Pixel Progression #15

Welcome to Pixel Progression #15!

We released season 3 of fishing!

There's obviously feedback to address, questions to answer, and more. Before we dive into that, lets talk about what's next outside of fishing.

As a reminder, we have a public roadmap! You can click this link to visit it: dankmemer.lol/roadmap

If you've visited before, a few things have changed. I highly recommend checking this out, there's some cool stuff to look forward to!

We know you're eager to hear more about pls and gambling, but both have hit major roadblocks that we're unable to get around at this time due to no fault of anyone. We still aim for both in 2024, ideally still both even this summer.

As for the SHORTEST possible term updates that are unrelated to fishing, we have a small balance patch out tomorrow, with a bigger one to follow in the next week or two (the bigger one contains leveling changes, including more leveling specific rewards).

We've spent our time since the launch almost entirely fixing bugs or incorrect values. There was a lot changed! As badosz mentioned in his article recently, we had to refactor the entirety of fishing logic, so this was to be expected.

We've heard a lot of feedback loud and clear, and we see some points we'd love to clear up.

1. This season feels too easy/short
2. Things are still confusing, maybe even more confusing
3. You want more to do for the next few months of season 3

Easy season

To an extent, some of this was on purpose. In a lot of our polling, a large group of people who fish found the things we made a bit too hard to do which resulted in them giving up. If you remember, we did a poll that also asked similar questions that included asking people their main motivation in fishing. Things like profit, or fun.

What we found that was expected, was that people who primarily play fishing for PROFIT were the same people saying content was too hard. Alternatively though more surprising, the people who play for profit also were an even split with those who play for fun, and the people who play for fun reported overwhelmingly that things were MORE confusing than those who play for profit.

So we had two takeaways here that might help you see our influence for the launch of this season:

• People who play for fun need simpler systems, even if they're not easy.
• People who play for profit want an easier path to profit, which the badge is a blocker for.

So for this reason, we purposely did NOT include a large amount of new or rare fish and we did NOT spend time making new intricate systems like skills. We DID make badge requirements for skills more lenient, and gave paid investments like fish boosts for people to min-max time and profit.

But, this doesn't mean that is our philosophy in general! I'll take about that more in the third point.

Confusing things

We spent some time adding some question mark buttons across a few commands. Did you notice?

This is step one of us working on improving clarity in this entire system for any type of player.

A big blocker we have in general is Discord and Discord UX not being super game friendly. We can sometimes find a path around it, like we did with skills letting you paginate between categories. But games on Discord will always have a disadvantage here.

If you're finding something particularly confusing, please make a post on reddit explaining what confused by. We aren't here to judge, we want to make the game experience better and to do that we need to know what people are getting held up on.

We'll keep working on this through season 3 and beyond.

More to do

I agree that fishing and similar games are at the MOST fun when there's tons of things to do and chase.

I shared a dream recently in DMC about how cool it would be to have HUNDREDS of fish and variants to find, some so rare that you hardly hear of anyone getting them. This is FUN to people, myself included!

The issue comes in when we remember that not everyone plays this game for that reason, which is why we're making changes to badges mid season to not be dependent on 100% of all fish completions.

So to give a sneak peek into the midseason update[s] we want for the next couple months:

• Multiplayer fishing
• A new skill with detailed art involved
• NPC content refreshes (dialogue, tasks, rewards, etc)
• New badge requirements for gold angler
• New fish, and ideally, a LOT of them
• Leaderboards for fishing stats (unrelated to the daily resetting boards)

There's a lot still coming with season 3, it's just being spread out instead of all happening at launch. So don't burn yourself out yet, there's more on the horizon.

This is to give information on ongoing known issues or common points of confusion.

Upcoming Patch

There will be a small patch inbound tomorrow to address some balance issues, primarily with freemium.

Known Issues

These are issues we know about, and don't need reported right now.

• Time keeper and prismatic has some bad interaction with tools breaking
• There's a funky 1x multi in the season pass. If you want this to not be wasted for you, don't claim it until we fix it!
• Get the full list here: Public bug tracker

As a recap:

Posting on reddit with the phrase #PixelShowcase in the title will give you a chance to be here.

We want:

• Fan art (ZERO ai art is allowed)
• Community made resources
• Concept/Suggestion posts
• In depth feedback
• Funny/Awesome moments

Anyone who gets selected (2-3 per week) will earn EXCLUSIVE rewards, including a title, some gems, and an item that we'll showcase next week that can ONLY be earned from winning this and is non-transferable. A true flex of flexes.

We want to showcase you guys, but lets empower you to post high quality content in the first place <3

Last week was great, and this week is also great. You guys amaze us! Shoot us a dm via reddit modmail so we can get your discord IDs and reward you!

/u/rlchungus99

I don't have much to say here, it's kind of the perfect honeypot for us to give this person the W.

Badosz loves legos, badosz loves his card, badosz loves badosz, badosz loves this post!

/u/WarWar000

Warwar has posted a few different universe themed items, and this one is my favorite!

I'm not sure we'll ever add skins to fishing tools, but if we do, just know that warwar did it first.

Now, with fishing done and out I'll be taking the weekend off to be with my family and relax. We grinded our asses off for this season and this deploy, and we see all you having fun and it's been great to watch, but now we must rest.

See you next week, and since you didn't drink water we'll be talking about something BORING.