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Dev Tracker
A chronological record of developer forum posts and site updates.
An Apology for Beastclans on the Rise
In October of 2014 we released the Beastclans feature, introducing new opposition in dominance, a lore dump, and new Beastclans familiars. Since then, much has changed—us as developers, you as a community, and our overall education about how the world around us directly and indirectly influences and impacts our work.
And it’s time to address it.
What happened?
The Beastclans were several new species that came into being in the third age. Their origins date back to when the mysterious civilization of the second age reached new heights of magic and technology before eventually destroying themselves and much of the planet. This event gave rise to powerful elemental beings, new flora and fauna, and the sapient Beastclans.
The idea behind the conflict was intended to be dragons vs (not)humans. Our goal for this particular conflict was for it to go alongside the dragon vs dragon and dragon vs Shade setups, providing a variety of tasks to accomplish and conflicts to resolve, with dragon clans working to carve out places of peace in a volatile landscape of elemental catastrophe and Shade-infested life.
Adventure Mode is still a planned feature, but its many delays created a near decade-long gap, where the players being told dragons—their dragons—are engaging in or engaged in monstrous acts that hold parallels to real world events. And they're supposed to play as these dragon clans and enjoy the game.
An Apology
Many of you have rightly pointed out that the Beastclans on the Rise setup has several disturbing parallels with colonialism, where colonizers invade indigenous populations and commit violent crimes against humanity in order to steal land and resources from the people who were there before them.
With Beastclans on the Rise, we've put players' dragon clans in this role for years, with no acknowledgement of the problematic story communicated to players or way for them to resolve it. It's a dangling plot thread that's gone on for too long. Specifically, a dangling plot thread with harmful implications we never wanted to convey and one that left our players to deal with it on their own. Regardless of our original intent, these implications are harmful, and we owe you an apology.
We apologize for the original Beastclans on the Rise update and our ignorance on the underlying implications. We regret our lack of follow up on the issue for so long. We know that this has concerned and made many of you uncomfortable, and we’re sorry our ignorance negatively impacted your experience with our game.
Moving Forward:
We will be adding a disclaimer to the Beastclans on the Rise page in our encyclopedia and removing the video from our Youtube channel. The Beastclans on the Rise page will be removed from the encyclopedia index, as it is no longer canon lore, but will remain on site, linked from this post and the reworked Beastclans index once it is available.
We will be rewriting and expanding each Beastclans entry to have as much information about each Beastclan as a player would get with a new species of dragon, and conflict with the dragons will not be the central focus.
When we add a Beastclans Encyclopedia entry, we will also be including a new illustration, new familiars, and a scene from their territory.
We will look into having new Beastclans shopkeepers in the future, so that players can have ways before Adventure Mode to positively interact with the Beastclans.
Beastclans will also remain on the Dominance board. They present a non-player controlled faction, they are a force unto themselves, and they serve a necessary gameplay function.
Thank you to everyone who reached out to us with your concerns regarding Beastclans on the Rise. We appreciate you, your time, and your effort.
With this in mind, we’d like to (re)introduce everyone to the Great Flock: The Harpies of Sornieth!
Revised Harpy Lore:
The revised harpy lore is now available to read in the encyclopedia here!
In addition, we have added new harpy familiars that feature the everyday lives of harpies, and a new scene depicting a harpy city. These items will be stocking in the treasure marketplace, and also have a chance to drop from iron & gilded chests and Pinkerton's Pile. The treasure marketplace stock has been increased for one week, after which time these new familiars and the scene will stock at the same rate as other familiars and scenes.
In October of 2014 we released the Beastclans feature, introducing new opposition in dominance, a lore dump, and new Beastclans familiars. Since then, much has changed—us as developers, you as a community, and our overall education about how the world around us directly and indirectly influences and impacts our work.
And it’s time to address it.
[Image Description: A banner image of a rocky scene with humanoid bird-person, a harpy, in the foreground. They have short hair and are wearing clothing similar to a toga. The harpy is concentrating on the clay pot they're painting and their tongue is sticking out of the side of their mouth as they do. The text overlaid on the banner image reads: "Harpy Lore" and "Beastclan apology and plans for the future".]
What happened?
The Beastclans were several new species that came into being in the third age. Their origins date back to when the mysterious civilization of the second age reached new heights of magic and technology before eventually destroying themselves and much of the planet. This event gave rise to powerful elemental beings, new flora and fauna, and the sapient Beastclans.
The idea behind the conflict was intended to be dragons vs (not)humans. Our goal for this particular conflict was for it to go alongside the dragon vs dragon and dragon vs Shade setups, providing a variety of tasks to accomplish and conflicts to resolve, with dragon clans working to carve out places of peace in a volatile landscape of elemental catastrophe and Shade-infested life.
Adventure Mode is still a planned feature, but its many delays created a near decade-long gap, where the players being told dragons—their dragons—are engaging in or engaged in monstrous acts that hold parallels to real world events. And they're supposed to play as these dragon clans and enjoy the game.
An Apology
Many of you have rightly pointed out that the Beastclans on the Rise setup has several disturbing parallels with colonialism, where colonizers invade indigenous populations and commit violent crimes against humanity in order to steal land and resources from the people who were there before them.
With Beastclans on the Rise, we've put players' dragon clans in this role for years, with no acknowledgement of the problematic story communicated to players or way for them to resolve it. It's a dangling plot thread that's gone on for too long. Specifically, a dangling plot thread with harmful implications we never wanted to convey and one that left our players to deal with it on their own. Regardless of our original intent, these implications are harmful, and we owe you an apology.
We apologize for the original Beastclans on the Rise update and our ignorance on the underlying implications. We regret our lack of follow up on the issue for so long. We know that this has concerned and made many of you uncomfortable, and we’re sorry our ignorance negatively impacted your experience with our game.
Moving Forward:
We will be adding a disclaimer to the Beastclans on the Rise page in our encyclopedia and removing the video from our Youtube channel. The Beastclans on the Rise page will be removed from the encyclopedia index, as it is no longer canon lore, but will remain on site, linked from this post and the reworked Beastclans index once it is available.
- This disclaimer will link to this announcement thread.
- This disclaimer will note this lore is no longer canon and undergoing a rework for the reasons stated in this post.
- We are not deleting the page as accountability. The fact is, the US culture and institutions we (Flight Rising team members) grew up in clearly had influence and impact on our early work. We released this as official content and it’s wrong to pretend we didn’t.
- The Beastclans will still be in Adventure Mode, but the standing of relations with dragons will be greatly changed; you don’t need to start from a place of horror to have impactful quest lines and objectives.
- When reintroduced, dragons will no longer have been vying for territory with the Beastclans. There will still be conflicts and mysteries for players to find solutions for and story opportunities available, and we think that this change can make Sornieth and Adventure Mode all the richer for it.
We will be rewriting and expanding each Beastclans entry to have as much information about each Beastclan as a player would get with a new species of dragon, and conflict with the dragons will not be the central focus.
When we add a Beastclans Encyclopedia entry, we will also be including a new illustration, new familiars, and a scene from their territory.
We will look into having new Beastclans shopkeepers in the future, so that players can have ways before Adventure Mode to positively interact with the Beastclans.
Beastclans will also remain on the Dominance board. They present a non-player controlled faction, they are a force unto themselves, and they serve a necessary gameplay function.
Thank you to everyone who reached out to us with your concerns regarding Beastclans on the Rise. We appreciate you, your time, and your effort.
With this in mind, we’d like to (re)introduce everyone to the Great Flock: The Harpies of Sornieth!
Revised Harpy Lore:
The revised harpy lore is now available to read in the encyclopedia here!
In addition, we have added new harpy familiars that feature the everyday lives of harpies, and a new scene depicting a harpy city. These items will be stocking in the treasure marketplace, and also have a chance to drop from iron & gilded chests and Pinkerton's Pile. The treasure marketplace stock has been increased for one week, after which time these new familiars and the scene will stock at the same rate as other familiars and scenes.
Dev Update: Achievements & Anniversary
In this Dev Update, we’ll be talking a little bit about the relaunch of our long-awaited Achievements system, which will be the focal point of our 10th anniversary celebration in June 2023.
It’s been a long journey, but we are reaching the point in our refactoring efforts where the hard work has paid off, and this means that the site will be in a good position for us to finally bring back our Achievements system. We thought there was no better way to celebrate such a monumental engineering effort than our upcoming 10th anniversary.
Why Did You Wait?
We’ve gotten some questions in the last few years about why we needed to wait until the very final stages of the site refactor to develop and relaunch achievements.
The simplest and most concise way to answer that question is:
If we had launched achievements before all major systems had been converted to the new code base, we would need to perform refactor work not only on the features themselves, but also on the achievements associated with each feature (and all their corresponding progress data). This would have been inefficient; we do not want to essentially duplicate what is already a huge workload.
Refactoring the site first gives a nice clean slate and foundation with which to build the new achievements system, which touches nearly every aspect of Flight Rising.
Why the Anniversary?
Given the size and complexity of something like an achievements system, it was paramount that we factored in ample time for planning, execution, testing, and reflection of each milestone, as well as staying committed to our company philosophy of avoiding crunch.
Because the achievements roadmap coincided nearly perfectly with our game’s anniversary, it just made sense to make it our major feature update for next year’s festivities. While we are generally always working on multiple things at once, the magnitude of this update does mean that our engineering team will need to dedicate a lot of resources towards it for the first half of 2023.
What You Can Expect
On to some of the cool stuff we can share! Please be aware that all of this is subject to change.
The Achievements Themselves
As of today’s Dev Update we have over 500 achievements planned that we aim to have ready to go on launch day. For those that have been with us since Flight Rising’s early days, you will know that this is a massive increase in what was available before! It’s an ambitious goal—and there’s a chance that we may not meet it—but we wanted to start boldly.
From a design standpoint, our goal for achievement criteria is to make them as enjoyable as possible, incorporate them into many of the activities you’re already doing on the website, and provide all types of players some opportunities to feel accomplished.
In the legacy system, achievements rewarded non-functional points (internally, we affectionately called these “Starmies”—can you tell there are some Pokemon fans on the team?). With the revamp, completing achievements will reward you with not only points, but a special new currency, as well as a chance for some treasure and gems. The new currency is slated to be usable in a dedicated Grand Exchange shop that will launch alongside the system, stocked with new and exciting items for you and your clan!
Pursuits
One challenge with a finite list of achievements is that it’s possible (at least for a time) to hit the end of the road and for progression to slow down considerably until new objectives are created. By having achievements grant a spendable currency, it meant that at any given time you could only earn so much of it. We don't think it would feel great if you wanted more copies of items in the Grand Exchange achievements shop, or if new items were added later after you had spent most (or quite possibly all) of that new currency. This, of course, created a dilemma for Flight Rising, where most activities can be repeated in some fashion and eventually get you toward that thing you wanted.
To help alleviate this, we’re planning to develop an adjacent system called Pursuits. It’s easiest to think of pursuits as repeatable “micro-achievements”, as they’ll usually be more common activities that are easier to complete (e.g. “Breed a pair of dragons”, “exalt a dragon”, “convert 50 meat food points in the same action”). Each completed pursuit will help advance a segmented rewards meter, and when each segment fills up you will be able to claim small batches of the new achievement currency.
While specifics are still being finalized, our current plan is for this system to offer a set number each of three pursuit types: daily, weekly, and monthly. These lists will reset as often as their name implies, with each pursuit type having a “meter weight” that corresponds to its difficulty. In general, daily pursuits should be really easy and have a lower weight, while monthly pursuits will be moderately challenging and have a higher weight.
Our hope is that this supplemental system will allow you to continue to make incremental gains of the achievement currency to use in the accompanying shop.
Do We Have to Start All Over?
Quite possibly the toughest challenge in relaunching this system centers around the fact that every one of you will be at a different place in your Flight Rising journey come launch day. Some of you have been around for the last decade and just by the nature of playing for so long have likely completed the criteria of a large portion of the achievements we’re in the midst of developing. Many more of you might just be joining the world of Sornieth and still figuring it all out.
How do we strike a fair balance between those experiences? Can we and should we grant anything retroactively?
It’s a hard question to answer, and unfortunately the best solution hasn’t yet materialized. We know that we’re not able to promise retroactive achievement progress for gameplay history that came before the kick-off of this new version. The data is very old, unoptimized, full of gaps, and the new infrastructure handles progression in entirely different ways.
However, we are hoping that by intentionally/carefully creating the system in pieces, we may (may!) have enough collected data by the anniversary that many of our players will have lots of achievements completed and ready to collect, alongside others yet to be tackled.
And that’s our update for today! As with all of our anniversaries, there will be plenty of goodies to enjoy to go along with the long-awaited return of achievements.
We’ve still got a long road in front of us to get this feature out the door for the 10th Anniversary, but our eyes are already set on the prize. We’re really excited to celebrate what is truly a special milestone in the life of any game, and we’re thankful and grateful to have made it this far with all of you.
In this Dev Update, we’ll be talking a little bit about the relaunch of our long-awaited Achievements system, which will be the focal point of our 10th anniversary celebration in June 2023.
[Header image description: A banner image with six cogs of various sizes with the largest to the left-center of the image. On the right side of the banner is a mechanical monkey (the Monkey Wrench familiar). Overlaid text reads: "Developer Update."]
It’s been a long journey, but we are reaching the point in our refactoring efforts where the hard work has paid off, and this means that the site will be in a good position for us to finally bring back our Achievements system. We thought there was no better way to celebrate such a monumental engineering effort than our upcoming 10th anniversary.
Why Did You Wait?
We’ve gotten some questions in the last few years about why we needed to wait until the very final stages of the site refactor to develop and relaunch achievements.
The simplest and most concise way to answer that question is:
If we had launched achievements before all major systems had been converted to the new code base, we would need to perform refactor work not only on the features themselves, but also on the achievements associated with each feature (and all their corresponding progress data). This would have been inefficient; we do not want to essentially duplicate what is already a huge workload.
Refactoring the site first gives a nice clean slate and foundation with which to build the new achievements system, which touches nearly every aspect of Flight Rising.
Why the Anniversary?
Given the size and complexity of something like an achievements system, it was paramount that we factored in ample time for planning, execution, testing, and reflection of each milestone, as well as staying committed to our company philosophy of avoiding crunch.
Because the achievements roadmap coincided nearly perfectly with our game’s anniversary, it just made sense to make it our major feature update for next year’s festivities. While we are generally always working on multiple things at once, the magnitude of this update does mean that our engineering team will need to dedicate a lot of resources towards it for the first half of 2023.
What You Can Expect
On to some of the cool stuff we can share! Please be aware that all of this is subject to change.
The Achievements Themselves
As of today’s Dev Update we have over 500 achievements planned that we aim to have ready to go on launch day. For those that have been with us since Flight Rising’s early days, you will know that this is a massive increase in what was available before! It’s an ambitious goal—and there’s a chance that we may not meet it—but we wanted to start boldly.
From a design standpoint, our goal for achievement criteria is to make them as enjoyable as possible, incorporate them into many of the activities you’re already doing on the website, and provide all types of players some opportunities to feel accomplished.
In the legacy system, achievements rewarded non-functional points (internally, we affectionately called these “Starmies”—can you tell there are some Pokemon fans on the team?). With the revamp, completing achievements will reward you with not only points, but a special new currency, as well as a chance for some treasure and gems. The new currency is slated to be usable in a dedicated Grand Exchange shop that will launch alongside the system, stocked with new and exciting items for you and your clan!
Pursuits
One challenge with a finite list of achievements is that it’s possible (at least for a time) to hit the end of the road and for progression to slow down considerably until new objectives are created. By having achievements grant a spendable currency, it meant that at any given time you could only earn so much of it. We don't think it would feel great if you wanted more copies of items in the Grand Exchange achievements shop, or if new items were added later after you had spent most (or quite possibly all) of that new currency. This, of course, created a dilemma for Flight Rising, where most activities can be repeated in some fashion and eventually get you toward that thing you wanted.
To help alleviate this, we’re planning to develop an adjacent system called Pursuits. It’s easiest to think of pursuits as repeatable “micro-achievements”, as they’ll usually be more common activities that are easier to complete (e.g. “Breed a pair of dragons”, “exalt a dragon”, “convert 50 meat food points in the same action”). Each completed pursuit will help advance a segmented rewards meter, and when each segment fills up you will be able to claim small batches of the new achievement currency.
While specifics are still being finalized, our current plan is for this system to offer a set number each of three pursuit types: daily, weekly, and monthly. These lists will reset as often as their name implies, with each pursuit type having a “meter weight” that corresponds to its difficulty. In general, daily pursuits should be really easy and have a lower weight, while monthly pursuits will be moderately challenging and have a higher weight.
Our hope is that this supplemental system will allow you to continue to make incremental gains of the achievement currency to use in the accompanying shop.
Do We Have to Start All Over?
Quite possibly the toughest challenge in relaunching this system centers around the fact that every one of you will be at a different place in your Flight Rising journey come launch day. Some of you have been around for the last decade and just by the nature of playing for so long have likely completed the criteria of a large portion of the achievements we’re in the midst of developing. Many more of you might just be joining the world of Sornieth and still figuring it all out.
How do we strike a fair balance between those experiences? Can we and should we grant anything retroactively?
It’s a hard question to answer, and unfortunately the best solution hasn’t yet materialized. We know that we’re not able to promise retroactive achievement progress for gameplay history that came before the kick-off of this new version. The data is very old, unoptimized, full of gaps, and the new infrastructure handles progression in entirely different ways.
However, we are hoping that by intentionally/carefully creating the system in pieces, we may (may!) have enough collected data by the anniversary that many of our players will have lots of achievements completed and ready to collect, alongside others yet to be tackled.
And that’s our update for today! As with all of our anniversaries, there will be plenty of goodies to enjoy to go along with the long-awaited return of achievements.
We’ve still got a long road in front of us to get this feature out the door for the 10th Anniversary, but our eyes are already set on the prize. We’re really excited to celebrate what is truly a special milestone in the life of any game, and we’re thankful and grateful to have made it this far with all of you.
Frigidfin Expedition
Another chilling winter is about to howl across the realm and dragons everywhere are taking advantage of an unusually bountiful fishing season!
The Frigidfin Expedition, one of Flight Rising's quarterly micro-holidays, is in full swing! From Thursday, December 8th to Monday, December 12th (06:00 Server Time), all players will experience a couple of battle-related boosts!
Bountiful Battles
For the duration of the Frigidfin Expedition, all all Coliseum enemies will have the chance to drop seafood items in addition to their normal loot. Other site activities such as gathering, breeding, bonding, brewing, and visiting some of the trading post dragons will also yield a chance at the expedition! Dragon clans everywhere are taking this time to stock up on fishes, clams, sharks, sponges, corals, snails, shrimp and more to feed them through the winter.
Battle EXP Boost
During the event, all battles will yield 50% additional EXP, so now is a perfect time for dragons to train. Grab your newest team and head out into battle!
Furry Fishers
Dragonkind are not the only ones taking advantage of the prosperous fishing season. As the oceans, lakes, and rivers teem with life, enterprising critters rush the shores. A few unique species of beaver capitalize on this seafood surge, catching fish not only for themselves, but as currency in a primitive barter system with waterfaring dragon clans. For the duration of the Frigidfin Expedition, these toothy familiars will drop fairly commonly in the Coliseum and rarely during Fishing. Once the expedition has concluded, they'll go back into hiding, but may run into one or two while Fishing.
This year we have a new vista that has a chance to drop in the coliseum and many other site-related activities.
December 18 - Dec 31
The mischievous Nocturne dragons return for their annual fortnight of mayhem. Strange and whimsical creatures and items will start appearing all over Sornieth. Get your hands on apparel, vistas, and familiars specifically unique to this event!
It's also the only part of the year where you can obtain Breed Change: Nocturne and Unhatched Nocturne Egg!
Another chilling winter is about to howl across the realm and dragons everywhere are taking advantage of an unusually bountiful fishing season!
The Frigidfin Expedition, one of Flight Rising's quarterly micro-holidays, is in full swing! From Thursday, December 8th to Monday, December 12th (06:00 Server Time), all players will experience a couple of battle-related boosts!
Bountiful Battles
For the duration of the Frigidfin Expedition, all all Coliseum enemies will have the chance to drop seafood items in addition to their normal loot. Other site activities such as gathering, breeding, bonding, brewing, and visiting some of the trading post dragons will also yield a chance at the expedition! Dragon clans everywhere are taking this time to stock up on fishes, clams, sharks, sponges, corals, snails, shrimp and more to feed them through the winter.
Battle EXP Boost
During the event, all battles will yield 50% additional EXP, so now is a perfect time for dragons to train. Grab your newest team and head out into battle!
Furry Fishers
Dragonkind are not the only ones taking advantage of the prosperous fishing season. As the oceans, lakes, and rivers teem with life, enterprising critters rush the shores. A few unique species of beaver capitalize on this seafood surge, catching fish not only for themselves, but as currency in a primitive barter system with waterfaring dragon clans. For the duration of the Frigidfin Expedition, these toothy familiars will drop fairly commonly in the Coliseum and rarely during Fishing. Once the expedition has concluded, they'll go back into hiding, but may run into one or two while Fishing.
This year we have a new vista that has a chance to drop in the coliseum and many other site-related activities.
December 18 - Dec 31
The mischievous Nocturne dragons return for their annual fortnight of mayhem. Strange and whimsical creatures and items will start appearing all over Sornieth. Get your hands on apparel, vistas, and familiars specifically unique to this event!
It's also the only part of the year where you can obtain Breed Change: Nocturne and Unhatched Nocturne Egg!
Friends for Arlo's
I keep hoping, but no one ever sends me a friend request. 
Status Update
Dragon Share Theme Week: Progenitor Dragons! 