Announcement Update on the Wardrobe Wonders patch

Hey y’all!

We released the beta of Wardrobe Wonders yesterday, which brought some store changes and new perks. Many of y’all have shared your feedback (and memes!) about it and made some great points, so we’ve decided to make some changes based on it. I’d like to also explain a little more why we are updating the store. The business of Minecraft servers can be a little obscure, especially Wynncraft’s, so I’d like to clear a few things about it.

What we’re changing:

• We’re changing the default Character Slots from 3 to 5. Despite the fact that only a tiny portion of the playerbase even creates more than 3 characters, you guys told us you found it important for new players to be able to test every class Wynncraft has to offer nonetheless. So we're changing it back to that. For transparency sake, here’s the breakdown of the % of the playerbase in the past 2 months per character amount:

1 character: 43,17%
2 characters: 14,23%
3 characters: 8,02%
4 characters: 6,32%​

• Loaned APs will now be capped at 4 instead of 6, in addition to no longer being usable in any gamemodes. The idea with this perk is to make ranks more interesting to players on their first playthrough without negatively affecting the endgame. Cosmetics and slots are nice, but new players rarely care much about those until much later in their playthrough. New players also don’t have a great understanding of every system Wynncraft has to offer, so we needed something that touched a system they properly understood early on. We’ll also keep an eye on this perk to make sure it doesn’t become problematic with scaled content such as Raids.

• The Crafted Items perks won’t change from how it is right now on the main servers. The changes stated were not intended.

• We forgot to mention it in the original changelog, but Attack Effects are gone and will be replaced by a free crate when the update releases! It’ll make more sense as to why we removed them (hopefully) when Fruma comes out.

• Raids and Lootrun Tokens’s stack cap will be reduced to 3 only. We will also tweak their pricing to make sure they do not become too powerful. The idea behind this perk, and the other tokens, was to stitch back an issue that has slowly grown over the years. Let me explain:

Back in 2015, after the EULA changes that ravaged most servers, we introduced Bombs as a new monetization centered on endgame players. You guys like to say we don’t have an endgame, but back then we REALLY didn’t have an endgame. All you could do really was grind mobs, or dungeons, and get items. Bombs were focused on these aspects.

However, over the years we’ve introduced more and more proper endgame systems, and the game’s meta has shifted a lot. Mob grinding, dungeon runs, and so on are (thankfully) no longer a very popular endgame activity, and that has led to Bombs sales to continue to drop over the years. This originally forced us to rely on ranks for the most part and focus on the new players’ experience and progression. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it leads to a vicious cycle with endgame content where the more time we spend on that, the less money we make, which is not sustainable.

Thanks to the recent-ish EULA changes and Silverbull two years ago, we’ve been able to focus more on proper endgame content that is fun and engaging (not like grinding mobs was). But Silverbull and Shares have a cap to their effectiveness based on the size of our existing playerbase and size of our in-game economy, respectively. Crates have also helped a lot with festivals, but sales are very “bursty” and unreliable on the long-term.

Tokens are in response to that slow but continous detachment Bombs went through over the years. Bombs are a very public perk, so they give off the impression of being very popular, but they aren’t as much as it seems. Additionally, a lot of bombs you see thrown are from rank special offers, which are given for free. We understand these perks can be dangerous if not done right, so we’re careful and will keep an eye on them. For example, the Tracker reroll token adds a counter next to the Tracker to make sure that non-rolled Trackers are still special and valuable.


Share Prices

Some of you noticed that Shares are now a little more expensive than before. That is our fault for not being very clear about it. The reason being is that the current in-game Silverbull store used to give about 25% less value than the real-money store. Now that the prices are 1:1, we’ve shifted this towards the price of Shares rather than the packages. In most cases the Shares end up slightly more valuable despite the higher price, here’s a breakdown from Shadow on our Discord:

Current:

Combat: 3 for 1 share (5)
Prof xp: 3 for 1 share (5)
Prof speed: 3 for 1 share (5)
Shout: 8 for 1 share (5)
Loot: 4 for 1 share (5)
Item: 4 for 1 share (5)
Dungeon: 5 for 1 share (5)
Scroll charge: 7 for 1 share (5)
Ingredient: 6 for 1 share (5)
Party: 15 for 1 share (5)​

New:

Combat: 4 for 6 shares (buff)
Prof xp: 4 for 5 shares (buff)
Prof speed: 4 for 6 shares (buff)
Shout: 10 for 6 shares (buff)
Loot: 6 for 5 shares (buff)
Item: 4 for 6 shares (nerf)
Dungeon: 6 for 5 shares (buff)
Scroll charge: 8 for 5 shares (buff)
Ingredient: 6 for 5 shares (stays the same)
Party: 12 for 4 shares (stays the same)​

Business Costs

Let’s talk a little about business. I’ve seen some of y’all doubt what I wrote on the changelog about having 30 or so active paid members. Wynncraft has continuously grown in the past years, and it can be hard to wrap your head around what it takes to sustain and create content for a MMORPG. So I’ve tallied the actual numbers:

3x Game Devs
1x Sysadmin
1x Web Dev
6x Managers
3x Composers
7x 2d Artists (skins, resource pack, GUIs, concept arts, web arts)
7x Modelers
3x Animators
1x Editor
1x Accountant (hey they matter too)

Wynncraft relies a lot on its volunteer team. And they have been formidable over the years, they deserve only the best. We’ve been slowly switching roles away from volunteering towards being fully paid, but we’re still far off. The only other server who has managed it is Hypixel, and they're significantly larger than us. We want to continue to expand these paid roles so that one day, maybe, we too can have a fully paid team. We might not achieve it, but we’ll at least try.

Now let’s talk about these damn rich owners. It's not really a huge deal personally to me, but it has been a thing in the community for so long now I might as well mention it too. I’m well aware of the numerous memes about my many yachts, and I love them too, but please keep in mind those are just memes. I don’t even own a car, let alone a yacht. I’m a very private person, but for transparency's sake, here’s what I made this year so far (before taxes) in CAD: $32,640.40 (about 24k USD). And I’ve actually stopped taking a salary for two months. I’m a lot more interested in owning the absolute best MMORPG server than owning money. I don’t need it, I live extremely frugally in the same rent-controlled apartment for the past 10 years, next to a homeless shelter using a kitchen table as my desk. Now don’t take pity on me, I do still own a great business which has its own inherent value. But over the years I’ve stuck with Wynncraft through its highs and lows and still plan to for the foreseeable future. Wynncraft is incredibly important to me on an emotional level.

Screenshot of my monthly salary from Wynncraft's accounting. I've taken more in January so that I could invest in my TFSA and FHSA accounts early, which are Canadian tax advantaged saving accounts. Exciting shenanigans of the adult world.​

Spoiler: More boring business stuff

I’ve seen the memes about me claiming Wynncraft was self-sustaining, and yet here we are adding more monetization. Self-sustaining means that we do not own our existence to a higher entity we have to beg for money or control. Wynncraft is a Minecraft server, if we want to grow and spend more we must get the money first as no banks would ever loan us money (especially in Canada! They’re very risk averse). If Wynncraft wasn’t self-sustaining, it would be dead.

There are also hidden and unexpected costs to running a business. Credit Cards/Paypal take 3% + 30 cents off of every purchase you make on Wynncraft. Tebex, our merchant of record, also takes their share. That’s all fine and is the cost of doing business, but the worst one lately that we haven’t seen coming has been currency exchange. Wynncraft is Canadian, but uses USD on its store, which has seen a significant value decrease in the recent months. On the macro scale, players outside of the USA end up paying less (relatively speaking) than before because of the decreasing value of USD, which then gets exchanged a second time in CAD later down the line. This ends up being a double cost whammy for us. Thankfully we’ve been able to lower the impact with regional pricing, but it can only do so much.

We owe a lot to you guys and would never want to hurt what makes Wynncraft so special. Hopefully y’all will see with Fruma the quality of updates we can do with a larger budget and team. And don’t hesitate to give more of your feedback! We do read those and take them seriously.

Salted