Calypso’s not the only one who can write blog posts! I was originally just gonna make a forum post, but I had too many things I wanted to talk about. I know my stuff isn’t as exciting as Calypso’s but hopefully it still gives you relevant info. I would also like to start doing weekly blog posts (not on Calypso’s days but maybe Wednesday or something), but they may not be too exciting considering a lot of my stuff is private (tickets and the like), but I’ll try to give you some details!
Suggestions
We’re reviewing the suggestions to give the first update to them now. We want to review a little more than the top three, since the top three are all older suggestions from the dev team rather than you guys, so it’s taking a bit longer than we planned due to that update. Jeff and I are going to review the suggestions today. We’ll probably have a super massive post to kickstart it this week, and then next month go to the top three suggestions. My goal is to have the update out by tomorrow (but as with all things game development, take that with a grain of salt)!
Moderation
I’m looking to improve the quality of our chats and the forum moderation. I’m adding a few new forum mods, and am reviewing our current rules to cover any gaps. I hit a bug a week ago or so when I tried to mute someone, instead it banned him, and started a chain reaction of IP bans that didn’t make any sense. People who’ve never interacted in game were getting this really dumb ban. I fixed it within 10 minutes of it happening, but still. Weird. Sorry to those of you who got banned, I heard someone was pretty ticked on teamspeak. Sorry <3.
I’m trying to be a bit more active at forum banning some people that aren’t respecting the forums. We have this really dumb bug that doesn’t display forum bans to users resulting in alternate accounts that are still breaking the rules because they don’t know they actually got forum banned! I’m setting up a work around that will allow me to just add them to a group that makes it so they can’t post on the forums, but still see them, and then I’ll just private message them the ban reasons.
Tickets
A month or so ago I stepped aside on some of the ticket categories to do more work in marketing. Around this time is when a dev got sick, and Jey got trapped in the mountains due to flooding. We had a perfect storm of ticket answering woes. Jey’s back and only one dev is sick now (get better Blue Dwarf!). We’re still not back up to snuff yet in the tickets, but my goal is to be current by E3 (next week). Current would be that all tickets are replied to or resolved if submitted more than 24 hours ago. We currently have 90 open tickets which isn’t great but it’s not horrible either (I’ve seen the system sitting at 200+ before… ouch). That’s only two pages of tickets. 90 of you that have issues we need to resolve yesterday and we’re working as fast as we can to get you guys all taken care of. To get your ticket resolved faster, avoid responding to it until one of us has responded to you. When you respond it changes the status from “New” to “Waiting Reply” and new tickets get higher priority than “Waiting Reply.”
Contest Rewards
Now that our winners have been announced, I’m working with one of our devs to do some recolorings of the skins that people would like. I’m not too sure if these skins will be using Jey’s new system or the old skins that people got for the SS2 beta. Prizes will hopefully be rewarded at the Uni Reset (announcement incoming for that too).
E3 & Steam!
Jeff, SI and myself are all going to E3 this year! We’re gonna network like there’s no tomorrow and see a lot of exciting new gaming things! If you managed to snag an E3 pass toss me a message on twitter when you’re there and we’ll meet up! It’s also gonna be really weird cause this is the first time I will be meeting Jeff in real life, so that’s gonna be different. We also finally got greenlit on Steam and have started the process of actually getting on Steam with integrating all their goodies into our systems. I want to thank all of you that voted to get us on Steam. It literally would not have been possible without you. I’m not going to give any time estimates on our Steam Launch yet since we don’t know how easy it will be to integrate. Our goal is to be ready for steam launch by July. The Vert has compiled a list of high priority bugs that would be ideal to be fixed by the Steam Launch.
Nexus Playtesting
Jeff has asked the dev team to get fresh eyes on the Nexus revamp Calypso’s been working on. He wants us to get people who maybe aren’t too familiar with games, or maybe who are gamers but have never played Star Sonata, to play through the revamp on test server and take notes about what trips people up, or what doesn’t go smoothly. I’ve got a few people to help do that on my end, and the feedback we’re getting is incredibly valuable and is going a long way to strengthen our new player experience.
And with that I’m signing off! I hope my posts are mildly interesting to you, and I’d like to start doing these more often. I can’t say that they will have too many details in them, considering I handle a lot of private things like account disputes and moderation issues, but I’ll try my best to keep you guys informed as to what’s going on back here. 
