Community update: week 39 & 40

Dear Community,

It’s time for our bi-weekly community update with the latest news and information around Grepolis.

Forum layout – upcoming beta test

It’s been a while since we last gave an update on the status of our graphical forum update. Since our artists and forum layout expert recently started working on our very own improved forum skin again, we can bear some good news today: The very fist version of our improved forum layout has been implemented on the beta forums yesterday and is currently available to all administrators for testing.

As soon as these admins confirm the layout to be functional, we will activate it for all beta users to experience and test the improved scenery for our discussion forums.

Knowing that you are all eagerly awaiting the changes, we would like to share a quick preview of some views with you:

Keep your eyes peeled for the changes on the beta forums and test the new layout with us!
We’re looking forward to your feedback!

Grepolis Player Council update

After the local council members of each market have determined their members for the Inner Council, we are now moving them over to the beta forums and getting all the “paperwork” done in order to enable them to finally get started. As soon as the privacy agreements are signed, we will also be able to announce all the final Inncer Council representatives for each of the 13 language versions represented in this term.

Speaking of terms: Given that it took us quite a while to confirm all candidates, we have decided to declare that the term of each member officially started on October 1st, rather than right after the elections. We believe it’s only fair to give them a full 6 months time to work and discuss matters together. 😉

v2.148

The update to browser version 2.148 took part this week. The mobile update is to follow as soon as the approval process is finished for iOS.

With this update, we implemented several changes targeted towards new players and early game phases, e.g. text adjustments for easier understanding of the farming villages, additional information on tooltips, improvements to positioning and movement of tutorial arrows and minor changes to tutorial quests.

At the same time, we prepared for the upcoming morale changes which are currently being tested on beta and US worlds.

Next version preview

The sprint for version 2.149 was finished today. In this version we continued with early game improvements and technical adjustments while at the same time finishing off our final big surprise for this year, a new event which will be revealed in November.

The technical adjustments target the command overview as we found that our past rework caused some issues that needed further investigation to guarantee both a good performance and a reliable display of all movements (which in turn also affects notification sounds). The code improvements for this system will be a continuous topic in the upcoming weeks.

In regards to early game changes, you will notice that the quest log handling was improved by hiding scrollbars if no scrolling is required and removing the island quest section while island quests were not unlocked yet in the tutorial. Furthermore, we changed the order of tutorial quests to improve the tutorial flow.

Finally, adjustments were made to the automatic player deletion after being inactive for a while. Even if there is only very little progression with the account, it will not be deleted while there are still active advisors.

The current update schedule for v2.149 is as follows:

Tuesday, October 17th: NL, SE and SK market
Wednesday, October 18th: international roll-out

As always, you can already test these changes on our public beta servers. To learn more about the current availability of features in this testing environment, please follow the official changelogs in the beta forums.

Weekly stats

The following statistics represent activity between September 19th and October 4th:

	New tickets	Answered tickets	Av. resp. time	Rated tickets	Av. rating
Week #39	2264	2103	3.44	490	408
Week #40	2049	1868	3.9	422	4.12

Bugs

Status	Browser	Mobile	All
Open	12	2	14
Reported	17	1	18
Solved	15	0	15

Take care!