Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is not planning any wipes, despite rumors. The team is also moving to set some boundaries when it comes to communication with and to the community.
Now that Pantheon is in Early Access, going forward, they've set up some new rules that are intended to not just formalize communication to prevent discrepancies, but also to prevent any potential for accusations of favored treatment for some community members or guilds.
“As our community approaches 100,000 users, how we interact with you clearly needs to change. Informal relationships, chumming around and joking with the community is no longer tenable or appropriate. This will mean less instantaneous responses and chatter, and serious, measured factual language in our communications. Furthermore, communications will be streamlined with one individual verifying official statements for facts and consistency.”
What these boundaries will entail is anything that involves members of the community, including pre-patch testing, is going to be structured in a way that won't allow for any perceived or real advantages. Visionary Realms has worked with a particularly organized guild for pre-patch testing for a while, but since guilds do compete and others deserve a chance to be considered, that will end. The perception of advantages followed.
“We thought we could contain the risks, but that turned out to be overly optimistic and just plain wrong.”
During Early Access internal testers will not be testing on live servers anymore. GM commands like being able to spawn/despawn NPCs or items will only be usable by a limited number of customer support and Community Management staff. All GM activity is logged and the team will have this log openly available to team leaders and review it several times a week to make sure there are no violations of these new rules.
They're hopeful that these new rules will demonstrate that the team is listening and that this new phase is taking some new directions.
One direction they are not taking anytime soon, however, is a server wipe. Visionary Realms has maintained that they’re looking to avoid wipes, and in a new video, Joppa Vash reiterates this.
“There is absolutely no plan for a guaranteed wipe until the final full 1.0 launch of Pantheon,” he says. They're also considering a server at launch that could let you keep your Early Access characters. That's not guaranteed but it is something they are considering. of course if there are unforeseen circumstances that require some action, they will let us know.
The War Within Hotfixes - 18 March
The War Within Hotfixes - March 18
