A few months back, we gave an update on SimpleMMO, outlining the game’s current state and our commitment to resolving existing issues before introducing new mechanics. Our plan remains unchanged, but we’ve slightly revised the timeline. It is taking longer than we expected to get back on track.
When we initially published the post (available here), our timeline was based on the expectation that our new game IdleMMO would launch in summer. This release would enable us to redirect more resources to SimpleMMO at the start of autumn (or fall, for our American audience).
However, the situation evolved unexpectedly. Due to a significant surge in interest for IdleMMO, we decided to postpone its release to the end of the year. This delay allows us additional time to further polish the game. This decision was carefully considered and you can read about our rationale here. As a result, we haven’t yet been able to fully move over development resources back to SimpleMMO. However, this doesn’t mean we haven’t been developing both games concurrently – we definitely have. Our recent updates have mostly been behind-the-scenes, resulting in no notable changes in the update log. However, as IdleMMO’s release nears, with a target of mid-December, we are increasingly focusing on ensuring a smooth launch.
So, let’s just clarify one thing by being extremely clear: SimpleMMO’s development will slowly return back to normal once all IdleMMO‘s apps have been published. In fact, recently, I’ve been itching to move back over to SimpleMMO for an extremely welcome change of pace. However, right now, this isn’t possible due to IdleMMO’s imminent release.
Why is there no update log of everything that happens behind-the-scenes?
I’ve noticed this question raised multiple times before, and simply put, there’s no need for such detailed technical updates. They would likely create more confusion than clarity. For instance, if we mentioned migrating our caching driver from file-based storage to a Redis key-value database, or applying middleware to update the client’s connecting IP to the one that connects to Cloudflare’s edge, it would prompt questions like “What does this mean? What is Redis?” Providing such intricate technical details serves no practical purpose and would only consume valuable time.
Future Expectations for SimpleMMO
I touched on this in my last post, but to recap, many upcoming updates will significantly enhance existing systems. Additionally, the mobile UI will undergo a substantial overhaul to incorporate a more modern design pattern—we already have a working prototype of this.
Until then, you have the winter holidays event to look forward to which will start on Friday December 15th.
If you haven’t already pre-registered for our upcoming game IdleMMO, you can pre-register here. You can also join our Discord for a chance to participate in our closed beta testing.
Feel free to let us know any questions you have in the comment box below.
We are thrilled to announce the exciting rebrand of SimpleMMO!
It wasn’t that long ago since we recently moved away from the sword logo to the dragon logo. In fact, we went into detail on the reasoning behind the rebrand and ultimately it boiled down to it being the most effective in pulling in new players.
SimpleMMO’s past logos
As time went by, we slowly started to lose our love for the dragon logo due to two big reasons:
The colour scheme presented significant challenges in our work process. The combination of blue, purple, orange, and red, along with small black elements, proved to be quite problematic when attempting to establish a cohesive and unified brand for the game. Despite the promotional images using a darker background, it was originally designed with the intention of placement on a white background. We’ve recently made a company-wide decision to shift our focus towards creating products solely using a dark colour scheme and, in our opinion, the logo doesn’t blend as effectively against darker backgrounds.
The dragon and the text lack unity, existing as two completely separate elements, with the dragon positioned on top and the text beneath. While this design approach might suit other businesses or software, we realised it wasn’t quite fitting for a game. Our aim was to create a logo that exudes a more unified and game-like appeal.
During our pursuit of designing a new logo, our initial step involved creating a fresh app icon, which would serve as the foundation for the subsequent logo design.
The process for deciding on our new icon lasted approximately 6 months utilising the same tools provided by Google as we done during our previous rebranding. The tools allowed us to see if a logo was effective at bringing in new downloads to the game. As the app icon has a huge prominence in a store listing, being the first element users encounter on the Google Play page, it stands as one of the most critical factors in driving new downloads.
We went through various different types of icons testing the effectiveness of them against our dragon icon. During this period, we leveraged both traditional icons and icons created by artificial intelligence (AI) to explore its potential in creating an icon that could be even more effective than our dragon design.
Here are just some of the icons we tested throughout the time period:
Shield IconKnight IconSword Icon
Despite these icons, a critical problem remained unresolved: they failed to address the issues we had with the dragon icon, leaving us apprehensive about the possibility of yet another rebrand in the future, repeating the same cycle of uncertainty.
Throughout this period, we also dedicated our efforts to developing our second game, IdleMMO, and we are delighted that its logo addressed all the concerns we had with SimpleMMO’s dragon logo. The newly purchased logo boasts a cohesive design and an established colour scheme, perfectly aligning with our vision for the game.
So, naturally, we decided to use the same artist for SimpleMMO.
SimpleMMO LogoSimpleMMO App Icon
The results were overwhelmingly positive, as it was determined with 90% confidence that the new logo could potentially yield a remarkable 25% to 40% increase in engagement.
And it was definitely evident…
New logo (Orange) performance against the old logo (Blue)
It is perfect and, as a result, we decided to completely change our brand to this new design.
The rebrand will be gradually introduced over the next few weeks, and we are absolutely thrilled with the response we’ve received so far. We firmly believe that this new logo perfectly aligns with the direction SimpleMMO is heading towards.
The summer has finally arrived (If you’re not from down under!). The second quarter of the year has ended. The Memory Lane event is no more. So… what now?
To the observant players among us, you have probably realised that SimpleMMO has seemingly lacked updates of actual substance. In fact, the last update that wasn’t a measly bug fix or balancing change was the introduction of new items more than two months ago.
“So… what gives?”
A very good question. I’m aware of the fact that some people just simply don’t like to read huge blog posts so let me write two answers; a short TLDR and a longer version.
Too Long Didn’t Read (TLDR)
TLDR; we are shifting our focus on settling a lot of technical debt that has accrued over the last five years. A lot of this tech debt is behind-the-scenes so while it may not look like we are making changes, we are actually making a lot of them. The update logs don’t list them because they don’t affect you (the player). This is an incredibly lengthy process but will it result in a far more sustainable game in the future to extend upon. We have a long-term vision with SimpleMMO and that hasn’t changed.
Tech debt refers to the negative consequences that arise from prioritising short-term solutions or compromises in software development, resulting in additional work and challenges in the future.
Long Answer
Recently we have been developing our other game which is due to come out this summer – IdleMMO. As we approach release, this is obviously taking up a lot of time to prepare the game ready for production. I am aware that, in a previous blog post, that I mentioned IdleMMO won’t affect SimpleMMO, and that still remains true. We always move resources to other projects when they are close to the finish line, but we return them to normal levels once we’ve manage to pass the release. In fact, this is the case with literally any project we do so there is no difference in the way we are working.
However, I’d be lying if I said that IdleMMO didn’t indirectly affect SimpleMMO in a somewhat significant manner. We have been building IdleMMO from the ground up using the same framework as SimpleMMO, except we have one major difference – we are placing a huge amount of focus and attention to detail on the quality of engineering that enters the code base. We are trying to minimise any possible technical debt and, as a result, making changes to existing mechanics and adding new features to IdleMMO is a breeze (albeit a long one). It’s night and day in comparison to SimpleMMO. It’s much easier to see this comparison when they are both fundamentally an online role-playing game.
When I make changes to SimpleMMO, it often feels like I’m engaged in a furious wrestling match with a bear on a wild cocktail of steroids, riding atop another even more roided-up bear. It’s no simple feat, thanks to the technical debt we’ve accumulated over the years.
As you may have heard me mention countless times before, the very first iteration of SimpleMMO was never intended for the public. Have you ever studied a programming course and your very first project is a “Hello World!” project? If you’re not familiar with a “Hello World” project, it’s essentially the simplest way to grasp how to output a message using a language or framework of your choice. It’s like taking that very first baby step into the world of development.
SimpleMMO was essentially my “Hello World” project as I dipped my toes into Laravel, a PHP framework. By that point, I had already been developing web apps for a few years, but I had never ventured into using frameworks, so there was a lot of room for experimentation. Initially, my plan was to create a test project to learn the framework and then start fresh once I gained some footing. However, that plan never came to fruition, and as a result, its mere conception turned into a heavy burden of technical debt.
The very first iteration of the Travel page in SimpleMMO (August 2017)
I built the core concept of SimpleMMO overnight. Specifically, from 12am to 5am. Within that time, I built the travel system, the inventory, and an extremely basic attack page. Perhaps not so coincidentally, they are the three “heaviest” mechanics in the game with the most amount of technical debt. They’ve haunted me for years.
The first iteration of the battle mechanic (August 2017)The first iteration of the inventory system (August 2017)
Simply put, the reason why I was able to build three entirely separate systems in a mere five hours was because I just thought “Eh, I’ll fix it later.” Obviously, I never did which is why you are reading this blog post. I did make some pretty major changes to the travel mechanic in the past when we moved away from the step limitations, which significantly improved performance but the very foundation of it is still rotten.
“Why did you not fix it later?”
A valid question I presume you would ask. The answer is simply because… I didn’t want to. Fresh out of university and in search of a job, I started on this project with the simple desire to create a game, without expecting anyone to actually play it. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that over 1 million players would register for the game. I wouldn’t have even anticipated 10 players. Nevertheless, even in such circumstances, a smart and organised individual would strive to enhance their code, regardless of whether the game attracted 10 people or a million. However, my smooth fickle brain thought it would be fine to just leave it… and here we are today… still talking about simple mistakes that were made more than 5 years ago.
The issue with settling technical debt
The concept of initially creating a foundation using “messy” code but subsequently improving it once the system has been built is a sound approach. In fact, that is still what I do today (with a heavy emphasis on improving the code). My preferred approach is to start by creating a “skeleton” of the mechanic I’m building and then go back to it later for a significant restructuring. I find that this method helps me mentally distinguish the user-facing functionality from the underlying structure. Initially, I can concentrate on making it functional, and then I can shift my focus to fine-tuning it to work precisely the way I envision. However, this process should happen before the code hits the production server. With SimpleMMO, I don’t have such a luxury. Ensuring full backwards compatibility with prior iterations of the game when making changes to existing mechanics and frameworks is a major challenge. The primary issue lies in the fact that rebuilding something with backwards compatibility can take me nearly 3 to 4 times longer than starting from scratch. It’s an enormous headache that I’d prefer to avoid.
As a result, our primary focus on SimpleMMO is to lift it out of the stone age and bring it to the 21st century. Luckily for me, I’ve already been going through a lot of systems and bringing them up to speed. You may have noticed a lot of overhauls recently. Tasks, collections, daily rewards, etc. They are, for the most part, considered “up-to-speed” to what I now consider production-ready battle-tested code. However, the very foundation of the game is rotten, and I don’t want to keep kicking the can down the road any longer.
As mentioned previously, we’ve already made plenty of changes, but there is still a lot of work pending. This could honestly take us more than a year.
What to expect
I don’t anticipate SimpleMMO will have any brand-new mechanics in the near future (with the potential exception of the auction house). What you can expect is overhauls and significant improvements of existing systems and UI changes.
Mechanics
A lot of mechanics will significantly change so that they are ultimately easier to play and understand. For example, the World Boss mechanic is older than dirt and was built with string and gaffer tape. That will receive significant changes so that it feels generally nicer to interact with. “Jobs” is another big one.
Mobile UI
The mobile UI is incredibly outdated and based off the old material design language that Google brought to market in 2014. We have plans on giving it a much-needed face lift.
Rebrand
In 2021, we introduced the new SimpleMMO logo. Whilst effective in the Google experiments (thus was the primary reason why we went with it), it still doesn’t feel right. I’m not a big fan of it. In fact, I just don’t like it. There is no established colour scheme to it makes it extremely difficult to work with. Over the next few months, we will be experimenting with new logos and branding designs to ensure that we can find the one that I like and is also effective.
Removal of Features
As we will be taking a look at literally every part of SimpleMMO, no stone will be unturned. Consequently, we will review the least utilised features or those that provide no utility, and we will simply remove them from the game. While we won’t be removing popular or beloved features, we will thoroughly review those that appear to be pointless and prove to be more burdensome than beneficial. “Wishlist” and “Ads” are at the top of the list to review.
Discussion Boards
The discussion boards are reminiscent of the old bulletin boards that consumed the internet in the early 00’s. We have plans on completely changing the way the discussion boards work so that it incorporates new, modern ways of interacting with other players. We are actively exploring alternatives to the suggestion section due to its current issue of being inundated with duplicate suggestions, making it increasingly challenging to identify unique suggestions that hold actual value.
Conclusion
In summary, our ultimate goal is to establish the long-term sustainability of SimpleMMO. Currently, the game’s structure restricts development solely to me, as the spaghetti mess it has become cannot be easily handed over to other developers. Ideally, the workload wouldn’t be solely mine to bear. Moreover, it’s challenging to introduce new features to a game when I am aware of how much of the foundation has decayed over time. Merely piling on additional features would exacerbate the situation further.
All in all, rest assured that SimpleMMO is still under heavy active development despite it having fewer updates that affect the players. As a result of this, we have adjusted our public roadmap by removing the quarterly changes and creating a new category titled “Upcoming”. The reason is that we cannot provide an exact timeline for these changes, as they depend entirely on how the development process unfolds while addressing the accumulated technical debt.
P.S If you haven’t seen it already, you can read about our game “IdleMMO” by pressing here.
Crafting was initially built in the summer of 2020. It was a commonly requested and highly anticipated. In fact, it was one of the first suggestions that was ever passed on to me. After all, it makes sense. Most MMOs have a crafting system so why didn’t SimpleMMO?
Everyone was excited when the crafting system was released. Tears were falling from people’s eyes. Players were swooning. Children were screaming. Hearts were throbbing. Fists were shaking. History was made.
Until … a few weeks later when players (myself included) started to see a massive glaring issue: it provided absolutely no utility. There was no reason to craft. The items were bad and everyone who could craft the items already had them or didn’t need them. The progression was difficult and pointless. Why would anyone grind the crafting level when it provided absolutely no use? The only utility that the crafting mechanism served was the ability to craft diamonds with Diamond Shards. That was it. The only other reason to craft was obviously to satisfy an underlying tendency of performing masochistic behaviours.
A few weeks later, it got me pondering: how can it be improved?
I was dwelling on this question for literally years. Emptiness was consuming my smooth brain the entire time. It was like as soon as I thought of the word “crafting”, my brain would immediately shut down and I would be staring into an abyss. Not a single moment during that entire time could I think of a genuine way to improve the crafting system.
I then started asking myself another question: “Why?” and it became glaringly obvious. I had never crafted in any game ever (besides the bare minimum that I might’ve been required to partake in). I had no underlying knowledge of the system. I had no inspiration for it. How could I think of a crafting system when I simply had never used one myself? This then lead on to another question: “What is the soul that the crafting mechanic has that makes it so damn enticing?”
By this point, I’d spent so much time pondering on the damn thing and being frustrated at the lack of ideas that my eagerness to improve the system slowly dwindled with time. In fact, I even scrapped the crafting system momentarily in an update for the Android App. I was about to bury the hatchet and declare its official time of death.
That is until a moderator, Oubi, made an offhand comment about replacing the crafting system with a new system that he envisioned called “Archaeology”. The idea was to give players the opportunity to exchange item shards (such as armour shards) for items of that specific type (e.g armour shards can be exchanged for armour, etc). I loved the general idea of it, but it required a lot of refinement.
However, this got the cogs turning once more. The forges were lit up and ideas were flying in and out of my brain. I took a lot of notes on different ways of implementing a brand new crafting system until I came up with a final idea that I was happy with.
So, without further ado, I would like to present the new crafting system.
Design still pending
The new crafting system allows you to craft any item within the loot pool using any material. The item rarity matches up with the material rarity, so if you craft an item with epic materials, then you are guaranteed to receive an epic item. This applies to every rarity tier (celestial included!).
To get started, when you press the “Start crafting” button, a pop-up will appear.
From this point, you can select what you want to craft. You can craft many things, such as a specific item rarity type, keys, or diamonds.
For this occasion, I will choose an “Epic Item” because I have a bunch of epic materials left over from testing.
After selecting the item you wish to craft, the following screen will appear:
This gives you an overview of your crafting session. From here you can choose how many items you wish to craft in one go (at a maximum of 10/20, depending on your pleb status), how much energy it will cost to craft, how long it will take to craft, and the materials you need to craft the items.
I haven’t added any epic materials yet (and I need 30), so if I press the “Add Materials” button, the following page will appear:
This lists all of the materials that I have in my storage and inventory that is relevant to the requirements. From here, I can choose any material as long as the material quantity matches with the requirements. I can mix-and-match them too. For example, I could decide to use 5x Large Crystals, 5x Small Crystals, and 20x Tiger Sharks. It’s entirely up to me.
To make things easier, I’m going to press “Auto Add” which will automatically select the materials so I don’t have to.
Doing so has automatically selected 30 “Chromium Ore” materials. All I need to do now is to press “Update Materials” to commit them to the crafting session.
Once I have done that, the overview page will be updated to show the materials you have committed to the session.
After reviewing the page, I am happy with what I am about to craft. It will cost me 3 energy, 30 Chromium Ores and take almost 4 minutes, but in return I will receive a guaranteed epic item.
Once I have started the crafting session, it will then display the crafting status on the main page.
After waiting the full time it takes to craft, I can then claim the items by pressing on the “Claim Items” button and voila…
I have been given EXP for my character, crafting EXP, and the epic item. It’s as easy as that.
Here is another (albeit extreme) example. If I craft 15 celestial and exotic items in one go, it will look something like this:
One of the issues we encountered when developing the system was trying to make it enticing for high-level players to actually use the system. We completely understood that being able to craft “Epic” items was simply not enough. Why would a level 10,000+ player be interested in solely creating epic items other than the player EXP? That is why we have introduced reward tiers. Every time your crafting level increases by 5, you are eligible for a reward. The rewards differ between keys, materials, and diamonds.
As you can see, once you reach level 100 in crafting, you will receive 50 diamonds, 5 gold keys, and enough celestial materials to produce a celestial item. Basically, this means that if you reach level 100 in crafting, you are guaranteed a random celestial/exotic item.
New Materials
This crafting system will arrive with new materials and material encounter rates. As we are now introducing celestial materials, we are also throwing something new into the mix too: untradable materials. Now, at first you might gasp in horror at the mere thought of having an untradable material in the game. However, there is a beneficial trade-off. This allows us to significantly improve the encounter rates for the materials at no risk of disrupting the market. This also gives another incentive for players to utilise the game’s mechanics more rather than mindlessly collect materials and then sell them on the market. Potentially, this also gives us the ability to provide players with rewards for in-game feats too (world bosses maybe?).
Not all materials you encounter will be untradable. Just some of them. Sometimes you will come across a celestial material that is tradable and other times it might be untradable.
Here are the new rates that we currently have in place for the update:
Celestial material encounter rates are double the rates of the legendary materials pre-update.
Legendary material encounter rates increased by 316%
Epic material encounter rate increased by 47%
Elite material encounter rate increased by 41%
Rare material encounter rate increased by 25%
Uncommon material encounter rate increased by 25%
Common material encounter rate decreased by 29%
These rates might change before release. The final rates will be included in the update log.
Old Materials
One of the big questions when developing and testing this system was: “What to do with the old materials?” and it’s a big one. After all, because the crafting system was useless, players had been accumulating materials for literally years. If we allowed people to use their old materials then the game would instantly be flooded by a massive wave of newly acquired items which could be catastrophic for the game’s economy.
We throughly discussed two potential solutions: 1. Allow players to convert old materials to new materials. However, the conversion ratio would have to be incredibly high to account for the huge quantity of items that have been gathered in the past few years. Setting the conversion rate to such a high level could have dissuade players to not use this mechanic at all thus making this solution potentially futile. It also felt to me a bit insulting to be given the option of a conversion but have the ratio so high that it made almost no sense to convert. It’s like when you enter a competition to win the EuroMillions lottery and you get an email saying, “YOU WON!”, but you click on it and its only 20 pence. I’d rather not win at all than have that initial sense of hope.
2. Bump up the quick sell value of the materials and convert them to collectables. This would give the materials a new utility (i.e adding them to the collection). This would still pretty much serves the same purpose that they had for most people (i.e collecting and selling) as they certainly weren’t used for crafting bar the odd exception. The new crafting system would be completely fresh untainted by the old mechanics.
We hummed and harred over each solution discussing the positives and negatives of both. Ultimately, I wanted to make the decision based on utility-perspective rather than what is going to be easier (i.e less backlash). No matter which decision we make, people are going to be annoyed regardless. So I felt it was important that we made sure that we were not just mindlessly ripping out a part of the game that could still serve a valid and helpful purpose to the players.
Throughout the discussion, I was leaning further and further towards converting them to collectables because, to me, it felt like it made more sense utility-wise and for us to start on a clean slate. After all, it is an entirely new system. This solution would give the materials a “new” utility (i.e collecting), but that utility is essentially what materials are used for by most players anyway hence the quotation marks. However, it felt difficult to just completely nullify peoples material collection over the years.
To help with this, I wanted to see how many materials were actually in the game, and how many players actually crafted. This ratio would help me gain clarity between the number of people who actually use the materials for crafting and those that hoarded them in their storage/inventory.
The result was staggering. There were more than 45,000,000 materials tucked away in people’s storage and inventory. That was way higher than I thought it was. Not just that, but the average level of crafting of players who actually crafted enough to level up the crafting skill (i.e level 2 and higher) was just a mere 4.1. When I looked at the average crafting level of all players who had simply crafted once and then stopped, the average dropped significantly to 2.09. In comparison, the average mining level was 9.
This gave me some much needed clarity. Crafting was extremely underutilised by the players and if I were to add a mechanism that allowed players to convert materials, it would have to account for 45,000,000 materials. I felt more and more like the ship had sailed with this.
At the end, we came to a reasonable solution. We decided to open up the old crafting page (to those that still want to use their old materials on crafting) and after a month or so, we will convert all old materials into “Collectables” and switch off the old crafting page. This solved a few issues:
It will continue to give the materials a crafting utility in the same way as it always has.
It will give the materials a “new” utility after a month.
The new crafting system will remain entirely fresh. A completely fresh start. New mechanics. New crafting level. New material encounter rates. New materials. New crafting mechanisms. Everyone starts from the same point.
A personal apology to those that have spent time hoarding as many materials as they could in the past few weeks in anticipation for the new crafting ability. It was originally my intention to be able to use the old materials as part of the system, but after a much-needed discussion and a review of the in-game statistics, we decided it would be far too difficult to balance old materials on the new system given the astronomical number of materials there are in circulation. It was a hard decision but I believe it is the correct one to make.
Edit: I want to make it clear that players who has invested significant resources into the crafting mechanic will be acknowledged and rewarded. This has applied to every feature “reset” in the past and this will be no different.
Overview
New crafting level. Everyone starts at level 1.
The maximum crafting level is 100.
You can select the rarity of the item you wish to craft. The requirements are based on that rarity.
Any material within its rarity group can be used. Crafting no longer requires specific items.
The higher the rarity of the item you wish to craft, the longer it takes to craft.
The higher your crafting level, the faster it takes to craft an item.
You can craft up to 20 items in one go if you are a member or 10 if you a free player.
It costs energy to craft an item.
The energy requirement adjusts according to the rarity of the item you wish to craft as well as the quantity.
You can play any other areas of the game while you craft (unlike jobs).
You must manually claim your crafted items upon completion.
You can access the old crafting system by a link on the main page. This will be removed in one month.
Old “legacy” materials will no longer be available from gathering nodes.
You can craft silver and bronze keys.
Diamond shards and its requirements remain unchanged.
You can get a reward (diamonds/materials/keys) for every 5 levels of your crafting level.
Reaching crafting level 100 gives you enough items to craft a celestial/exotic item.
Celestial materials will be introduced.
New materials (well, they’re the same name, but they have new sprites).
Some materials you encounter will be untradable.
Material encounter rates have been significantly increased.
Minimum encounter level for all material rarities have been significantly reduced. (For example, Legendary nodes required a minimum skill level of 100 and now it has been reduced to 15)
And that’s all!
We are still testing it at the moment so some things may change before release. The update log should contain it all when it has finally been released.
We anticipate that this update will be available later this week or early next week.
It’s that time again. Let’s all gather around the fire, whip out some tasty marshmallows, and discuss the last year of SimpleMMO.
Like the previous year, 2021, we managed to continue improving the game by implementing lots of new mechanics and improving existing ones. The active player-base continues to increase at a consistant, healthy rate and things are only looking bright for the future of SimpleMMO. In fact, we have recently breached 1,000,000 downloads on the Google Play Store according to the development console however Google Play has yet to update our store badge to “1M+”. We are eagerly awaiting that moment to celebrate.
Unlike the last post (“Looking back on 2021”), I’ll be discussing various topics that are not limited to just major updates but rather changes that caused a ripple in some way, shape or form.
So, without further ado, let’s jump right in. As usual, I will post each point in chronological order (earliest first).
PvP item drops (January 2022)
While this may seem like a very simple addition, it has actually been a massive hit in the community. People are now finding incredibly powerful items by attacking those poor NPCs.
New quest point system (January 2022)
We moved the quest point refill mechanic to a tier system to help further close the gap between the paying and non-paying players. As expected, this change was highly welcomed by the overwhelming majority of players but those in the upper echelon were, understandably, annoyed by this. Essentially, we made it so that players with more quest points had to pay more for their refills and those with less quest points had to pay less. I mean, it makes sense logically, right?
Mushroom of Energy price increase (January 2022)
We increased the Mushroom of Energy price to 30,000 gold. A small but incredibly necessary change to help cope with inflation. At this point, the economy had grown massively yet the price of Mushroom of Energy had remained unchanged for years. It was, by far, the most bought item in the NPC shop and this simple change actually made a sizeable money sink.
Huge inventory optimisations (February 2022)
Gone are the days when your inventory took approximately 4 days to view your materials. These optimisations clocked up to a 300% increase in performance.
iOS App (February 2022)
Finally, after 4 long years, SimpleMMO introduced an app on all iOS devices (iPhone, iPod, and iPad) as well as silicon based macs.
Economic changes (March 2022)
We introduced a bunch of changes that helped control the games inflation. The maximum cost for battling enemies in the Battle Arena increased by 25% and the price of keys also increased. Some were more drastic than others, but they ultimately proved to be very beneficial in combating this issue despite some players acting as if I was the antichrist for daring to do such a malevolent act.
Battle changes (March 2022)
The older players will remember the “cheese strat”. If you are unacquainted with this strategy, it was essentially a way for players to defeat NPCs without “dying”. Despite it being a bug, it remained in the game because the battle system was so fundamentally broken that it became almost impossible for players to defeat NPCs without using this strategy.
Changes were made so the “cheese strat” was no longer necessary. Battles went on for longer, but less food was needed and thus the bug was fixed. Unsurprisingly, this change was met with anger. However, ultimately, the update was long overdue as it was literally an unintended bug.
Leaderboard rewards (March 2022)
Rewards for leaderboard positions were increased significantly. Now top 20 players (instead of 5) for each leaderboard now receive a reward.
Here’s a quick run down: – 630 diamonds are now distributed across 420 positions on the daily leaderboards (increased from 189 diamonds across 105 positions). – 1,848 diamonds are now distributed across 420 positions on the weekly leaderboards (increased from 546 diamonds across 105 positions). – 13,860 diamonds are now distributed across 420 positions on the monthly leaderboards (increased from 3,570 diamonds across 105 positions).
Gauntlets (March 2022)
A new item type “Gauntlet” was introduced in the game. More than 1,000 gauntlets became available.
Guild Roles (April 2022)
This was a very highly demanded feature. This mechanic allowed guild leaders to assign different roles to the members of their guild. There are 3 roles (member, officer, and co-leader) and each role has different permissions. This was met with a joyous glee as this feature had been teased since the guild overhaul in 2021.
Stepping Parties (April 2022)
This was arguably the largest update in the game this year. This change allows players to step with other players by being in a party together. Much like other MMORPGs, being in this party allows you to share your gold and experience points.
We found that this change helped massively retain players on the travel mechanic because it provided a fresh, new way of playing the game. SimpleMMO is ultimately a social platform and this change only further leans into the social aspect.
Inventory Changes (August 2022)
Inventory upgrades are always massively welcomed by the players. This update introduced changes, such as a new inventory page design for the web app, a “Select All” button, and a check mark to see if an item has been collected or not.
Energy scheduler increase (August 2022)
The automatic energy point scheduler was changed from every 10 minutes to every 5 minutes. This was a big change because essentially players can potentially get 576 energy points per day instead of just 288.
NPC Gold Nerf (August 2022)
Another controversial change that has ultimately proven to be beneficial for the game’s economy. Essentially, the gold acquired from NPCs was effectively limitless and it scaled to according to the players’ level. Therefore, the theoretical potential amount of gold that could be obtained from a single NPC was infinite and this became more and more problematic as players started to reach 6 digit levels.
The gold acquired from an NPC was changed to a sliding scale and the gold ceiling slowly decreases as you level up. Higher level players still get more gold than their lower level counterparts, but the maximum amount is significantly smaller.
Travel Sprint (August 2022)
Sprinting allows you to step 25% faster by using your energy points. 1 energy point gives you one minute of sprinting. This ties in nicely with the change to the energy schedule that happened only a few days prior because it meant that more players could use their excess energy on sprinting.
Library (September 2022)
The introduction of the library allowed players to write their own books. There are multiple book categories: lore, guides, poems, stories, biography and miscellaneous, but all books published in the library must be related to SimpleMMO in some way.
We made this feature because we had noticed it was common for people to write guides on their items’ description or profile bio. Now players can publish a book with a very generous character limit and even make a small bit of gold while doing so.
Couch Cat partnership (October 2022)
We teamed up with Couch Cat (previously Couch Cat Podcast) to provide you with regular SimpleMMO based content such as podcasts, streams, youtube videos and more.
Tasks were completely overhauled as they were simply a headache to complete. They were all predefined which meant that the database had a list of tasks to complete and the game randomly chose 5 (or 7) of them for you to carry out.
We ripped out that whole system and made a completely new one. Tasks became dynamic, and they change according to your account status. They also became much easier to complete as we significantly increased the rate of encountering an enemy that is listed as part of a given task.
Not just that but we also introduced weekly and monthly tasks as a part of an initiative to get people to play on the regular basis. We wanted to ensure that the tasks were not challenging or long but still required a bit consistency.
Card Event (November 2022)
A brand new event was introduced which allowed players to collect different cards during the World Cup and then proudly display them on the collection page. Cards could be achieved by finding and opening “card packs”. This was a welcome change from the regular event format and was very well received.
Stats
951,000 players have an account on SimpleMMO. This was 725,000 in January last year. That’s 226,000 new players in a single year. Not too shabby, eh?
73,000,000 NPCs have been defeated in combat in the past year. This has increased from 33,000,000 that happened in 2021. You’re a violent bunch, aren’t you?
105,796,526 players have been defeated too. Those poor noobs. This has increased significantly from 21,000,000 in 2021. I believe the changes to the energy system and attacking limits have caused the violent increase.
The inventory system has now processed over 449,602,770 items in total since the games conception. Pretty staggering, right?
I think I may make a separate blog post on the stats later this year so stay tuned!
Overall, this has been a very successful year for SimpleMMO. There has been a lot of new updates, changes, and quality of life adjustments despite some of them being fairly controversial in regards to economic changes. However, even though the changes negatively affected some players, they were ultimately needed if we are to keep this game alive and healthy.
If you compare the updates with 2021, you may notice that 2022 have had less introductions of larger mechanics than before. The year prior, 2021, introduced massive updates, such as an entire guild overhaul, a brand new web-app, the new travel experience, and a fresh mobile UI design. However, the reason for this is simple: we spent almost the entirely of 2022 stressing the smaller scaled stuff and updating pre-existing systems. We want to make sure that the foundations are tight and secure before we go ahead and start branching further out. We have entirely rewritten entire areas of the game in the codebase that you will never even know about because they bare no affect on the gameplay. In fact, 2022 received almost just as many codebase changes (1,432 contributions) as 2021 (1,483 contributions).
A massive thank you to all employees and contractors of Galahad Creative, administrators, moderators, advisers, and the players of SimpleMMO. You guys are the best!
Let’s continue on this upwards trajectory and make SimpleMMO as best as it can be!
What is your favourite 2022 update? Let us know in the comments below!
Aaaand… it’s that time again! No warnings. No hype. Just the biggest update ever!
Painfully, we have made the mistake in the past on announcing our major updates months prior to release. This puts un-necessary stress on us due to two reasons: we are constantly getting asked when the update will be released, and we feel pressured to release it as soon as possible because people are waiting for it. That is why this update has had no prior talk or announcements. We have just been taking our time and gradually grinding away at this for the past 6 or so months.
Reliably, v10 was huge.… but this update is bigger. better. revolutionary. It literally turns SimpleMMO on it’s head. We are introducing new features to the game that will have a giant impact on your gameplay. Not just that, but we are completely overhauling the entire way the game is played. From levelling, to customisation and rewards. The game is almost entirely new… but it’s not.
It’s just better.
Look, most of these changes will be welcomes by the player base. But, admittedly, some of these changes will have a negative impact of some of the “outliners” (i.e. the high level players).
Frankly, our main goal is to make the game sustainable. You may have noticed this with the changes we have introduced in the past month. We have introduced limits to the Knight feature, increased the prices for certain commodities to help control the inflation of gold (and it’s working too!). This update extends upon this principle and will introduce a lot of similar changes. Some are small and some are large.
Other than that, please rest assured that all changes are for the good of the game. Initially, they may be a hard pill to swallow, but, in time, you will realise that they are ultimately for the better.
On, we will make a seperate blog post going through all of the changes in detail, but let’s just take a look at the major ones.
Literally, we overhauled the entire travel system.
Since the creation of SimpleMMO, the travelling system has been the main part of the SimpleMMO. It basically isSimpleMMO. It’s literally what makes the game so simple. However, we are unsatisfied with it. The idea of it is sound, the implementation of it is ‘aight but the potential of it is incredible.
We have been experimenting with multiple proof-of-concepts on how to improve the travelling system. We must have tried about 20 various implantations before we came up with an idea that we were satisfied with.
The new travelling system is revolutionary. It now allows you to traverse an actual map in game. All maps are grid-based and they can go up to monumental sizes of 400×400 positions per map. That means there are over 160,000 squares on the map that you can traverse. You can travel up, down, left and right. Your current location will be designated by a X,Y coordinate. You can even meet up with people by going to the same X,Y coordinate and travel together!
This system is flawless. It now emulates the style of an MMO without having to sacrifice the “one button press” shtick the game has going for it. However, due to the limitations of the mechanics, we are now reintroducing limited steps. You can only step 100 times within 30 minutes. This can be “refilled” or even upgraded entirely by purchasing the update in the diamond store.
We can’t wait for you to try it! There is so many new aspects and hidden gems that it will require a seperate blog post entirely!
Pet Levels and Battling
Ask and ye shall receive! This has been a popular request since the dawn of SimpleMMO and we have finally implemented it. Pets are no longer designated as “items” and now they are their own seperate entity in its entirety. You can level them up, battle them with other players, customise them, feed them. play with them and so much more. Think “Tamagotchi” but…like… 10 times better.
The only caveat is that all existing pets have been reset to level 1. You can also purchase stronger and better pets directly in the diamond store!
Level Cap
The infiniteness of the game, in theory, is fantastic. It allows you to reach un-imaginable levels of power. You are only limited in how much time you invest in the game. However, in practice, it is simply too difficult to balance a game with players that have a literal 500,000 level gap between them.
Because of this, we are now introducing a level cap of 1,000. Any users that are above Level 1,000 will be reduced to level 1,000 and will receive 1 diamond per 1,000 levels above this limit.
Diamond Chests
We wanted to make a way for players to easily obtaining better and more powerful items without needing to fill up their inventory space with old and un-needed items. Because of this, we are introducing Diamond Chests. Diamond chests can be opened with diamond keys and they have a 50% chance of finding a celestial. That means you have a 1 in 2 chance of finding a celestial every time you open the chest. However, the caveat is that they are expensive. You can purchase a single diamond key in the diamond store for 50 diamonds. Diamonds, diamonds, diamonds….
Battle Overhaul
The entire battle system has now been entirely overhauled. We mulled over this for quite some time. We have always wanted to extend the battle system but we worried about ruining the integrity of the games simplicity. However, we have finally reached a system that retains its simplicity but adds unimaginable amount of depth.
Now, each item has the potential for 4 elemental effects; fire, ice, stone, nature. Each elemental effect has a strength and a weakness to ensure everything is balanced. There is no single effect that is the best.
Due to this, now all enemies generated in the battle arena now have an assigned elemental effect to them. You can come across a “Fire Vorok” or an “Ice Acroflar”. You will have to strategically use your elemental items to defeat them more efficiently.
However, due to so many structural and integrity changes that have been made, the EXP gain has been reduced by 45% and has been capped at 500,000 EXP per kill. Players who are PvP heavy can only kill 50 players every 24 hours. This cap can be reset by using diamonds.
Not just that but the gold you can steal from players has been capped at 1% and you now have a 2% chance of stealing diamonds from other players.
We can’t wait for you to try it.
Guilds
Guilds have had a bit of a makeover and they now reset every month to ensure the maximum amount of competitiveness between each guild. This is similar to the “seasons” mechanic you may see in other games. The guilds are placed in tiers depending on how many members they have and they will compete against other guilds in that tier in regards to EXP gained.
The winners of each tier will receive 100 power points.
We have also added a few more changes. Guilds can now assign a officer to do actions on their behalf. The maximum amount of EXP that a guild can obtain in a guild war has now been capped at 10,000 EXP regardless of who the enemy is.
There are many changes so be sure to check out the update log.
Quality of life additions/notable mentions
Diamond store balancing. It now costs 35 diamonds to refill your energy points.
You now cannot attack online players.
Silver key price has been increased to 150,000 gold per key at a 5,000 gold increment.
Inventory limit has been decreased to 1,000 from 20,000. Please ensure that you reduce your inventory numbers by the 31st April 2022.
Market tax has been increased to 20%.
Lots of crafting improvements such as more items and materials.
You can now marry other players if your interaction level is high enough.
It’s been just over 4 years since SimpleMMO first hit the Google Play store. Since then, we’ve set our eyes on making SimpleMMO accessible across all different kinds of devices. After we released the current version of the Web App, our next goal was to make it available on iOS devices.
We are very happy to announce that SimpleMMO is now playable across all types of iOS devices (iPhone, iPod, and iPad) as well as silicon based macs.
As we have now entered 2022, we can sit back and take a look at what 2021 brought to us. We can laugh, we can cry, but most of all, we can reflect.
SimpleMMO managed to flourish and further improve itself following the immense spike in activity that hit us in the Spring of 2020. We went from around 80 downloads per day to almost 5,000 downloads per day in less than a week. The servers really struggled due to this. Our workload increased ten-fold and our sub-par early development code was becoming evidently more serious and dangerous in nature. We took this very seriously and a vast majority of the updates in 2021 were entire structural overhauls of existing features. Our primary goal, for the entire period, was to keep the game healthy and increase its overall lifespan.
So, without further ado, let’s get into it. I’ll also post each point in a chronological order (earliest first).
Travel Reimagined (January 2021)
This was the first major update to SimpleMMO in 2021 and it turned the travel system on its head. Before this change, players were limited to a maximum of 50 steps. This maximum could be increased by purchasing an upgrade in the diamond store. Once a player had used all of their steps, they then had to wait 5 minutes to get 5 more steps. Alternatively, they could pay for a refill in the diamond store or voluntarily watch advertisements.
The update we pushed out completely the way this works. We scrapped the limits entirely so that players can step indefinitely. We also changed the design of the page, significantly increased the rates for rarer items, and brought all sorts of quality-of-life additions to travelling. However, because of this change, we suffered a fairly significant financial hit. The diamond store refills were removed, and players no longer needed to watch ads in order to continue stepping. Our advertisement revenue plummeted 90%. Yes, 90%. It’s now so low that I often forget advertisements are in the game at all. At this point, all it does is serve as a stark reminder of the past wherein a player was limited by an entirely arbitrary value and only of the only ways to get past this value was to watch ads, wait, or pay diamonds.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom though. This update was perhaps the most significant one in the entire year of 2021. The daily active player count shot up 40% overnight and, most importantly, it did not fall. Ultimately, the change was worth it.
Tiered Leaderboards (January 2021)
Tiered leaderboards was introduced to allow players to compete with other players who are of similar level to them. We introduced a total of 8 tiers for each category and the tiers are dependent entirely on the players level. So, for example, a level 12 player will compete against a level 14 players where as a level 6,000 player will compete against a level 7,000 player.
This change was a nice addition to the game giving it a slight competitive edge to its players and a neat little way of obtaining diamonds entirely through playing the game. It’s not perfect and we are aware of it, but it does its job.
Player Interactions (January 2021)
A common piece of feedback we received was that players wanted more reason to interact with other players in the game. After all, the community and the social areas are perhaps the largest reason why people play the game for long periods. Players come for the simplicity, but stay for the community.
This update allowed players to gain points when interacting with other players. The more points a player has, the higher the interaction level and each interaction level has a number of different benefits. For example, if player X reaches an interaction level of 3 with player Y, then they will be able to hug a them instead of waving at them.
Diamond Awards (January 2021)
One of the most common complaints we received was that diamonds were far to difficult to achieve via regular gameplay and we completely agreed. At the very early period of the games development, diamonds were typically only achieved by buying them or finding them as loot (which was incredibly rare at that point). Over time, we introduced more and more features to allow players to obtain diamonds through regular gameplay. This update brought the largest and easiest way for a player to obtain diamonds without spending a dime.
Essentially, when a player completes a specific task, usually a task that requires some form of perseverance, then are given an “award”. Awards have been in SimpleMMO since almost the very start of the game but they had no value to them other than bragging rights. This update changed that. We assigned almost every award in-game with a diamond value and when a player managed to achieve that award, they will be credited with X amount of diamonds. X is usually dependent on how difficult the award is to achieve. We introduced around 2,000+ diamonds that could be achieved solely via gameplay. This increases to 2,500+ diamonds if you include awards that are associated with diamonds themselves. This significantly gave free-to-play players a helping hand in progressing their character.
Diamond Market (February 2021)
Before this update, it was common for players to sell diamonds to other players for X amount of gold. The diamonds were then gifted to the other player once the gold was sent. We figured that this process could be made easier for everyone involved. That is where the “Diamond Market” comes in. The diamond market allows a player to sell their diamonds to other players for gold directly in the game without relying on the faith of the other player. It’s a win-win situation as sellers find it easier to sell their diamonds and also players find it easier to acquire diamonds using strictly in-game gold too.
Rebrand (April 2021)
After many, many attempts at finding a new logo for SimpleMMO, we finally found one that was both beautiful and effective at pulling in new players.
Guilds were a clunky, giant, spaghetti-coded mess. Honestly, I hated working on the guilds. It was awful and I preferred just to stay away from them. However, the problem was that guilds were such a big part of the game and a huge reason why people tuned in daily. Something had to be done so I just decided to “f*ck it” and rewrite the entire thing. I blogged about the new features extensively in a blog post titled “SimpleMMO v9.0 – Guilds, guilds, guild!“. The underlying foundations of the guilds were ripped out and replaced with shiny new toys…. almost. Honestly, it’s not perfect. The foundations are only as sound as the ground it’s built upon, and in this case, the ground is a bit wobbly (I’ll perhaps get into that in another blog post). However, despite that, the rewrite made it significantly easier for me to work with which allowed me to extend the guilds further. We added guild power levels, raids, tasks, custom backgrounds and icons, activity logs, and much more. If you want a full list, you can always go back and read the blog post.
New Daily Rewards (April 2021)
“Daily rewards are shit”. That was a common complaint. “Daily rewards were shit” would be more accurate if said today (I hope). Basically, before the update, the daily rewards provided a player with a random item from the game. Except, the chances of finding a random item that was worth any value was significantly low.
We changed the way the daily rewards work by attributing each day out of 30 with a dedicated item or reward. Each day progressively gets better and better until they reach the 30th day. After that, it resets back to 0 again. Previously, only items could be obtained through the daily reward. Now, diamonds can also be obtained too. We can add this to our “easily obtainable diamonds” list that seems to be growing.
New Web App (June 2021)
“What?! Another Web App?! The Web App was released in 2020 and you’re telling me there is a new Web App?!?”.
You’re god damn right I am.
The old web app was a mess (are you noticing a trend here?). Basically, without getting into to much detail, the “old” Web App started around early Spring of 2020 and it was expected to take around 6 to 8 months to finish (maybe even longer!). However, we hit April/May and are suddenly, but fortunately hit, with a huge spike in players. Because of this, the Web App was quickly rushed out the door to accommodate these players almost 3 to 5 months earlier than anticipated. It lacked several features but it done the job. However, it was a bit incredibly ugly (I don’t mean structurally, I mean it was literally ugly to look at). I wasn’t pleased with how it turned out.
Afraid that I was slowly turning into Dr. Frankenstein, I decided that I needed to bring this monster to the 21st century in hopes of rectifying my sins.
In comes Web App 2.0. I built the entire thing on TailwindCSS and, oh boy, I am glad I did. It saved me perhaps hundreds of hours in development time. It looks and feels modern. It’s snappier too. It’s still not perfect but I’m happy with the state that it is in now.
Would I have still released the old Web App early knowing that I overhauled the entire thing? Yes – absolutely. There was a perfectly valid reason why I pushed out the Web App early and that was to keep the new players around by making the game as accessible as possible. Despite, ultimately, the entire thing coming to an early death, it helped pave the path that Web App v2.0 walks on today.
Quest Point Change (July 2021)
In July, we slashed the refill time in half from 10 minutes to 5 minutes per quest point. This means that players now only need to wait half the time to perform a quest again if they have ran out.
Since early 2018, we have had a plan in place to help “even out” the playing field between paying players and free players in regards to quests and this change helps tighten that gap. I plan on making a separate blog post explaining this conundrum and how the solution is not as easy as one would expect.
Player to Player Trading (September 2021)
If a player wanted to trade with another player, they had to first send the item and wait for the other player to send the other items. It was a system entirely reliant on faith and, because of this, it was the perfect system for scammers. A player could take the items and then run away without returning anything back. Of course, this is against the rules and the offender would’ve been punished, but this caused extra leg work for the SMMO team.
Direct player-to-player trading allows players to trade items and gold directly between each other. Each participant in the trade can then review the trade and accept/deny it. This helps avoid the scam caused by people running away before they send the agreed item.
Entire Design Overhaul (October 2021)
This update is a heavy contender for “largest update ever” which is currently held by the Web App update in June. Basically, I went through the entire game, scrapped out the old designs (literally CTRL+A and DEL) and refreshed them all with a new look. This was a significant change for the game because we not only overhauled the design, but the underlying code that the front-end relies upon. For you techie folk, the old version of the app was built using Vanilla CSS + jQuery. I changed everything to TailwindCSS + Alpine.js. This is the same stack we use for the Web App. I had to rewrite a lot of modules because of this as the game was built in August 2017 and it included a lot of legacy and redundant code. It was a boring, tedious job but it has perhaps been the most important because it now allows us to seamlessly work on both the Web App and Android App (and soon the iOS app!) in unison.
Since the dawn of SimpleMMO, the chat system was built using a SSE (server-sent events) implementation. While this was ideal for a small-scale game, this became somewhat of a huge issue when more and more players started to play.
Because of this, we updated the chat to support web sockets instead. This allows us to run a real-time chat feature in the game in a similar vein as the likes of Discord and Messenger.
However, the new chat is still fairly new and there are still a few lingering bugs hanging around the place but we will soon have those squished.
Realtime PMs (December 2021)
The inbox system was old and antiquated. It felt like it was pulled directly out of a legacy PBBG from 2004. There was no real-time messaging involved. It was essentially a very simpler form of sending emails to each other.
With the addition of the new chat experience, we decided to move over the PMs to the chat system too. Now players can communicate to each other in real time and not feel like they should be using IE8 while doing so.
Russian Translation (December 2021)
Привет Россия! In December we introduced the first part of many. We plan to translate the entire game (or as much as we can) into Russian. However, this will be completed and pushed out in many different phases throughout the next few years. Due to the game being text-based, there is a huge amount of text that needs covering so this is a long process.
Notable Mentions
I thought I should list some changes that weren’t big or significant enough for its own heading but they were perhaps important enough to at least acknowledge.
Upgraded showcase – this update allowed players to showcase both avatars and items on their profile. (February 2021)
PvP Changes – We upped the PvP limit to level 200 and auto forced safe-mode for everyone who reaches this level with a free opt-out. Despite the disgruntlement from some PvP heavy hitters, this change has shown to be a significant step in increasing the overall positive attitude towards the game. This limit was introduced because it was the most significant complaint by a long shot. We probably received an email or 1-star review regarding this at least once every 2 weeks, if not more. As soon as we addressed this, the complaints stopped entirely and, perhaps not so coincidentally, our Google Play rating went up from 4.4 to 4.6 within just a few weeks following this change.
Potions – while underutilised at the moment, potions allow players to temporarily increase a given stat or effect on their profile. (February 2021)
Value modifiers – value modifiers are small game-wide events that increase the rewards given in a particular area. For example, we can enable a small event that increases all EXP gained from NPCs by 50% for 24 hours. (Sometime during Summer 2021)
Improved player onboarding – we updated the tutorials and tightened down the gameplay for lower levelled players. However, this is still very much a work in progress. (October 2021)
New event features – the last winter holidays event brought in new additions to the game including multiple stat increases, and auto-store materials when gathering. (December 2021)
Stats
Who doesn’t love some stats, huh? Let’s compare the game now compared to the numbers posted in “How big is SimpleMMO?“. That gives us approximately a 10 month window for comparison. Also, please note that the values given is the total amount since the stats were tracked.
Over 725,000 players are registered now on SimpleMMO compared to 550,000 in March 2021. Impressive.
95,000,000+ poor NPCs have now sadly given their life to the warriors of SimpleMMO compared to 62,000,000 in march.
Almost 25,000,000 players have been defeated in a PvP attack compared to 4,400,000 in March 2021. I think the guild update is partly to blame in this huge increase.
The inventory system has now processed almost 308,000,000 items in-game compared to 161,000,000 in March. Those poor servers… luckily we have made a number of improvements to the servers so there shouldn’t be that much difference. It’s still a terrible system though (we’ll get into that in a separate blog post).
A total of 75,500,000+ quests have been performed compared to 51,000,000+ in March 2021. Those poor gigantic chickens…
Approximately 51 unusual and weird conspiracy theories on how we are trying to squeeze and juice every last penny out of our player base in comparison to 35 in March 2021. Just kidding on the stats… or are we…?
Overall, 2021 was a very successful year for us. We are incredibly proud to have implemented a lot of features in the game, some of which were suggested and sourced from the community itself! We have introduced lots of new ways to acquire diamonds via regular gameplay, we have completely removed all limits to the travel system, we have implemented additions to help with in-game interaction, and we have overhauled many different features to help make them more sustainable in the long run.
Reflecting back, even I am a bit surprised with how much the game has progressed in just a mere 12 months. I bet that guy who complained that nothing gets updated in SimpleMMO feels a bit silly now. And this was all done while I was sipping on martinis and enjoying the nice sun in the Bahamas (but not really…).
A big thank you to the employees and contractors of Galahad Creative, moderators, advisers, and the players of SimpleMMO for making it the game that it is today.
Let’s hope 2022 will be as successful as the last!
What’s your favourite 2021 update? Let us know in the comments below!
As you may have noticed, the game has not received many updates as of late besides the occasional bug fix. There is a very simple reason for that! We are working hard on bringing you version 10 of SimpleMMO.
Honestly, this is probably my most favourite update yet. It doesn’t contain anything ground-breaking nor any new major features. However, we have overhauled many areas of the game to make it sleeker and added a lot of small quality-of-life improvements.
For you technical folk, the majority of this update is our transition from our own traditional CSS to TailwindCSS. We’ve had to overhaul almost 4 years worth of redundant and bulky code. It certainly wasn’t a quick and easy process! Not just that but we are also moving away from jQuery in favour of Alpine.js.
TailwindCSS is a utility-first CSS framework that runs behind the SimpleMMO Web App. Now that we have done the legwork and transitioned the Android app over to TailwindCSS as well, this means that updates for both applications will be be incredibly seamless. Not only does it bring us consistency in our design across the board, but it helps with accessibility too. Our old implementation was a segmented, bloaty, and inconsistent mess. It made it difficult for us to work with dark mode and adjust our design to help with accessibility. We used to use absolute values fairly frequently which did not respond well to devices that have their font size turned up for example. Our transition will hopefully fix these issues.
Before we get into it, I just want to make you aware that we are still in the very early beta stage and what will be shown here may not be what you will get. Things may change between now and public release.
We will display the old and the new designs so that you can compare them yourself. I’m sure you can figure out which one is the old design and which one is the new design.
Travel
We have transitioned our “travel” design to a new, cleaner design. The EXP and gold you gain on the step is no longer massive and it does not cover your player avatar (unless you have an incredibly small device).
World Bosses
World Bosses definitely needed some TLC. It was a simple page with minimal information. Now the design is a bit more fancy but it highlights the next upcoming world-boss. This makes it easier for you to quickly glance at what is coming up.
However, functionally, nothing has changed with the world bosses. It is still as much of a nightmare as you remember it.
Town
The town will now feature categories making it easier to navigate. Rather than just having a huge wall of multiple links, it is now divided for quicker and easier access. We have also moved the most frequently used pages to the top.
The Bulletin Board pulls out from the right of the screen (in a similar way as the Web App) and the “Horse and Carriage” has been renamed to “Change Location” to avoid confusion.
Quests
Quests recently got a huge overhaul not so long ago so not too much has changed here. We have definitely cleaned things up a bit though. The response you get from performing a quest now pops up on the top right of the page rather than having it displayed the bottom beneath the buttons. We found that when it appeared at the bottom of the page, some players were missing it entirely due to having a smaller device.
Player Popup
The player popup has been cleaned up too. The player background is clearer, the text is more readable and the spacing is larger. We wanted to give more real estate to the players experience bar due to that being the most common reason why a player opens up the popup.
Messages
Messages are much more “chat-like”. Honestly – we have some big plans to change the messaging system completely so that is a real-time chat client. However, until then, we have cleaned it up a bit and gave it a slight make-over. When that will happen is completely up in the air.
Item Popup
The item pop-up has been cleaned up significantly with two huge quality of life additions; the quick equip button and the collection check. You will be able to quickly see if the item/avatar/background/etc is currently in your collection or not. Not just that, but if you come across an item in-game (such as via an NPC or while travelling), you can quickly equip the item instead of having to navigate away from the page entirely. These are very small changes but they will make a huge difference in your gameplay.
(Yes we are aware that the new pop-up does not contain the item description. This will be fixed.)
Inventory
The inventory has received a bit of a make-over. It’s not too drastic but the biggest change is how the multi-select works. Now you get checkboxes when selecting multiple items rather than holding and pressing on them. The old way of holding on an item was incredibly flimsy at the best of times.
Crafting/Gathering
Ask and you shall receive. Gathering and Crafting no longer requires you to press and hold on the button! Now it works in the same way as the travel system. You simply press the button once, wait a few seconds, and do it again.
Battle
Battle has changed slightly so make it more appealing. Functionally, it is exactly the same. However, it looks much nicer, right?
Market
You will be happy to know that the market has been completely rewritten. Now you can filter through multiple item types and rarities, and the ordering now works as you would expect. You no longer need to face the dreaded “You are ordering without a filter” error message. It’s also way more efficient.
Profile
The profile page has received a much needed do-over. This design is more akin to the Web App version. The background is way more visible and things are just way more consistent. Not only that but we have made the profile page approximately 40% more efficient so hopefully it should be faster when viewing other profiles.
That’s not all!
We have changed a lots of things around the game. The Discussion Boards, for example, have received big changes but it is not listed above.
We look forward to breaking your workflow!
Q&A
When?
Probably sometime mid-November if everything goes as planned. We originally planned to have this release finished by the Halloween event but the undertaking was much larger than we expected.
What about the web app?
While this update focuses heavily on the Android app, the Web App will still benefit from all of the additional functionality (for example, the improved market and the quick equip button)
Will this be in pubic beta?
Probably not though I can’t say it for certain. Keep an eye on our Discord or Twitter to see if anything changes.
Shoutouts
A big shout out to the following people who have helped give V10 alpha feedback.
Dyl Tilphia Kiban Baetyl Amberjack Oubi Wiqued Musette Eclipse, The Witch of Arkhan Poonjo Hephaestus Y0mu Doot
As noted on our public road map, the introduction of trading will arrive sometime within the 3rd quarter. I am very pleased to announce that direct player-to-player trading will arrive in SimpleMMO this week.
For a long time, players have been trading assets by sending items and gold between two accounts without the guarantee that all of goods will actually arrive. It was a system that relied mostly on trust.
The trade system will change this. Two players can set up a direct trade between each other and then put in X amount of items and gold. Once both parties are satisfied with what they will be sending/receiving, they can accept the trade. Once accepted, the items and gold will automatically transfer between each account therefore eliminating any form of risk.
Let’s go through the process on the web app.
Scenario: I want to exchange 100,000 gold coins and 1 Spirit Deer for 100 Fallen Leaves. This is how I would do it.
Navigate to the players profile and press on the arrow button to bring up a list of actions. Press “Trade”
This will bring up a list of all past and current trades I have made with this player. To create a new trade, I will press “New Trade” on the top right of the screen.
A new trade will be created. From this screen, I am able to add/remove any amount of items or gold. I can also see what the other player has offered within this trade on the left hand side.
Let’s start off with the gold. To add gold to the trade, I simply need press the “Add Gold” button. This will bring up a page that will display how much gold I want to add. I can add any amount of gold that is on my character. The game will first withdraw from the bank and then the equipped pocket if I do not have enough there.
Once I’ve added the 100,000 gold. You can see it displayed on the trade page.
Now for the items. I can add items to the trade by pressing the “Add Items” button. This will bring up the inventory with all of the item that I have on my character. To add an item to the trade, all I need to do is simply press “Add To Trade”
On the following page, I can enter how many items I want to add to the trade. It is limited to 100 items per trade. If you wish to send more than 100, you will need segment it into multiple trades.
Once I have added the item to the trade, I can see it displayed on the trade page on the right side.
If you look closely, the other player has added 100 leaves to the trade while I was doing that.
The trade now consists of the following: – I will receive 100 Fallen Leaves – I will send 100,000 gold and 1 Spirit Deer
As I have verified it by checking checking the overview, I can go ahead and press the “accept” button.
This will bring up a prompt to ensure that you are not doing it by mistake.
As I was the first player to accept the trade, I now need to wait for the other player to accept the trade too. As you can see, the other player has not accepted the trade yet.
After a few minutes, the other player also accepted the trade. If I give the page a quick refresh, I can see that the trade has finalised. I will have also received a notification telling me that the trade was complete.
And it’s as simple as that! The Android app will work in the exact same way.
This feature will arrive in SimpleMMO sometime later this week. Join our discord to keep updated on the status of new updates.
Notes:
The above screenshots are not final and may change when the feature has been released.
The fees for using this feature are still under review.
You will still be able to send gold and items using the old way.
