Flight Rising Discussion

Hey everyone, It's been awhile since we talked about [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/coliseum][b]Coliseum[/b][/url], and we know a lot of you are looking for a little more transparency from us about its refactor progress. The good news is that the work on Coliseum is progressing nicely. The not-so-great news is that development suffered a bit of a setback as we shifted some engineering team resources around, and that's part of what is contributing to the project taking so long to complete. A few months back, we moved the engineering work to one of our other engineers and there was a degree of acclimation and learning that needed to take place. It's a huge undertaking, so we hope you all can empathize with the difficulty of picking up something as big Coliseum! But it also gave us a great opportunity to sort of re-align and really break the project into pieces to see where we could make both internal and external modifications. Coliseum is a monumental and integral part of [i]Flight Rising[/i], so we wanted to make sure that while we were preserving how it functioned, we were also making improvements. While I don't have a whole lot to share today, I thought I'd give you a preview of some of the differences you'll see in the refactored Coliseum. [size=4][b]Organize Party[/b][/size] So, we've made some modifications to the menu UI to bring it more in line with the style we use across the site now, but one of the first significant things that you'll notice is that there are a lot more dragons in your [b]Organize Party[/b] list. Namely, [i]all of them[/i]. One of the main confusion points for newer Coliseum players was that they had obtained several new dragons over the course of starting their account, but not all of them were showing up in the Coliseum, and there wasn't really any information as to [b]why[/b]. This change adds all of your dragons back to this scroll window, but [b]marks ineligible dragons with an icon and grays their image out[/b]. [center][url=http://flightrising.com/dropbox/preview_organizeparty.jpg][img]http://flightrising.com/dropbox/preview_organizeparty_t.jpg[/img][/url][/center] When you mouse over an ineligible dragon, [b]a tooltip will tell you exactly why you can't use that dragon in your party[/b] (such as: this dragon's energy is too low, this dragon's a hatchling, etc.) While we still require that a dragon be named to participate in a Coliseum battle, we also have added [b]the ability to give that dragon a name directly from the Organize Party page[/b]! While testing the feature as a team, we also thought [i]"wouldn't it kinda be so nice if you could jump directly to the Abilities & Stats page after arranging your party, rather than going through the lobby?"[/i] So we [b]added a button for that[/b], right at the top! Convenience! [size=4][b]Abilities & Stats[/b][/size] We've made a bit of a visual update to this page as well, so that all of the windows share the same style. [center][url=http://flightrising.com/dropbox/preview_abilitiesandstats.jpg][img]http://flightrising.com/dropbox/preview_abilitiesandstats_t.jpg[/img][/url][/center] Not a lot is changing functionally on this page, but you'll notice that we've added a [b]Clear [/b]button in addition to the Lock Stones button. This button will wipe any unlocked stones from the interface. ([b]Clarification[/b]: it does not wipe the dragon's abilities away completely) Again, just trying to add little conveniences wherever possible. We also added a sister [b]shortcut back to the Organize Party page[/b], just in case you've applied the battle stone finishing touches on your current party and want to quickly swap out your dragons for new ones. [size=4][b]Technical Beta[/b][/size] Because so much is changing about this system and the high volume of players that use it, we'd like to take the time to put the refactored Coliseum application through some rounds of community testing to make sure we iron out performance issues, infrastructure issues, surface optimization opportunities, and fix bugs. To accomplish all that, we will be deploying the refactored Coliseum in a [b]technical beta[/b] state before its final release. While we can't promise a definite timeline, [b]we are aiming to kick off the technical beta near the end of 2017 or in early 2018[/b]. There are a few caveats, however: [LIST] [*]Dragons will not earn experience. [*]Battles will not produce loot. [*]Dragons will not lose energy for being defeated or fleeing. [*]It will not be possible to modify your party's abilities or stats. [/LIST] Why? Well, our goals for the beta are to make sure the new codebase can handle the strain of many users hitting it and using it at the same time, and we did not want to run the risk of you suffering from possible item, energy, or experience loss while we're conducting performance-based testing. It will also give everyone a chance to try out the new [b]keyboard controls[/b] and the [b]visual effects toggles[/b]. We'll make sure that we announce the start and end date of the technical beta very prominently so that if you're interested in helping us out, you know when to jump in! That's all we've really got that we can talk about right now, but we knew it was important to remain open with you all about the development of this feature. We look forward to seeing you all in the technical beta soon! Thanks for hangin' in there!