The future of Guild Wars Legacy

[font="Hind, sans-serif"]Hello everybody,

Over the last few weeks you haven't really seen me online here often - which is because of a combination of me falling sick and working on something completely new.
That's right, big changes are coming in the next few months.

What will these changes hold? A lot, but I'll first explain why we're going to make big changes.

Right now, our forum is running on MyBB, which has done a great job, but at the same time it is holding us back enormously: MyBB2 is under active development, but this has been going on for years and after recently trying out the development builds, I fear it will take a few more years before they're even close to offering working forum software.
Developing plugins for MyBB1.8 however is a complete mess with no-so great documentation and a really strange way of working (plugins are mainly stored in a single PHP file, which makes it a MESS to work with).
Sitting on MyBB1.8 has several clear disadvantages: it hasn't got any support for responsive designs and to implement this would require a ton of work for us (believe me, I tried) and it breaks a ton of features of MyBB.
Next to that, our existing software has a tendency to break in different ways - one time it's image uploads, attachments are broken right now and neither I nor the MyBB team have been able to find out what is going wrong (the files are actually uploaded, looks like something goes wrong in linking it, but that seems to be fine as well).
Next to that, updates to the software have broken features on the forum for everybody quite a few times and these take a lot of time for me to resolve (for example, turning the entire board as read or for the moderators, the inline moderation broke a lot).

We also tried to modify several things to improve the Xunlai Market, but these simply didn't work out and caused even more issues.

At one point, I tried to create a external application to do things which in reality should be done by a plugin. It would require me to build an external authentication system to hook into the forum it's authentication and then allow me to hook the new application into it, in a really band-aid way.
I decided against doing that after using the development build of MyBB. It's simply said not even close to an alpha, it will take years to get there.
Using the existing MyBB plugin system is way too inefficient and hard.

So, what did we decide? We started looking into different options into which software we would use going forward and we tried a few of them, in fact.
Internally, our decision has fallen on a piece of software that is very modern and feels very modern as well - it has a responsive design out of the box and allows us to create entire new modules. So that should be exiting (yes, I'm not naming the software on purpose ;)).

This allows us to completely redesign Legacy as we want it to be - as there are some parts of Legacy that are currently not up to snaff that we want to improve upon.[/font]
[font="Hind, sans-serif"]I would like to ask what you guys, as our users, would like to see in the future? What do you want us to add or change? What can be improved?[/font]

[font="Hind, sans-serif"]Before anything will be visible of the changes, we'll be a few months further though - we're planning to do this right and not rush it.[/font]

[font="Hind, sans-serif"]Kevin[/font]

Quote from Lexx

I'm back, after (probably) a year away from GW:L.

When you talk about "software", it makes me think of Discord or similar software. If that's the case, I'm not sure that's the best way to go. But if there's no real alternative, I guess I'd give it a try even though I'm not a Discord fan. Now if it's NOT Discord, I'm curious what kind of software you had in mind

As for features I would love to see, are features to enchance party search for an otherwise aging game. Sort of like:
1. Pick an activity you want to do, and a time slot. (Ie. Dungeon, mission, getting a run, ...). These can be preset templates that initially only cover the most popular options in game, and later expanded with more choices. Meeting place would also be preset depending on area (ie. ToA int district if event is FoW/UW).
2. Other players can see requested activities, and pitch in a "I'll be there!", and then commit to show up at the selected time. International district is possible best choice as it's easier to find the people you're meeting up with.
3. This could be doable even anonymously/without an account, limiting the user to just pick a preset template and time slot. With an account, they could add additional comments.
4. An last, but equally important, is a form of subscription. Say a runner want to subscribe to all events related to "LFRun", and get notified when one is added or gaining people. This would allow them to more easily find enough people for a run to make it worthwhile. Likewise, people could subscribe to various dungeons or elite areas, and get notified when people want to start forming up parties for that. A subscription could be as simple as an email notification.

I think something like this is needed to help augment and breathe life into GW1. A new player could easily try find other players to join up with without having to try shout around in empty outposts. Instead people can do other things with their time, and get notified when something interesting is about to happen.

Hey Lexx,

I'm talking about the forum software we're using (on our end), not something you would need to install like Discord
The idea's you are bringing on are very interested, we'll have to look into those

Kev

I'm currently working on a responsive version of Legacy - this is being worked on very actively.

But, unfortunately, it's still a few months away.

Kev

Today, I have posted the very first exclusive preview of Guild Wars Legacy's new site on our Facebook page:

As you can see, it's quite a different but still very similar look. I also resolved most of the mobile issues today - and I have a preview of it here (exclusively here for you guys):

As you can see, navigation is a ton better and you can actually easily reply on mobile now - it works flawlessly. I hope that will stop the requests for a mobile app ;).

One thing that you might notice is that we've added an ad to Legacy - there's a single ad per page, no more than that. I hope everybody can live with this, but donations weren't cutting the cheese at all.

So, let me know what you think!

Kevin

Quote from Agent Chevy

Hello!

So this may be far fetched, just thinking outside the box, any way to display if favor is active or how many achievements are left? This may not be possible where it isn't on a timer. Not sure if anyone else shares this interest, but thought it would be neat if I could see without logging in if it's favor as I may pop on to farm.

Agent Chevy

Chevy, it would be really cool to do, but unfortunately Guild Wars hasn't got an API to hook into to get this info.. we might be able to extract this information from a running client, but it's far from my cup of tea.

Kev

Quote from Pleikki

There are two things ive noticed that legacy lack that i used rly much in old guru, wonder if those are someting that could be added on new site.

1st, Preview window when u have ur mouse over some thread title little window used pop that showd u 1st few lines etc on the thread.

2nd. Better search functions, ive allways used to search certain posts by user in threads etc if it could be added? like you once you open some thread in sale with 10 pages you could easyly find posts by certain person instead looking throw all pages.

-Pleikki

Hey Pleikki,

The new version will have pop ups that will show you the first bits of a post - it works on the mainpage and anywhere else, really.

The search will be much improved too, I'm not certain that what you're asking is possible, but it's a huge improvement nonetheless.

Quote from Blink316

Any plans of having an auction site/plugin like we used to have on guru or are we doomed to pages upon pages of threads of wtb/wts?

Now that would be telling...