Tomorrow's Update & New Roadmap

Tomorrow evening I will be releasing an update which adds Leaderboards with various daily, weekly and monthly competitions that give out prizes in the form of credits. There are some other things included in the update, like the ability to accept all missions from a given outpost at once, and rename items along with some more fixes. However there is another change in this update that I feel warrants some explanation.

Essentially I am planning to allow credits to be traded to other players for in-game cash. I know that this decision will be controversial and I so I'd like to take a moment to explain my reasons for doing so.

• Despite our best efforts, Dead Frontier 2 continues to have significant black market. This means that anyone with money can already buy pretty much whatever they want/need in the game. In fact, we recently estimated that black market sellers collectively earn more from the game than we do. Allowing credits to be traded will reduce demand for the black market, which will in turn help to reduce things like cheating/botting/account theft as the black market often drives these activities. It will also remove the need to ban players who would normally resort to buying these items as they can now get what they want legitimately.
  
  
• It will allow players who wouldn't normally be able to afford to purchase upgrades & cosmetics to save up for them by playing the game.
  
  
• It allows people with limited free time to have a chance at making decent progress in the game.
  
  
• I've come to realize that selling cosmetics exclusively is a great business strategy if you have a huge player base and gigantic resources, but it's not so great if you're a tiny indie developer with a niche game. It's simply not possible for us to make enough of these cosmetic items, quickly enough whilst still also getting gameplay updates out. For example it's taken Dobrin over a year and he's still got a way to go before he finishes our new cosmetic sets. Whilst I think you guys will like them when they are done, it will only lead to a very short lived spike in sales.
  
  
• At the moment Dead Frontier 2 does more than well enough for me to be working on it full time, but it's not at the level where I can really afford to hire other programmers just yet. Whilst this could be achieved with player base growth alone, I suspect it would take a long time with the current pace of updates. Allowing credit trading should allow me to hire someone in the near future, which in turn should accelerate the pace of updates.
  

I know that despite knowing all these reasons, some of you will still be upset with me about this change, and that's ok. This is not exactly how I imagined things would go either.



Here is what I have already completed from the previous roadmap:

• Level 50 content
  
• Weekly Competitions similar to DF1
  
• Newbie Tutorial/Missions
  

And here is what I still have left to do:

• Barricading
  
• World Boss(es)
  
• New Area Types
  
• Proper Friend/Clan System
  

I am still planning to do all of the above, but I also wanted to add a few more items to the list. Some of these changes are ones that I've been resisting for a while (mainly because they will be difficult), but I've come to accept that they are needed if the game is going to continue to grow:

• Drag and drop inventory with item images
  
• Quick use system for health/food items
  
• Improved HUD with health bars, mission info etc
  
• Remove door loading by either combining rooms into floors ( with loading at the stairs) or go fully open world by having buildings entirely outside
  
• Remove the need for constant server loads when looting
  
• Rework melee combat to remove animation lock and stepping forwards
  
• Fixed storyline missions
  
• PvP arena
  

I haven't decided on the exact order that these will be done, but I just wanted to make you all aware that they will definitely be happening at some stage.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy tomorrow's update :)