No item will be rejected after a single vote. It requires failing a large percentage of matches to be rejected. Given what percentage of items in the system are not great, the likelihood of a good-but-not-great item being matched hundreds of times against better submissions is impossibly low.

The robes and long coats are problematic. They don't animate well. If we had more bones to weight them to, it wouldn't be so bad, but we have a pretty severe bone limitation with characters.

We'll be watching the system's "health" throughout and tweaking it along the way to improve it if we see too many good designs being weeded out. We're starting out somewhat conservatively -- an item has to lose a lot of matches to get rejected outright.

These are the kinds of numbers that ought to stay "behind the scenes", so they can't be manipulated, as folks are doing with the current system (funnily enough, they're manipulating the last system, not the current system, so it's not even doing them any good) .

In addition, the system by its very nature "absorbs" bad users -- bad contributions will be rejected early and often, and it's hard to manipulate the system without also providing significant benefit to it.

As contributors, your collective job (such as it is) will be to rate things fairly and contribute great flags and sails. As long as some number of folks do that (and keep in mind that its design considered degenerate behavior as the norm, not the exception), we think the system will work great.

The current plan is to keep doing approval blitzes as often as we can manage them so that when the new system goes live, we're starting fresh.

Barring that (and it's unlikely we'll manage to not have any backlog the day we go live), anything that hasn't been reviewed will be carried over into the new system.

In case it wasn't clear, in the upcoming system, items are never rejected due to age, only by losing too many match-ups.

The unrest bundle missions are there on live, but after they were tested they didn't get unlocked so only GMs can take them. Oops!

We have a new server build coming Very Soon that unlocks all the unrest bundle turn in missions.


Joe

What is the incident number for your support ticket?

Marion van Ghent has published a new Devlog on the upcoming User Content improvements. It is filled with all the information you've been clammoring for, and much, much more!

So check it out by visiting this link, and let us know what you think!

Enjoy, won't you?
Aether

The folks at IGN have published their review of Pirates of the Burning Sea, and we were pretty pleased with what they had to share. We were even more pleased to find that the IGN editors had selected us as January's Game of the Month!

You can read IGN's review review by visiting this link, and read about our Game of the Month honor by visiting this link.

Enjoy, won't you?
Aether

There's a 15.2% chance to get a Royal Commendation from a level 50 ship, and an 8.9% chance to get one from a 45-49 ship. Writs may or may not change, but they aren't the primary gating factor on SOLs. Labor is, and if you're trying to grind out royals to have a writ ready now then you'll be sitting on it for a long time before it's possible to construct a writ-requiring SOL.

The system doesn't work in a way that allows it to add recipes based on lists of books you've already read.