Just like we promised in our Alpha 4 deployment news, we have delivered refund bonus items to those players who donated earlier and decided to play Alpha 4 again.
Unfortunately, these items require an existing country on the server so we have announced the refund on Alpha 4 deployment and gave over a month for players who wanted those items to create their countries on our new server. Today we are delivering those items. Because we have to do it manually, the procedure will be one-time only. We are sorry, but you will not receive the items unless you already started playing Alpha 4 before today.
Also we are unable to provide gift Lada's Wards this way. So, instead of giving one regular and one gift Ward per each $30 charged, we are giving you two regular Wards. As promised, the upper limit of bonus items will be $100 so you will receive a maximum of 3 packs of items.
Speaking about other news and current game development process - Things have been going slowly lately because of the season's holidays, changes in the team (someone left, someone joined), and a number of technical tasks that unexpectedly popped up while we were sending out massive invites and a flood of new people were joining in.
We hesitated to invite a lot of new players because we needed a proper moderator reporting system in place so people can have abusers reported and punished promptly without their spoiling the fun of the game. (Especially considering that already there were several incidents of newcomers, not accustomed to our friendly atmosphere, behaving aggressively and insultingly). This kind of behavior is unacceptable, but also inevitable with a large number of players. All we can do is react as fast as we can. Hence, the requirement for this system.
The bad side of this is that implementation required massive reworking of the messaging system, which took a lot of time and is still not quite finished. The good side - messaging will be slightly better. We plan to implement long-awaited requests to have messages follow a player when he/she switches heroes, the ability to receive private messages sent to another hero while on your currently active one, and more.
I am also still working on the long-promised surprise thing that I had planned to release somewhere around New Year's Day. But you will never know what surprises further development may bring. Fortunately, we never make formal promises so the disappointment should not be too bitter :)
But most of you are still busy with the Medieval Age and can wait, right? :)
