Wyvern: Year in Review

For the last two years I've done a "Year in Review" news post for Wyvern, detailing the important news of the past year and linking to the full articles so that returning/new players could catch up or so that regular players could quickly go over it and see if there was anything they missed and wanted more information about. They took quite a bit of work to put together, especially the 2009 version (that beast took a number of hours to conquer).

I originally conceived of this idea shortly after the game came back up following what is known as the 15 month hiatus. It seemed like Rhialto was going to be more active from this point on and that updates and news posts would be forthcoming as a result. Therefore, I figured I could do a big blog post at the end of 2008 catching everyone up. Unfortunately, things didn't work out that way and there weren't really enough highlights that year to make it worthwhile. It seemed like the same would be true the following year, but that changed a few months in and the news began to flow so rapidly that people couldn't keep up. Thus, "Wyvern: Year in Review" was born.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to put up a news post this year, but I thought I'd continue the tradition as a blog post per the original idea. So for your reading pleasure here are the highlights of 2011:

Celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Wyvern we brought to you a fun weekday party that introduced a lot of new content to the game. Out of this day, we saw new maps, new quests, new monsters, a new [and only somewhat buggy] Minath Monster Arena, the return of costumes, and artifact armor. We then followed this up with a "suggested playing hours" feature that would allow players to get extra experience while training throughout the game during specific hours of the day.

Such updates were the first steps toward focusing a bit more on attracting players to the game after spending quite a lot of time working on balance/bug fixes that hampered players during the bulk of our work. We still had more work to do to balance the game, but with most of the quick fixes taken care of, work would have continued more slowly in the future and therefore we wanted to also spend some time keeping all of our very loyal players entertained until we could be finally be done with old balance problems and turn our complete attention to building the game up.

Following these exciting two updates, Rhialto announced a temporary downtime for March 7th... and with that we end this edition of "Wyvern: Year in Review." *cues dramatic music as the camera pans out - I now begin to fiddle with my shirt in an attempt to remove my mic while the credits role*