We’ve finally gotten around to launching a website. So far we’ve focused on server development, but now we’re ready for a public-facing display. There’s project info, FAQ, media and ingame screenshots, and what I’m looking towards most, forums, which brings our project one step closer to being a complete community. And of course there’s also this dev blog, where we’ll be posting longer updates & announcements, as well as some write-ups about the internals of LU. (For shorter updates check our twitter as well).

Got suggestions? Something not working? Leave a comment or post a topic in the forum.

Plans for the future

The launch of this website clears another checkmark off our list towards a first alpha release. We believe the server is mature enough at this point, and have made sure that the features are working well. We’re working hard to deliver to you the server you deserve, and the first step in that direction is an alpha test where we will host a small server instance to a limited set of people. We want to make sure that every one of you has the same chance of entering, so we’ll be starting an admission phase soon, where you’ll be able to apply for the alpha. To make sure you can only enter once and people can’t game the system, we’ll likely not make it a random raffle, and we also don’t want to force you to follow our social media to participate, a practice that is sadly too common these days. We’ll notify you when the admission phase starts, so stay tuned!

Server costs

Of course, hosting a server costs money. We want everyone of you to be able to play completely for free, with no subscription and no hidden costs, and we want the server to be entirely noncommercial. To cover our hosting costs, we’ll be opening a patreon, where you can optionally donate to support our project. We’ve been asked about a donation option before, but we didn’t want to accept donations until we could actually provide you with a running server. With the upcoming alpha we can fulfill that promise. I want to explicitly state this though: the server will always be free-to-play, and donations will always be optional. Donators will not have better items that would give them an unfair advantage in the server. However donators will get a cosmetic in-game shirt as a thank-you, similar to beta testers back in the original game.

Update: Some of you have voiced concerns regarding donation items opening up a slippery slope towards something similar to freemium and microtransaction models. We never intended for this to be that way and are strictly against such systems. However we understand your concern. To make our stance on this absolutely clear and leave no questions open, we have decided not to give out any ingame items at all for donators. Rather, items will only be available through gameplay. We still want to thank everyone who considers donating to us to help us with the server, but we want to make clear that the playing experience is the most important thing to us.

It’s been almost four years since this all began, and we’re finally getting to the point I’ve been looking forward to all this time. I’m very excited for these next steps. They’re the last parts in this quest to make this vision reality.

See you all in-game!

– lcdr