State of EliteMobs #4

Greetings adventurers!

I'm breaking my own formula a bit here but I feel like it's time for a State of EliteMobs or else there won't be one before late July.

I am officially done with my university classes for the semester, and since next year I only have to write a paper that means I am virtually free of classes for the foreseeable future.

I've been using this newfound free time to double down on the development of EliteMobs. I'm not going to list all the changes because a code analysis tells me that about 50% of the plugin has been rewritten at this stage, so let's just say that this has been a major rewrite. Things are less buggy, more customizable and easier to develop for, and a lot of existing features have been polished.

Additionally, I've been developing 7.2 features to the point where I believe it is only a couple of features short of being ready to release. This means that, extraordinarily, the public release might go from 7.0 to 7.2.

Let's take a moment to talk release schedules.

I plan to update my network to 1.14 around the 15th of this month. For this release I want to have the new item and guild systems already fully ready to go. 

I'll also take this moment to announce two new features:

Soulbound items and item tier limiters. Soulbound items are basically items which only give combat and mob spawning boosts to the person the item is bound to, preventing users from just giving away top tier gear to new players. These items can be unbound to be sold, though the process will be extraordinarily expensive, which brings me to - 

Item tier limiters. This limits the item tier a player can loot based on their guild tier. As such, a guild tier 1 player will not be able to get a tier 100 item. The tiers are probably going to be 1 guild tier for 10 item tiers, meaning that a guild tier 1 player will be able to get items between tiers 1-20, t2 for items between tiers 20-30, and so on. This also means that even if a player buys a higher tier item which is no longer soulbound, while it will with combat for a while, they won't be able to get additional top tier items without first unlocking guild tiers (which they probably won't be able to do with just one set of good items). These are all features to avoid excessive powerleveling issues, but which still allow players to play together and boost each other in a more reasonable and equitable way.

These features are key for getting a more balanced EliteMobs experience. My hope is that they'll be fully developed by the 15th, and testing will occur around then. Taking testing and fixes into account, this means I hope to release the dev version around the 21st. I will be letting that version be tested by everyone while I develop some new features to accompany the full release. I will be away between the 1st and the 5th of August (but still working on my laptop), and if the version seems stable by the time I come back I will release that version as 7.1.  I fully expect that 7.2 will be released a week apart, meaning that by the 15th of the next month we'll be looking at fixing the last few bugs before the 7.2 release.

Unfortunately the best I can do right now is provide with my hopeful estimates. There are a lot of complex variables and many, many thing which could go wrong, but I have faith that 7.2 will be released at the end of the next month at the latest.

As always, thank you for your patronage, but also thank you for being patient while I finished my exams. That you believe in the project and stuck around while I was forced to be inactive means the world to me.