Greetings Vainglory Community,
As some of you may be aware, Rogue recently made the call to shut down servers for Vainglory. Over the past few days, we have been clambering to sort out the best solution for the game and the player base that continues to support Vainglory (many from the very beginning!). In lieu of the sudden change, and a continued uncertainty with another publisher should we choose to explore a similar path–we ultimately feel that the best call is to put the future of Vainglory (outside of China) into the hands of the most passionate and ardent supporters–our community.
Included here is rundown to support the plans and expectations outlined in our recent video announcement (embedded below). The goal is to give you a sense of where we’re looking to head in the coming days and weeks. There will be questions; please post them in our Reddit AMA thread and we’ll tackle them as quickly as possible.
UPDATE: Reddit AMA has concluded. Thank you for all your questions!
TL;DW
Instead of allowing it to be shut down and relying on a new publisher, we want to see if we can work with the community to build a long term future for the game. Why?
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- We want to avoid a situation like the one last week ever happening again (where Vainglory’s future is suddenly in danger).
- You (the player community) care for the game as much as we do and we want Vainglory to live forever!
- The Super Evil team is entirely focused on Project Spellfire right now.
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We need to move fast. You’ll be seeing and experiencing changes to the game as early as this week. All heroes and skins (except LE) will also become available for all. Why?
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- Vainglory’s servers are expensive to run without incoming revenue (we’ve turned off in-app purchases).
- As Project Spellfire gets closer to launching Loquori will need to sleep. Our window to do work on this is rapidly closing.
- We are making the game “client authoritative” meaning that instead of everything being handled by expensive servers, your handle and matchmaking information will be stored on your device. This means that if you uninstall and reinstall, you will lose that information.
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The app experience will get worse before it gets better.
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- You will be able to play the game as before, but many previously available functions like friends, chat, leaderboards, parties etc will no longer be available.
- Your progress may look lost, but it is not – we are working on a way for you to import it back into the game at a later date.
- We will aim to do a few more releases in the coming weeks to bring back some of these functionalities in new ways.
- Our long term vision is to enable the community to host servers directly, even collect statistics, enter your own tuning values, and more. That’s the dream. We don’t know if we will get there, and it may be months away.
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What to expect and when
Stage 1a – Everything breaks…but you will get access to almost everything
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- Target timing: End of this week (maybe as early as Thursday)
In Stage 1 we will make all heroes and all skins (except LE versions) available for everyone. You should still be able to play most game modes in solo queue, but almost everything around them will not work correctly including: parties, social, chat, quests, progression, glory, ice, login-logout, market, event-based game modes etc. Everything except the play menu, really. You will press buttons that do nothing or, worse, produce unexpected results. Bear with us.
Stage 1b – A new, cleaned up community edition client update
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- Target timing: 1-2 weeks from Stage 1a
Here we clean up much of what broke in stage 1. The functionality mostly does not come back, but the UI should be clean and the worst bugs from Stage 1 should be resolved.
Stage 1c – Further cleanup and party UI (party codes) returns
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- Target timing: 1-2 weeks from Stage 1b
Here you should, again, be able to form parties via a new party code system. Note, friend lists, chat etc will not come back. This version will now form the core of Vainglory Community Edition. We will build up from here.
Stage 2 – Introduction of community hosted servers
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- Target timing: to-be-confirmed
Here we are looking to introduce a function where community members or organizations can choose to host their own Vainglory server through a partner organization – similar to other games with community hosted servers. If you are unhappy with the ping of the SEMC servers, you can host your own in the location you choose. This phase will finish with adding a “server browser” into the game so players should be able to choose which server they want to connect to. Over time these servers should be configurable with custom balancing parameters, bringing back the event game modes we lost in Stage 1 etc but that will come much later.
Stage 3 – SEMC servers moved into a backup role
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- Target timing: to-be-confirmed
Here we gradually remove SEMC from the central server hosting role in favor of committing fully to community run servers and matchmakers. This will all depend on our experience in Stage 2.
Stage 4 – Re-importing your old Vainglory profile
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- Target timing: to-be-confirmed
We know progress is important and our games’ history is meaningful. In Stage 4 we attempt to make it possible for you to re-import all your old trophies, progress, LE skins etc.
Stage 5+ – We are still figuring this out
We will see what the feedback looks like from the earlier phases and act accordingly. We continue to love Vainglory and would love to evolve it into an independent, community driven cross-platform ecosystem. What shape this will take will depend on what feedback you give us, and how phases 1-4 go. More later!
Here’s what we need from you:
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- Your continued patience and support.
- We’d love to hear from community orgs potentially interested in hosting our initial community servers (Stage 2):
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- community@superevilmegacorp.com
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- Loquori will need your energy!
We could fail, and at minimum we’re likely to hit some serious detours along the way. Please post your comments, questions, and feedback. We have an open Reddit AMA thread that we’ll look to prioritize for answers as soon as tomorrow [UPDATE: This has concluded].
Thanks for being a part of this with us. We are excited to share in this journey with you.
Kevin ‘cloaken’ Johnson, Live Design Director
http://discord.gg/vainglory
Given the coincidental date of this post, it feels prudent to point out that this is not intended as an initiative for April 1st.
