Hi everyone,

Today we wanted to provide you with a quick update on one of the major development tasks our team is working on internally. Some of our development resources are focused on this task right now and we will not be patching today. We will have another patch sometime next week however and will provide details in the patch notes as always when it is ready.

Upcoming Persistence Changes:

One of the things that we uncovered early on after receiving the source code was that there is currently a lot of limitations on what we can track and monitor in-game. This has to do with the way that the game handles persistence, including how it is stored and accessed. We decided early on that we were going to change this and have been working over the past month on a new system that is designed to change the way that persistence is managed.

These new tools will provide us with much more visibility on the actions that our players are taking in-game, how many items and resources are in the economy, and allows us to have better ways to monitor potential malicious activity. The amount of information that will become more readily available is quite staggering and will give us much more control over managing the economy, being able to track and punish in-game offenders and make game changes more dynamically.

There are other benefits that these changes will have as well. For starters, the current persistence is static in structure, making expanding it near impossible without a wipe. The new persistence system will be dynamic and much more flexible, allowing us to add persistence to new mechanics without jeopardizing the persistence system. Another benefit is that with more flexibility in structure and more visibility into the game itself, we will be able to make certain changes much more quickly and more fluidly than we currently can.

The system has begun going under initial testing and at this time we do not have an ETA as to when it will be ready for release. There are many things we have to look at and analyze, as this is quite the undertaking and encompasses changes to some very critical aspects of the game.

Thank you for reading today's update and have a great weekend.

Join us in the discussion!

Sincerely,

- The Team at Big Picture Games