Dev Tracker

Hello everyone! We have some updates to our Rules & Policies to announce today, as well as some clarifications regarding moderation, account penalties, and misinformation.

Buckle in, this is a long read. Due to its size, we've formatted this update to be read in sections, so you can take a break if you need to. There’s a lot of information to digest in this update that directly addresses multiple player concerns. We do not recommend skimming this. Context is critically important and we’ve tried to provide you with that where and whenever we can.

Table of Contents

• Rules & Policies Updates
• Safe-Guarding & Human Rights Causes
• Moderation & Misinformation

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Rules & Policies Updates

Today we’re going to be touching on issues surrounding religious images, AI images/writing, cross-site trading, and certain types of profile or forum signature disclaimers.


Religious Images & Iconography

Players are permitted to share their personal religious identity, affiliation, or choice in their Clan biography, forum signature, or when introducing themselves. Do not report players to Support as violating our Terms of Use or Rules & Policies for simply sharing this information.

Religious imagery is already not allowed for skins and accents as we do not want real-world religious imagery, iconography, etc on our site or directly tied to our brand/IP.

As of the time of this post, we are expanding “no religious imagery” to be applied site-wide. When we say religious imagery, we specifically mean images and icons internationally recognized as or registered symbols of organized religions.

This also includes images depicting desecration, deconstruction, or political speech towards organized religions.

Themes that have been adopted into sci-fi or fantasy media (such as alchemy, wizardry, celestial, or abyssal themes, feathered wings, halos, horns, etc) do not fall under this definition at this time.



What you can expect

We would appreciate it if players with these images in their Clan or dragon biographies, forum signatures, art, etc would take initiative at this time and remove them from our site. We will not act right away on reports that are submitted today. We’d like to give our players with this content time to remove it themselves, on their own terms. The first time Support removes the images, your account will not be actioned under our Rules & Policies. You will receive a private message notifying you of the removal and education of our policies. Continued posting of these images after Support confirms that the private educational message was received by you will lead to account penalties/actions.


AI Images, Writing, & Videos

Images, writing, and videos created by prompting generative artificial intelligence programs are not allowed on Flight Rising.

We do not consider the images, writing, and videos made through prompting AI programs to be art. These models did not acquire consent from the artists whose work they were trained on.

We cannot support AI image generators that are trained on stolen work. Artwork (images, writing, and videos) posted to our site should be work of your own creation or art you’ve commissioned from a real person and artist.

If you have AI images or are using AI to generate creative writing, images, or videos as a service, please stop posting them to our site and begin removing the images or writing right away.


What You Can Expect

Players will be given time and a chance to remove these images from our site of their own accord. The first time Support has to remove AI imagery will most likely only lead to a notification and an educational message; subsequent removals or attempts to sell AI images or writing on our site will lead to escalating account penalties as described in our Account Penalties Explained article.


Cross-Site Trading

Effective immediately, all cross-site trades must include each trading partner’s username on the other website and what the trade is for in either the private message or Crossroads message text.

The first reason is that some players try to cover their Terms of Use violating trades by claiming they’re a cross-site trade.

The second reason is the concerning rise in behavior where an individual will register an account on our site for the purpose of cross-site trading. They then make gem purchases and once the trades are concluded, they then issue chargebacks, often claiming credit card fraud.

When this happens, we contact the other site and let them know that a trade between our games was potentially fraudulent. If the chargebacks are successful, we will confirm with the other game that the trades were fraudulent and that we will be reversing the trade on our end. We also notify the other game because credit card fraud is a crime and individuals who choose to defraud small businesses are not the type of person we want in our communities.

While we have the receipts that show it was in fact the registered individual and account holder making these purchases, these investigations pull Support off tickets for extended periods of time and, depending on the total number of gems involved, can also lead to all of their trading partners temporarily losing access to their accounts while we investigate.

We also want to encourage players to take care when engaging in cross-site trades with individuals who aren’t already active members of both communities. There’s a possibility that their choice to engage in fraudulent activity could lead to your trade being reversed or even temporarily losing access to your account during an investigation.


What You Can Expect

As of today’s date, cross-site trades without information about the other pet site, your account name on that site, and details about the trade will be considered suspect should either account come under investigation for any reason.


Do not broadcast, advertise, or otherwise highlight or call attention to your age.


We understand the impulse to post disclaimers and context about your interactions with others and to communicate that certain topics would be inappropriate to share or discuss with you in advance. The reason why we do not want our minor players to widely advertise their age group is for safe-guarding purposes. When you post disclaimers like the examples above, you are also broadcasting your age to people with malicious intent. This is compounded by an observed tendency of individuals to overshare about their living situations, their personal relationships, and their medical history on our site in general.

This is a case where the risks vastly outweigh the benefits to your experience online and we have found it necessary to formalize this issue in our Rules & Policies.


Remember that the following applies to your time on our site:

• You are not obligated to interact with anyone.
• You can block any player you don’t want to interact with at any time.
• Topics inappropriate for adults to discuss with minors are already prohibited on our website.

If an adult player is reaching out to a minor player about something inappropriate or is offering to be a private shoulder, ear, or confidante in private messages based on information previously disclosed or shared, please report them to us through Contact Us right away. Do not respond or exchange offsite contact information.

What You Can Expect

Players will be given time and a chance to remove these age disclaimers from our site of their own accord. The first time Support has to remove an age disclaimer will most likely only lead to a notification and an educational message; subsequent removals or attempts to post age disclaimers on our site will lead to escalating account penalties as described in our Account Penalties Explained article.

Now let's play "How many genes are in the Undertide expansion?"

Hint: More than the Aberration expansion. Less than the Auraboa breed release.

The following corrections have gone in tonight:

• Primary: Fern on all Auraboa was reverted to its prior version.
• Secondary: Paisley on all Auraboa was reverted to its prior version.
• Eye: Primal (Nature) on Auraboa H was missing the larger hatchling flower. Fixed.
• Eye: Common, Uncommon, Unusual, Rare, Pastel, Bright, Multi-gaze (head eye) were missing line art around the edge of the iris. A very thin line was added to finish the eyes without causing major changes. The eye colors and gradients were not changed. Fixed.
• Tertiary: Scales on Auraboa F was missing the scale pattern on the top of the largest pair of wings that the hatchling and M had. Fixed.
• Secondary: Affection on Auraboa F was missing the dark gradient on the tip of the lower wing on the lefthand side of the canvas. Fixed.
• Secondary: Woven on Auraboa F was missing the gradients on its left wing that was present on its right. Fixed.
• Secondary: Peregrine on Auraboa M was missing the inner hand marking present in the other templates within the breed. Fixed.
• Tertiary: Capsule on all Auraboa should had the highlight extended up to the empty portion of the "glass". Fixed.
• Secondary: Hypnotic on Auraboa F & H was missing some of the spots on the wing-hands. Fixed.

All Auraboa gene fixes should be in! I'm closing this thread out for now. We'll be taking future Auraboa gene error reports in a unified ancient techcnical error thread. at the end of February.

Hello everyone, thank you for your feedback about the gene error updates.

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Paisley & Blend

• Based on the time taken for a consistency change to go in, Auraboa Fern/Paisley will be reverted.
  
• Sandsurge Blend will also be adjusted to have the crest returned to the prior colors. The blend and fade changes were mainly to address the smooth vs abrupt transitions in the gradient. We were trying to match one of the original templates to have gradient lengths smoother with less chunky edges. The head crests were erroneously adjusted as the templates were effectively made from scratch a second time. The smoother body and large back frill transitions will be preserved, but the complete change in color to the head crest is going to be changed back.
• The other listed gene and eye type fixes in the last gene error thread (Auraboa) are going to be implemented, but as three months have passed, we have removed some of the larger consistency reports external to the breed itself.

On a personal note, I want to acknowledge that the gene being listed as an error since December, but taking three months to go through is not great. I am truly sorry that the correction did not go in swiftly, especially on something that was not an obvious error and many enjoyed.

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Upcoming Changes to How Gene Errors are Handled

Completing the existing breed-specific gene error threads are something we have been working towards for a while now.

As an art team, we need to have the ability to make both technical and consistency changes with our genes. Though we do check our templates and saved-out images, many issues do not come to light until hundreds of eyes are there to see the images in their millions of combinations.

Equally, players need and deserve to not have their dragons radically altered months after release for things that aren't bugs, cleanup, or technical errors. Gene consistency is something that needs a shorter, clearly communicated time limit, after which players can be assured that their dragons will not change.

Addressing the gene reporting system:

• The error turn-around on genes is a true pain point. We've been working towards getting the outstanding error threads caught up and closed out.
• The intent to move to a universal modern and ancient error thread for catch-alls on older templates. These universal catch-all threads will have no time limit, and will be for technical errors only.

• New genes, gene expansions, and breed releases will receive a corresponding sticky thread in bugs to receive reports so that any major changes can go in soon after release. We will refer to these as New-Gene Focus Threads. These temporary, after-release threads would be the ones where both technical and consistency differences could be addressed within a time limit.

• These New Gene Focus Threads would have a 45-day time limit and will close after this duration. After this occurs, any further errors will need to go to the universal threads, and will have to fall under the technical error category to be addressed. No further consistency-specific changes will be made after the focus-thread is closed. Having a clearly-communicated deadline will allow players a timeline when they can feel confident that their dragons will not radically change, while allowing us an established window during which we can make alterations to our artwork.

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Coming VERY Soon:

1. Auraboa Paisley, Fern, and Sandsurge Blend (crests) will be reverting tonight.
2. The remaining listed issues in the Auraboa gene thread will be corrected and implemented.
3. When the Auraboa gene error thread is finished, we'll be closing it out.
4. After the Auraboa thread is finished, the promised Undertide gene expansion will release as our next content update. It will be paired with our first New Gene Focus Thread and will have a 45 day window. This thread will be exclusively for the Undertide genes that were just released and nothing else.
5. We will update the status box with the UT focus thread launch, 15 days left warning, and close-out announcement for additional player visibility.
6. The Universal Modern and Ancient threads for past releases that have technical issues will go up at the end of February. Because non-breed-specific reporting has been unavailable for some time, we fully expect that these are going to be hit hard. Fixes for these will go in as we are able to make time for it. These threads are long-term threads, and do not operate under a time-limit.

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We want to thank everyone for their patience and understanding as we decided how to address this delayed and controversial gene fix. We hope that with our new systems in place, we can more swiftly address gene errors and provide clearer communication to our players. We all love dragons, and want them to look their very best!

@TheMasterGamer, please try clearing your cache first!

@tifftac, @Icos, @AutumnFall123, please be sure to send your reports to Hiveworks via tech@thehiveworks.com


Question for everyone else—has anyone experienced the browser page lockups recently?

Update, February 21, 2024

1. The content originally cut for length was restored.
2. The writing team worked on this draft based on player feedback.
3. This draft underwent a sensitivity read with beta readers.
4. The writing team made updates based on the beta reader feedback.
5. There were delays in revisiting the draft due to the 2023 holidays and rolling team outages from illness.
6. Currently: We are holding for a professional editor and writer to go over the current iteration of the draft instead of having our writing team perform copyedit passes over the base draft.

Thank you for your patience while we continue our work to address your concerns with and feedback on the Auraboa lore story.

Joxar has quite a bit of spare inventory to manage! Thank you for helping him keep it organized!

Roaming Aries is now a potential drop from the pools, as is Virgo. Scene: Windsinger's Domain has been removed from the crate, as it's not a cycled out item nor a unique recolor.

The following corrections have gone in tonight:

• Eyes: Primal (Shadow) had the back eye drip added for all Auraboa.
• Eye: Glowing had the glow radius and intensity adjusted to be more in line with the rest of the glowing eyes.
• Secondary: Flair on Auraboa F was missing a gradient on the overlapped portion of the right wing. Fixed.
• Secondary: Myrid on Auraboa F had a swirl that crosses over an overlapping piece of the wing corrected.
• Secondary: Peregrine on all Auraboa was missing the crest patterning on the head feathers. Fixed.
• Secondary: Hex on Auraboa F had the hands of the wings colored a different color than those of the arms. Fixed.
• Primary: Starmap on all Auraboa was a missing horn/claw gradient and needed the constellation lines adjusted. While the gene is semi-abstract with how the lines fall over the dragon, large offsets such as a wing crossing have now been taken into account.
• Secondary: Constellation While the gene is semi-abstract with how the lines fall over the dragon, large offsets such as a wing crossing have now been taken into account.

A reminder that the Auraboa gene error thread is for Auraboa gene reports only.

The following corrections have gone in today:

• Eyes: Primal in Shadow for all Sandsurge now have a second drip for the unseen eye.
• Primary: Fade for all Sandsurge had the gradient intensity adjusted.
• Secondary: Blend for all Sandsurge had the gradient intensity adjusted.
• Primary: Flaunt for all Sandsurge had the gradient intensity across the back adjusted to be more in line with the modern version of the gene.
• Secondary: Flair for all Sandsurge had the gradient intensity across the back adjusted to be more in line with the modern version of the gene.
• Tertiary: Runes had the second, brighter color placed on the edges rather than the middle of the runes like the modern variant. Sparkle enhancement. Transparency cleanup along the spines.

All Sandsurge gene fixes should be in! I'm closing this thread out for now. We'll be taking future Sandsurge gene error reports in a unified thread once we close out the remaining Auraboa (and upcoming Undertide Gene Expansion) thread.

The following corrections have gone in tonight:

• Tertiary: Stained has had the claws filled with the Stained tint in on all Auraboa.
• Secondary: Striation on all Auraboa was missing an extra gradient color in the upper level of feathers. This extra gradient is present in manes and separated wings such as those of the Skydancer dragons. Fixed.
• Primary: Flaunt on Auraboa F didn't have all of the markings that were present in the belly colored in. Fixed.
• Primary: Fern on all Auraboa had the markings adjusted alongside the changes to the Secondary of this gene.
• Secondary: Paisley on all Auraboa had highlight intensity issues and a lack of patterning on the top portion of the wings that would make it more consistent with other dual-color feathered wings like Coatl and Skydancer. Fixed.
• Secondary: Basic was briefly overwritten by the Striation fix. This has been reverted.
• Tertiary: Topcoat on all Auraboa F had the right-side wing coverage reduced, as it should have only covered the wrap-around portion of the wing that had the varied wing color applied to the feathers.

The following corrections have gone in tonight:

• Eyes: Glowing had the halo effect adjusted to better match the modern version of the eye.
• Secondary: Striation on all Sandsurge had more pattern added to the interior fans.
• Tertiary: Lace on Sandsurge F had pattern bleed into the horns corrected.
• Tertiary: Stained on all Sandsurge was bleeding into the teeth. This has been corrected.
• Tertiary: Augment on all Sandsurge was given a new treatment on the line art to correct the color bleed issue.

This has been corrected. Thank you.

Nice catch! While all the other bears and mimic bears were included, it looks like the Jadecarved Decoy was accidentally omitted. It has been added into the pool. Thank you for the report.

All Aberration gene fixes should be in! I'm closing this thread out for now. We'll be taking future Aberration gene error reports in a unified thread once we close out the remaining Sandsurge and Auraboa threads.

Fixes that went in tonight:

• Primary Ground - in the color spruce should appear for M Aberrations.
• Primary Ground - for all Aberrations should have the blue horns returned to the Nightshade color.
• Secondary Fissure - for all Aberrations should have the blue manes returned to the Nightshade color.
• Primary Clown - on Aberration F had the missing tooth color restored.
• Ongoing secondary template updates. See above.

It is an image changing familiar! They only showed the first step with our little pop-up tool tips. If you put it on your dragon it should have the other forms.

The return of the most lovely seasonal event in today's update!

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Love is in the Air
From now until February 21 at 06:00, the following seasonal items will be available, after which time they will cycle out until love is in the air once more~










Susie's Sweet Sentiments
Susie's Sweet Sentiments is a seasonal shop in the Grand Exchange. Her shop is available for the duration of the Love is in the Air event and contains the following items:

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Trickmurk Circus Skin Contest
The eleventh annual Trickmurk Circus will begin on February 25, 2024, and we're running a skin and accent contest in celebration Click here for more information!

I forgot the offering. My apologies.

Crystalline has a cool tint and a lightening effect by design. This is intentional.

Escher's Tundra.

I assure you that the apparel is there... right over the back arm! You can clearly see it covering every bit of its back arm.

The future shines bright with new apparel!

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Augmented Dragons
Enhancements for dragons have been forged! Dragons can now wear metallic enhancements with a core of glowing crystal. The following pieces are available in the treasure marketplace.

The Azurite enhancement pieces can be crafted at Baldwin's Bubbling Brew by alchemists level 11 and above.

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Trickmurk Circus Skin Contest
The eleventh annual Trickmurk Circus will begin on February 25, 2024, and we're running a skin and accent contest in celebration Click here for more information!

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Additional Updates

• We have an update on the issue of Adobe ads and page freezing for our community. We have some good news, some not-as-good news, and a path forward!

Hi there, @Void62! Yes, that is something you can do if you want to and something that players are allowed to do on our site. We certainly can't fault players for turning their ad blocking extensions on when a conflict between scripts on ads is freezing pages and disrupting their experience.

We are actively working on addressing this problem alongside Hiveworks, communicating with Venatus and the company whose script wasn't working as intended. They've both been very responsive, especially once we sent them our findings. This issue is one of our top priorities right now; in fact, it's a top priority across four separate companies! I promise you, we all want this fixed ASAP. We are a free-to-play game that regularly provides free content updates and events; ads are part of how we keep the servers paid for, the Flight Rising site up and running, and our employees and contractors paid.

It's quite possible this may even be fixed before the weekend! Fingers crossed!

@KarrotTop, correct, that counts as an unwanted ad behavior. Please send what you can to tech@thehiveworks.com. Thank you!

@Self, please see our update on Page 8. Thank you!

Good news, everyone!

We have an update for you on the freezing ads issue. We've got some good news, some not-as-good news, and information on how we're moving forward for you.

Mutron was able to identify the cause of the lockups. For some context, you should know that advertisers can opt into services from third party companies that perform background tasks when their ads run. These can be tasks or services like ensuring that their ad views are organic (not being served to bots), parse data, cookies, etc. These services run their own proprietary code when their clients' ads are served on a site.

So what did we find? What we've discovered is that two separate services have been contracted to run on Adobe ads and when their background scripts are run at the same time? They run into conflict with each other. That means neither script can complete their task and the page that ad is on locks up.

The not-as-good news: As far as what Flight Rising and Hiveworks are capable of in order to fix this? Well, we can't. Or we could but the only options available to us would damage our site's reputation with advertisers in general and that's...well, that's not great. Opinions on the current state of the ad ecosystem and the internet in general aside, the fact remains that ads help keep the lights on.

So what can we do? We've already started the process of contacting the third-party companies providing these services and notifying them of the issue, in detail. We've also submitted our findings to Venatus and they've responded. They are making some changes to how the Flight Rising website is mapped in their system which will allow for custom blocklists. This will take some time, hopefully no more than a week but we can't guarantee the ETA.

As to why Adobe ads are still appearing even though they're also off? Our best guess is that Adobe is currently pushing an ad campaign across all platforms, across multiple vendors and networks. Which is why changes are being made on the backend to allow for custom blocklists until the third-party script issue is fixed.

Our sincerest thanks to everyone who has whitelisted our site to help us track down the source and cause of the freezing ads. To our players who whitelist Flight Rising in general, you have our deepest appreciation and gratitude. It's our hope that our next update is the announcement this issue is well and truly fixed.

As a note for everyone, this is not okay and the thread is now locked. Players are allowed to utilize the block feature for whatever reason, whenever they see fit. Posting it about it, having third-parties do recon and report back to you, followed by posting that report publicly crosses the line into harassment territory. Thank you.

Hello @hydezmuse, please be sure to email your report to tech@thehiveworks.com. Thank you!

Hi @SamuelMaybird! Thank you for your report. Remember to email your report to tech@thehiveworks.com. Thank you!