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We know that there's no way for you to know that we're working on all of this, which leads me to my next point: communication. With that being said, hopefully you can also sympathize with us and understand that sometimes things happen in our lives that we cannot control.
So, something that could be done to easily avoid this "lack of communication" here ..is to have someone make up "news papers" or teasers of things to come - while it's not a full form of communication, players will at least know what to expect - I'm aware that estimated time frame for these things are quite hard to keep to but this at least gives players some idea of what's going on rather than not knowing anything. I believe you did this a bit with the introduction of runelite client. With this you can see how the players feel about the updates to come and you can learn what to prioritize over what and so on..
Continuing on with the "lack of communication" bit, one thing I've noticed when coming to this server, maybe it's just me.. but I find it oddly frustrating not knowing what the hell is going on with the staff team. I see random promotions, random demotions and people randomly quitting and all without any announcement and or explanation as to why - sure those members that resign or get demoted aren't required and have no obligation to say anything as to why and or what happened but I definitely feel the community should be and needs to be updated on when these things happen instead of randomly seeing someone that was a staff member no longer being a staff member and it not being addressed to the community until someone decides to finally make a staff update.. a tip for the future, if you do monthly updates on this is to add additional change posts to that main post if there so happens to be changes in the staffing team within the month. I apologize if this is something that already happens in the discord, but, not everyone uses the discord like that. Forums are just as vital in a concurrent player base as discord is..
Communication has been an issue for awhile now, as Chad and I scramble to rush updates out (as a 2-person development team) we do sometimes lose sight of the big picture and neglect the communication aspect. It isn't something we intend to do, it simply makes more sense to us to put our time and energy into developing these updates to have a healthy, constant flow of new content and bug fixes, as well as responding to all the PMs that we receive daily and keeping in touch with the higher up staff team to make sure that things are running smoothly.
I had a good bit of experience in this myself, not in development, but managing a server and the staffing team/community and I can tell you that it's really important to keep people up to date with what's going on regardless, otherwise people will start to believe that you're in it for the money and or starting to abandon the server - which.. is what you have with this post. The only visible thing that's been shown in any sort of update progression is a new donator rank, you probably should of waited to roll it out and or hint it at all until the bigger update/s happen and or after them even..
You have a community manager, event/advert manager and 4 or so other admins that can fulfil the holes creating problems in your communication - use them.. if they can't do it, find someone that can.. simple as that.
This is one of the things that I will never understand the logic behind... Let's look at the most recent, and probably best example of this. The Chambers of Xeric rework is probably one of the best content updates Alora has seen in a long time; not only is it a good advertisement point, but it is also the cause of many old players returning. While I don’t agree with people saying “cOx iS iMpoSsible” I must admit I don’t see any logic behind delaying crucial bug-fixes, like the scaling of the top floor or the chests randomly disappearing for an entire month. Another good example of this would be a very long time ago, when the skilling interfaces were updated to match OSRS. This update brought a crafting bug, that made the skill impossible to level early on, pretty much rendering the skill unusable for an entire week. Whether the reason is that a server restart would “annoy” players, or rather it was better to simply delay it a week so that the update would look bigger and better. It makes absolutely no logical sense.
It's pretty obvious that these delays are there so that there's more content to be added to a single update, this is how most things go in terms of development of a game - in this case an rsps. Some games have regular downtime for maintenance weekly, but unfortunately that isn't an rsps works. I do believe that critical bug fixes shouldn't be held back in any regard and should be pushed out ASAP but the problem here is that they probably backup all the files having it sitting ready to be updated so attempting to try to update the server would implement everything they've been working on which would bring a plethora of new exciting bugs for everyone to deal with as they're not finished yet.. it's not exactly the smartest way of handling the files for the updates, I could be wrong.. but I'd assume it'd have to be the case or something similar otherwise there shouldn't be any problem with pushing out the critical bug fixes and the problem with it is, if they've done this with all the files it can take a long time to transfer.. which I can't really blame them for trying to avoid but maybe in the future better management of the files and so on can be considered.
I guess I'm fairly newer here.. so I don't really know the owner or the staffing team to any regard very well - so I don't know for sure if this is a continuing problem for a long time. I'd assume that it isn't that bad if the server has managed to stay up for 4 years with a decent playerbase but it's good someone has voiced their opinion/s for the community but in the future I don't think anyone should be afraid to voice their opinions on things so long as they're not just toxic gibberish because something bothers you a little bit and you for some reason can't seem to get over it and it's not really that big of a deal such as the below example
I’ve contacted you a month or two ago regarding the Scythe of vitur’s wrong angle.
this is such an irrelevant thing to be bothering about and has absolutely no impact on the players gameplay and 90% of people probably didn't even know. Anyway.. voicing opinions is how you get things to change, staying quiet then there's no feedback etc to refer to when continuing on with updates and so on.. but being annoying and toxic about it you may as well just get booted into orbit.
Aside from that, the Eternal rank is simply a prestige rank -- yes, there are a few new perks (such as being able to transfer your rank more regularly) but at the end of the day it isn't anything that threatens the integrity of the game, and ultimately the addition of this rank will do more good than bad as it will allow us to keep providing the best support and content that we possibly can.
Most people won't even achieve this rank, so it's weird that they're even complaining about it. I think there should of definitely been a post made about it as soon as it was visible to the public or as said previously not made visible to the public until update/s roll out as an addition to the update posts explaining the rank in more detail and why it's been implemented to avoid such a harsh backlash.
Nice post, relax a little bit Alorians 
- Doc Hellish, Paine, Sassa fras and 4 others like this
Good luck with the drops!
