Direction
This week, Direction focused on maintaining current staff systems.

• LumosJared focused on Individual Direction and HR, Staff Applications, Staff Rank Ups, and the upcoming Spawn Reworks for both V5 of Regalia and the Main Common Spawn! New players will soon be going on quite the trip!
• MonMarty worked primarily on the Lore Occult Systems, Lore Reworks, Individual Direction, HR, Financial paperwork, and system management.

Game
We welcomed a new aspirant to Game Staff this week, Sevak! We were all busy aiding Tech as much as we could with making TPS improvements. If you have missed them, check out the daily updates that have been posted in the Factions Discord #survival-announcements channel (Link at the end of this paragraph).

MassiveVillagers is 95% ready for release. We encountered a bug when starting a Raid in faction land with monsters flag turned off; the raid ends immediately with no mobs spawned and an undeserved victory. Once we fix that, MassiveVillagers will be released.

We made several changes to MCMMO and MassiveRaces which should appeal PVPrs joining the server who do not want to spend hours grinding. All damage abilities of Axes and Swords max out at level 500 instead of 1000. We significantly lowered the damage done to surrounding targets when using Skull Splitter and Serrated Strikes. Additionally, we decreased the time required to reach a fully unlocked level 4 race from 15 days to 15 hours (An Active Day resets each hour). Read more about MassiveRaces here: https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/massiveraces-reborn.88855/

A new event, Red Rover, was built and added to our list of weekly hostable events. Red Rover divides players into 2 teams, and one member of each team fights the other. When they die, the next person up enters the arena. The event ends when one team has exhausted all of its players.

MythicMobs have been disabled in Essalonia for a few days now. We will be discussing the effects in our Staff Meeting today before they are reenabled. MythicMobs remain enabled in Essa.

An update on Kingdoms: Tech staff has been working hard building the plugin. Kingdoms is enabled on our test server now and is in testing and tweaking phase.

58 player tickets, mythic mob creation, numerous help chats, world cleanup and restoration, and naughty player investigations were completed. We hosted Spleef and Sumo Events this week! You can vote on which events we host next week here: https://www.massivecraft.com/discord-factions

• QGMK aided players, tested and configured MCMMO changes, hosted events, and configured the upcomming MassiveVillagers plugin.
• Takedown aided players and hosted events.
• Notchyherobrine aided players and hosted events.
• The_Fluorspar aided players, build and hosted events, and tested and configured MCMMO and MassiveRaces changes.
• Effloresce_ aided players and developed custom crafting recipes.
• Winterless aided players.
• Sweet_Dreams aided players, decorated Essalonia spawn, hosted events, developed custom crafting recipes, and tested MassiveVillagers.
• Skhosh aided players, answered help chats, hosted events, and tested MCMMO changes.
• Sir_Daragon aided players, created and tested MythicMobs, trained Game Staff members, hosted events, and looked into new KOTH plugins.
• Sevak answered help chats, designed and hosted the Red Rover event, and tested MassiveRaces and MCMMO changes.

World
This week World focused again on upkeeping the current requests for decoration in Regalia, and setting up events. Various noble estates were pasted in, the van Hal, Vyzal, and Ino Femmun estates received some decoration, the Vogel on mainstreet was finished, and the assembly hall was updated for the commons assembly at /tp government. Some big projects are coming up in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that!

• Bunemma re-vamped the interior of the old assembly hall for the commons assembly, helped WaterDruppel with the van Hal estate here and there.
• EdnaMode_ decorated the rest of the Vyzal estate, and finished up the Vogel beneath the willow.
• WaterDruppel worked primarily on the van Hal estate, and set up the valentine’s fencing tournament.

Lore Updates:

• Avanthar skin color has been clarified on the Wiki now. The old “Tan and Olive” colors were severely outdated and no longer applicable to our vision, so we updated them properly to their ochre-shaded darker skin tones. https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Avanthar
• Raid rules have had a new amendment to include rules with regards to prisoners and hostages taken during raids. https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Crime_Rules#Raid_Prisoner
• Fortification Arts: We were generally displeased with the usage of this in Roleplay, and have opted to remove it entirely. A replacement for Progression relevance will be up to the World System DMs.
• Stealth Rogue: Clarification has been added to the skill, but nothing functionally changes.
• General Abilities: We do not have a stance upon the ‘timing’ of Abilities, so this has been made clear on the abilities page.
• Alais Vampires can no longer infect anyone with blood drinking / feeding their blood. They now have a more flexible consensual ritual only. Additionally, Vampires that have been cured and are re-infected by a Vampire with a different Bloodline will be able to change Bloodlines to the new infecter. Vampire Forms are consistent across Bloodlines only, so if they get re-infected by an Alais after a stint of being a Doughall, they return to looking like the Vampire Form they had when they were Alais the first time.
• Saivalathar Secondary Racial “Power’s Reach” has been changed to more clearly function as an “escape” ability as we intended it to be.

World System Updates:

• https://forums.massivecraft.com/thr…ities-revelry-and-a-dash-of-foreboding.90855/
• House Mac Conall publically denounces Duke Alaric Keen for desecrating his written oath and bond. They encourages all- peerage or not, to think twice before entering into agreements with the man, or believing his word is of any merit or honour at all.
• @everyone With the noble prog out and work on the War Progression starting today, I have decided for the sake of schedule and keeping things simpler for me to keep track of, to move War Progression publishing to the Tuesday closest to the 15th, just so to keep in line with the same sort of time frames as the Archipelago progressions. The next war prog will also be out Tuesday.
• Some announcements may also be coming this weekend relating to the military stuff that will be put in the Regalian Martial Com chat, so if you’re engaged heavily with the Hadar War, or are interested in military rp, make sure you’re in that chat

Event Updates:

• https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/the-bacchanal.90347/
• House di Rossi and House du Beaufort are calling upon any and all adventurers seeking to aid them find their lost daughters! Lend a hand at /tp Hostesse
• https://forums.massivecraft.com/calendar/weekly-sanguine-lecture.1347/event?id=139
• https://forums.massivecraft.com/calendar/digmaan-vyzal-presents-a-fashion-show.1366/event?id=1420
• https://forums.massivecraft.com/calendar/wedding-of-triss-aduro-elena-beahan.1370/event?id=142
• https://forums.massivecraft.com/calendar/noblewomens-night.1349/event?id=1403

Roleplay Updates:

• Regalians rally in the face of the Kathar threat internally within the city. Will there conflict continue? Or fizzle out after the latest round of punishments at the warning of death
• Local scourge Ayas the Sanguine’s head robbed amid execution, tomfoolery suspected by one of their lackeys!
• The Festival of Roses draws in all manner of crowds, both underworld and good citizens in a true test of cooperation and love!
• Northern Explorers return to the city after their first round of delves deep in Jorrhilder, surprising, alien, discussion alit the archeological scholar circles of Regalia. What is worth there to gain?
• Elections for a new Lord Chancellor already beginning to make gossip circles through rings of greater families within the Empire!

PR
This week, PR has been working on updating the main website and social media, again, as well as guide creation.

• Seoulmate has done the Weekend Roundup and in-game ticket announcements.
• Hierophat_ has been doing announcements for other staff and players.
• Battlebrawn has been updating and maintaining our PMC page in addition to in-game tickets.
• Wan_Xia has taken screenshots of an in-game event.

Quest
This week the quest department launched several quests for the Valentine festival which you can check out at /tp Hostesse. We also reimplemented the Pattera ore node quest in a different location on the Regalian isle so be on the lookout for this opportunity to find some lore compliant materials to be used in roleplay! Due to its positive reception the scavenger hunt quest will stay around a little bit longer, head to /tp event to start it. As we are the smallest staff department we are always looking to grow our team, consider applying here: https://forums.massivecraft.com/forums/staff-applications.11/create-thread You can also have a look at our methods on this page: https://www.massivecraft.com/massivequest-author

• Lazzulai Wrote the Pattera resource node quest, a Valentine festival quest and did Valentine festival acting.
• Derpadillo Wrote quests for the Valentine festival and did quest implementation.
• The_Fluorspar wrote and implemented kits for our new red rover event.

Tech
With regards to MythicMobs returning – We are still testing the impacts of this plugin, we have noticed a significant improvement to the TPS at peak times however there is still a lot going on that we need answers for. Once we have sorted out the TPS in that regards, we will then look at re-implementing MythicMobs onto the server. We will have more information regarding this soon.

This week, Tech has been doing optimisation work to the server:

• CS_Birb has been updating a lot of the software behind the scenes of the server as well as switching us over from PaperAPI to PurPur to help combat TPS lag. Within the next coming weeks, we shall also be making more optimisation changes to help with this too.
• FourThirteen has been rewriting a lot of the code behind MassiveRaces to make the /mr abilities update automatically on config changes.
• xxxYajRabxxx has been working on Kingdoms to implement a lot of the feature set of the plugin. We are now pretty much at the point of testing Kingdoms and work out any bugs for the plugin.