“Whoa. Déjà vu.” – This happens when we change something. What changed? A couple of things.

Steam sales added to Oort Online goal funding

We have dropped the Steam sales figures from November onto playboundless.com. This means we’ve included all the standard Oort Online sales as Explorer packages and the Collector’s Edition sales as Adventurer packages. Together these boost up the total funding working towards more goals.

We’ll keep adding the Steam income periodically once we get the official figures from Valve. The sales report normally arrives after the 20th of the following month. So we should find out the official figures for December after the 20th of January.

(If you’re trying to work out exactly what the funding should be and wondering why it’s different – don’t bother torturing yourself. There are exchange rates, VAT rates, chargebacks, Steam’s share and all sorts of other little gremlins hiding in there.)

Beacons unlocked

We’ve used a chunk of the Steam income to fully fund the Beacons feature, everything else has been applied to the voted feature Character Races I.

But didn’t we vote for Character Races I not Beacons? What’s going on!

Yes! But we’ve made a call to consider Beacons as an essential feature. There are many parts of the game that don’t get voted on, for example, building the core engine, working on optimisation, working on the GUI, building the world servers, and lots more basic core + essential stuff.

At the moment there is impressively very little griefing in the universe of Oort Online. Everyone is respecting everyone else’s hard work and playing nicely. But we want to get ahead of this and make sure that the tools are in place to make sure no one has their game spoilt. Collaboration and griefing controls are essential to making sure everyone can have confidence and fun in Oort Online. So we made the call. We hope everyone agrees this was the right thing for the game today.

We also wanted to be able to demonstrate that we had an answer to one of the most common questions: “If it’s an MMO, how do you stop people griefing your creations?” Right now we have a plan (Beacons) but not the solution fully implemented, which is a sticking point for a lot of people joining the game.

Unlocking Beacons will give more people the confidence to join Oort Online, and all of our current players the confidence to build whatever they want with their friends without fear of griefers.

Merry Oortmas

Merry Oortmas from the Oortarch and all the Oort Elves!