Today we are excited to announce that SWGEmu is transitioning to a new phase of the project. After more than 15 years of investment by the original founders, we are now moving from the Development phase of the project to Beta as we march towards the much anticipated official post-1.0 server launch.
As many may have noticed TheAnswer has publicly declared he’s taking a back seat on the project, and Oru has already been doing this quite some time. Vlada in his year-end update also bowed out with a long-winded, tear-jerking declaration of his love and devotion for the project.
TheAnswer and Oru are officially becoming blue glowy, they will forever be welcome in the project but the demands of their real lives will make it harder over time to dedicate the time needed to keep the project moving forward. They’ll be here to provide wisdom, support and make fun of us when we do stupid stuff and cheer when we get it right.
Scurby, Farelli, and Lordkator have formed a new legal entity (In Delaware, USA) and are in the process of moving all contracts from the old legal entity to this new one. This means soon we will move the PayPal donations to the new account and will need your help getting the word out to subscribers on the old account that we need them to move their subscriptions. We expect this to happen in the next 30 days. Please keep an eye peeled as we transition we will need everyone to help keep the donations flowing to so the org will remain financially stable. This new legal structure will make it easier for the org to operate in the USA and avoid unnecessary taxes caused by the original legal entity being formed in Hungary.
Going forward Scurby, Farelli and Lordkator will be the council of three and will endeavor to move the project forward as we transition from development to beta onward to a post-1.0 world. We will all keep our same current roles and be officers of the organization going forward. We will continue to operate with the same separation of powers we have to date, including CSR’s having control over bans/unbans, devs controlling what code finally makes it to the official codebase. Scurby will maintain the “Eye of Sauron'' role and we will continue to work towards more transparency inside staff and with the community. In April we will produce our first Quarterly financial update and will work to keep the updates coming no later than the last day of the month following a quarter-end (i.e. Jan 31, April 30, July 31, Oct 31) and include as much detail as we can without compromising project security or community member’s privacy.
Moving forward as we shift into the Beta phase of the project we will start leveraging Basilisk as the test server for changes that require large scale testing. A recent example of that is the multi-accounting detection tools and will include other changes over time where Basilisk’s unique scale of 5,000+ monthly active users will help us test at scale. You can expect to see us test things like end-game content, camping issues, leveling, user surveys, email expiration, house cleanups, economy monitoring, and auditing. We, however, will not be introducing new content other than maybe some fun mysterious things related to the end of Basilisk’s long run and teasing the coming of the new post 1.0 server. In most aspects, Basilisk will remain with the pre-CU behavior until we shut it down for the new official post 1.0 server.
We have a lot of exciting ideas on how to engage the community including in-game senate meetings to discuss game mechanics and up-coming ideas, an official process for community members to propose changes to the game. We will also create processes to embrace more community content contributions including ideas around allowing for new stories, quests and other content from new code to assets that enhance the game for everyone.
Stay tuned, over the coming weeks we will start to release more details about this phase of the project, and we will share our thoughts about what’s next, and how we plan to engage the community both as players and contributors.
