Greetings,

I would like to announce what's been going on and details about our plans, what the current state is and how we will be moving forward from here.
I have been working every day non-stop for two months and half months now, there have been # big updates and few new things that we've changed in management, policy and structure.

We have let things slide a bit for a long time and it was time to "get a grip" and make everything as they should be, as many of you have noticed I've been more active not only on development but customer service, managing staff and solving issues, making decisions on policy changes that are way overdue at this point, together with our other two admins Nisti and Billy. All of us are very motivated and working hard to solve this pile of issues that have been stacking up.

The main goal for these two months has been to take a more professional approach to running RSCRevolution, polish the current features, fix the bugs, and get the server to a state where it would not feel like alpha release but more of a stable version of the game which does not lack any of the quality of life features that are necessary for new players to get into the game, and in all ways meet the standards of modern gamer. On top of that, we want the atmosphere to not be as toxic as it has been so far and so none of the players have to endure insults, slurs, and offensive language over chats or player names.

Development:

Customer Support

This was not released this year, but it's still something worth mentioning because not all know why this was necessary update and why you should use it.
We often see players reaching out for help on global chat, send private messages to mods who might just be AFK at the time and players keep waiting, I'm not saying that is okay but it happens. A lot of frustration in reaching for help without this feature, I think you all will agree.

The solution: From the new support interface all you have to do is submit a ticket and all mods in-game and browsing our game management panel will be alerted.
The first one available will contact you as soon as possible, that is all you have to do. No spamming global asking for mods, and getting frustrated as nobody replies.
From now on we require you to use this feature for all issues because this is how we keep our tasks organized.

You can also report bugs and suggestions from the interface, not many want to log in to forums to report bugs so this is a great alternative to that, and each time we're deciding on our next patch we go through these!

MiniQuest System:

I wrote a new user interface to be used with this system, removed the dialogues and they are now instead shown in the new interface.  You can now choose the rewards you want from the interface, and you can opt-out from the rewards that you don't want. Along with all this, I have made it so we can add Daily Quests in future, but currently writing new quests with this system is not something we consider a priority. I wrote many versions of this interface until I was satisfied with the current one:

In addition to the interface, I have added a quest log to view your quest progress.

And you are kept up with your quest progress with these Objective Messages:

Dedicated E-mail Server

One of our issues since the beginning has been that we haven't had a dedicated email server, this limits our emails per hour, and the methods to deliver emails until now have been somewhat unreliable, missing emails, e-mails going to the spam folder, etc. I have purchased a dedicated e-mail server to handle all the e-mails that are sent from game server and website. All e-mails are encrypted with SSLand the email server is configured to professional standards, in a way that the e-mails are not being flagged as spam. No more missing e-mails! We are the first server with more than one dedicated server to run our services which are needed to handle all the traffic appropriately.

Two-step Verification

There has been at least one database leak per server now, and not a security breach on the website or server, but one of the leaders/developers going rogue. This has happened to all servers out there currently, as far as I know. Our database leak was around two years ago now and sadly there still are players who haven't changed their password since, we have been using a rather weak hashing algorithm called MD5, this is outdated technology and was replaced with more modern algorithm.
Growing issue was that people with access to these old databases were logging on to accounts that were still using the same password as when the database was leaked. They dropped all their stuff and in the worst case, they got the character banned.

The solution: Request all users to change their password? No, that's an amateur move. We can't count on that happening fast enough or if at all. So instead I programmed a two factor authentication system, so even if someone knows your password they will be blocked from doing any damage and you'll be notified about it. Upon login you will be requested to verify your e-mail address and reminded that you are not using two factor authentication until you enable it.
If someone happens to know your password and tries to login they'll be greeted with this message:

And you will receive e-mail message like this:

Click the link, verify login or report it and you're done.

World Map

You must be wondering why I put so much effort into something that is seemingly pointless, "we all know RSC from the heart" was one of the first comments on release topic.

If you ignore the fact that there are new players who haven't played RSC before and you do nothing to help them get into the game, you will lose a large group of people willing to play this game, only because you are stubborn and assume everyone is on the same level of knowledge as you. I'm not that guy and don't want to be.

This feature was planned and worked on about two years ago but the complications that go into making a world map, labelling the entire map, managing the memory size, file size, and so on was something that required a complete rewrite of several systems and proper design. I've never had enough time or manpower to get it done from start to finish. Thanks to Mod White & Tina for configuring all the labels and icons for the entire world map! :applause:

One of the biggest benefits of World Map is that it is a great way to show the content that is available to players, and those who seek adventure will go and check out what there is. It answers questions WHERE and HOW at the same time.

Dueling improvements

I had planned to make this last summer but didn't, I feel like I've constantly had my hands full and I've had just tons of projects waiting for me to complete them. This is important update because we released equipment tab and rings. We felt like we have ruined the staking scene by adding these things, without an option for players to choose what they want to be enabled in the duel. In the end, I only saw boxing duels and I felt like it's something that needs to be resolved ASAP.

The solution: Equipment rules, and additional rules. Remake the original duel screen to meet the standards of the staker today, not 10 years ago!
Players should be able to duel just the way they like it.

What's new:
- Equipment rules; you can now choose one by one which equipment is allowed in your duel.
-Hitpoint Offset is now displayed on the bottom of your stake containers.
-No drinks. Enabling this rule will remove all effects from potions used before the duel.
-No members items. This rule will forbid you from using any p2p items known from the original rscrevolution Classic.
-No RSCR items. This rule will forbid you from using any custom RSCR items in the duel. This covers all the items that have never existed outside RSCRevolution.

Automated 1v1 Tournaments

The idea came out of nowhere, Kleio brought it up and we hopped right on it. This is something that the scene needs. Depending on if the tournament is donated or voted for, you can join free if donated, and if it was started by a vote each player has to pay 50,000gp to enter and 40,000GP gets added to the jackpot. The player who wins the tournament gets the entire jackpot, 640K. It's likely that we will add an option to choose the entry fee for the tournament but it's not there now.

The great thing about this is that you don't have to have flats, don't have to have gear. All you need is the coins to enter, or not even that if the tournament is donated!
Each participant gets flat 99s, set of runes for fire blast and inventory full of swordfish. This was a huge success and it was heartwarming to see everyone enjoy it so much. We'll be improving and polishing this event more soon.

Performance/Stability/Optimizations

The world map update was a step back in performance, I just kept my fingers crossed that it would work as is without rewriting anything.. well, it didn't. So that's where all of the optimizations started from, I had to pack nearly 125-megabyte map efficiently and in a way that it won't use much memory while the map is being used. After rewriting the entire sprite format, client renderer, I did a bunch of upgrades to the client. I finally did it, but after I was done I noticed something. The changes that were only meant to make world map usable actually affected the client performance as a whole and it's memory size! Players got insane amount of FPS boost and the character seemed to glide in the world, it was so smooth.

After seeing such huge progress I didn't want to stop there, I had the client optimized at this point. What remained was server core which was bit struggling and there was unoptimized code everywhere. I went and rewrote the majority of server core and it's services, I profiled the server and analyzed the results and then I did it again.. again.. and again.

We're in the clear now, no memory leaks, everything is as efficient as it can be, utilizing multiple threads. There might still be occasional lag spikes and I'm investigating that currently.

During this time we had two unfortunate setbacks.

First one was related to the shutdown procedure after rewriting the server core services and their shutdown processes. It was one line that ruined everything. What it did was it shut down every service without waiting for them to be done with their tasks, although the code seemingly was doing that. Players online at the time had their saves scrambled and rollback was required, as it was not something I could undo by tracing.

Second set back was when I rewrote the server database manager and it failed to save inventory and bank under specific circumstances, I had learned from my past mistake and took a back up before releasing the update to live. But it took us 3 hours to notice that something was off, so we had to roll back 3 hours.

Because of our advanced logging system and profile snapshot system, we could restore the majority of players progress, with exception of stake wins. We have restored the majority of players at this point and we are preparing to move forward again!

That is where we stand now, lots of things have been happening and are going to happen.

Bug fixes
There have been numerous bug fixes during this period, not all have been noted down but those which have been can be found in our Update Logs section.

What's next?

Policy & Staff structure
We will be updating our Character Name Policy and Chat Language Policy together with entire staff team, to create a better atmosphere to play in for everyone. There have been numerous reports of players getting tired of it, and not only that we've kept the door tightly closed from outsiders who don't have as high tolerance for such as we do, us who have been here for years.

We will also be updating our Moderating Policy, I have noted that moderators are all doing their job according to different guidelines/policy and in some cases unwritten rules that only seniors know about, this is something that we can't have happening, disagreements and confusion about policy should not be a thing that happens within staff team, on top of that we can't have staff members doing something which needs to be undone by someone else, or staff member lets things slide that others don't.. All staff must all agree on one policy together and we only follow that one policy and we add to that single policy if it's missing something.

Polish & Fix!
I'll keep working on polishing the current game content on the side while working on other projects.

Bank improvements
Just like everything else, this was something I always wanted to do but it takes a substantial amount of time to do properly and I really don't you guys to witness another poor implementation of a feature. I will be introducing the following improvements to bank interface;
Equip from bank,
Deposit from equipment,
Gear Up/Save Current setup buttons,
Bank tabs

Combat Formula Changes
I've heard you, the combat formula is unfair and unbalanced. It's my next project and I will gather a group of stakers and PKers to guide me on tweaking it. Please join our discord as I will be announcing it there.

Deadman Seasonal
We have planned to convert Deadman players to regular players soon and close the deadman mode, and reintroduce deadman mode with higher exp rates in seasons which you get rewards from, we'll announce more in detail about this later.

Slayer
Announced last summer by me, saying it will be out in two weeks... Oh man, that was a big mistake.
We have rebooted the project and we're still planning things out, our opinions have changed about some things and we have improved upon old ideas. Billy is leading the development for Slayer and we're making great progress. We will release it when it's ready and not a moment sooner, since it will be 100% authentic to the look and feel of RSCR.

Thank you!
There is no server like RSCRevolution, we have been here the longest, we have developed the furthest and will continue to make you proud!
We appreciate all of you who have stayed loyal to us when times have been rough and we haven't done what you deserved I have never witnessed as loyal player base as the RSCRevolution community. Thank you all for counting on us and continuing to do so!

With appreciation,
n0m, Billy, Nisti and the rest of the RSCRevolution Staff Team