think it'll be a good one, it's not entirely decided just how we'll be doing it right now. We would like to hear some of your opinions on it before we make the final decisions.

Point System
What we want to do is introduce a point system. You trade in items, maybe even skill experience to receive points. These points can be used in a store to obtain items not otherwise obtainable. These items will mostly be untradeable items. This point system will come to stay. However we thought that we should add some limited time deals, so that the players that have played up until this reset will have the chance to get some unique items that are never to be obtained in any way ever again.

With this, we have the following questions for you!

- What items would you wish to see in this point store? (can be anything from OSRS)
- Should we forcefully convert items and skills into points, or should be make it optional? Alternatively should we only forcefully do items, and leave skills, or entirely optional?
- Should we have only tradeables or non-tradeables, or a mix of both?
- Should we solely have cosmetic items or also gear/consumables?

So for now, if we can get some feedback on this, it would be awesome and a lot of help! After all, we want the community to be a part of deciding the future as much as that's possible, so your opinions matter a lot to us!

New Website
As mentioned earlier, some of you might question the decision to make a new website instead of completing the new server.

Security
vBulletin is extremely outdated, there are probably multiple security vulnerabilities for those who care to look carefully enough. The currently installed website's files has been in the hands of a good amount of people, who could've tampered with them to make security holes. So my trust in this being a secure website is very limited.

Functionality & Maintainabilty
Considering the dated source code, documentation, plugins and themes. It's very hard and time consuming to add or adjust features of vBulletin. For example when we started out, we had paid premium membership, but it was manually being handled by admin team. Reason was PayPal integration being broken, and there was no easy way to fix it.

Conclusion
The conclusion is that we need a website we can easily integrate things with. So for the new server to be functional, we need a website we can build the integrations into. It really doesn't need to be anything complicated taking years to build either. We don't have a whole lot of forum activity, so we'll be going for a more blog-like approach. Have announcements, and let players comment on these announcements. We'll see about more advanced forum-like features in the future.

To sum it up, we'll basically need this:
- Registration / Login
- User/Profile Settings
- Admin Control Panel
- User Management
- Server Management Tools (similar to those we already have)
- Announcement Posting/Commenting

So when will this be done?
As you're well aware, giving specific dates, or even time frames isn't ideal here. We've all seen history repeat itself with staff not being able to uphold their promised deadlines. Though I will say I hope to get a beta version of the new website setup in about a weeks time.

New Server
We've just started playing with the idea of going for an actual OSRS server base instead of a 317. This would probably involve a little bit more work than completing the current server, but we would have some benefits.

By going with an OSRS base, we'd have the option to have RuneLite and a mobile client for Android. We would also be able to use the actual OSRS client, instead of a massively messy and potentially bugged 317 client loading OSRS data. We've barely gotten started looking at this potential way of going forward. I guess we have until the website's beta is ready to decide on this.

More details on the new server to come when we start working on that again. In the meantime you can come with feedback on what we've just announced, so we can consider the community's opinions as well!