Developments for 2015 For those with a Nexus account, greater details can be found in the Rules, both under the 2014 Pubmeet for new additions and the bulk of Character information in the 2011 pubmeet. 2015 is the year we seek to tidy up the loose ends of Phoenix and really get down to flattening the learning cliff but at the same time add long-term depth and luring back former players and catching the attention of completely new players. Here is presented an abbreviated list of things that we will be focusing on: Player Recruitment We have already outlined improvements to the UI. Further to this and with the understanding that any reduction in turn fees in certain areas may require balancing to remain financially stable, we will review costs to play the game and the limits of free-play. Key features of this overhaul: Tightening signing up procedure - there are steps in the process that could be clearer as discovered by a review of where players stop when signing up. Pulling sign-ups back to the site - need things to pull players back to the site over the first few days to check results, get more things moving - email/SNS. More Initial Missions - tutorial style with stellar rewards, officer experience, access to ships. These will include tasks such as contacting affiliations, signing bonus for joining an affiliation and posting on the recruitment forum. Advertising - we have already identified sites that list games along with voting protocols. These have response hooks back to the origin of the vote. Include links on Nexus to allow players to vote and get in-game rewards (a thousand stellars is a big deal to a new player). Free Basic Political - The old arguments against this are no longer salient. More Political Perks for Upgrades - Give big reasons to upgrade and remain upgraded. Monthly fees to be applied to prevent swapping and changing political level. Android and Iphone App - initially these will receive push SNS's of (Red) notifications and PM's. Give a reason to download the app such as a stellar bonus. Make the benefit of the download clear on signing up. Event Notifications - things happen to politicals (or at least the position they are in). Offers of a good trade deal such as BP's or hi-tech goods, information about an anomaly, chance to buy a nice ship. These may be in the form of mission tags. Always a Red Notification and pushed through phone app.

The Political Package

As politicals are essential for playing Phoenix, they have historically formed a barrier to getting into the game by those that are initially unwilling to pay to play. To remove this we will make them free to play but including Political upgrade options to discourage current players from downgrading to free politicals:

• Political - 10k Bonus on creation (and 5 ships) - but need the KJC account - free
  
• The Budget Package - Pol + Starbase + 2k/week + 2 free Updates/week (and 10 ships) - £2.50/week
  
• Pol Upgrade - one-off 200k bonus on upgrade + 10k/week + 5 Updates/week - £2/week
  
• Pol Upgrade - 10k/week + 20k weekly troop wage subsidy +15 updates/week - £3/week
  
• Pol Upgrade - 20k/week + 50k weekly troop wage subsidy + unlimited updates/week - £4/week
  

Characters
We have converted all the existing characters to the new framework described a number of years ago. This has required that all the items in the game are databased and instanced correctly and has required a large rework of the existing code. While the actually implementing this kind of thing is relatively easy, making it work in code that was not designed this way 14 years ago is not However we now have a system that has all the characters converted to individual items that can carry their own data, so that system can be built on.

We need to expand this so that you can get report on all the characters and submit orders as separate positions. We are going to make it so that you can interact with characters through the positions they are in and via individual orders. This will be achieved via a character tab on the nexus that will keep all the necessary utilities for characters in one place so that they can be happily ignored if that's the way you chose to play them or used to micro manage every detail if you are that way inclined.

We need to create the option to apply a default template to characters along which they automatically develop. This will be a Nexus tool (similar to Position and Base Editor). So when you recruit a character you could select one of these templates and ignore the character as he develops into the role that you hired him/her for. We also need to create a utility to allow you to create these templates so that you can plan out exactly how they will develop. We want to provide all the tools so having characters can be relatively painless but at the same time they can be a whole other aspect to the game.

Agent Networks (for characters)
We will be rewriting all the agent orders so that an agent/operative is more about setting up a network consisting of safe houses and operation centres within a starbase and then using these accumulated assets to interact with the starbase in a more straight forward way. This will not make it more simplistic to cause problems at a starbase but will make it clearer what is required to actually do an action. We will be using notifications to make sure the starbase owner has a clue what is going on but on the other side of things we will be creating false alarms so that a single clue will not bring down everything onto a new operation. We will be stepping far away from the current mechanics of one shot and % success equates to sending in multiple operatives to achieve success.

Missions Missions are in a very usable state within the game but adding and checking them is very time-consuming. We need an internal debugging process for the missions allowing their results to be checked without requiring a test platform. This will allow Mica to add more missions without having to have to write them 'blind' and having them debugged later by Darak. Infrastructure The infrastructure orders are being done entirely in custom code within the game. The underlying custom code engine and interface has been slowly improving stretching the achievable limits of custom code. This has allowed coding of some interesting things that previously would have got bogged down in how much could be done. This organic development as also defined clear and achievable borders for development. The engine and therefore custom orders will constantly improve. We are adding more features to the orders and more generic features to the custom code, this is allowing the game to evolve without constantly changing to base code. Improve Utilities and UI We are going to go through the nexus and see how we can create a bunch of utilities that allow turns to be crafted more easily. We will never remove the standard order editor but there are ways of creating turns that mean that you will never have to see the actual set of orders. These utilities will focus on letting you do what you want to with your assets and not on automating the game. Part of the ideology is that modern gamers are daunted by the old PBM style of issuing orders and this may a big part of the learning cliff. Currently we are not exactly sure where this is going to go but we need to make the game easier to play the game while not removing the ability to do everything in the game with simple lists of orders. I'll be looking into how the jump/system maps could be improved to help with movement and actions. We will also look to parsing the turns from text into a more interactive format.