[h3]Hey there, I wanted to give a little update on our update.[/h3] First off, happy 2025! It’s going to be a bright year for ASKA, we’ve got big plans and it’s all thanks to you. I’d like to start by addressing the elephant in the room: the animal respawn bug. This has been fixed and will be part of the next update. The obvious questions have been “why did it take longer?” or “why did the patch go out with seemingly less support on our end?”, as in “why haven't we hotfixed as fast as we've patched other bugs in the past?” Some assumed that it was because we closed shop over the winter holidays, and that's not accurate. The truth is that work has been done during the break, albeit at a different rate. The way we work is that we always build and fix things in the background and what's being delivered in an update is not the true development state of the game. We sometimes have to stop building and decide what goes into an update. We basically tie everything together, make a build, test and deliver it. After that we "split open" the game again and continue working. While the game is "split open" we can't make updates because everything we touch in the game we also have to close back up and then test. Because we wanted to continue work ASAP on the big update, we opened up the game right after the update was made live, and because we touched some big, sensitive systems it made it very difficult to quickly close it back up for a hotfix. Basically we had to make the difficult choice of either delaying a major update or a hotfix. We chose to live with the bug for a while to the benefit of our upcoming update. As expected, we took a bit of a hit, and we didn’t make the decision lightly. Community sentiment affects us directly, and every review, positive or negative, is felt by us directly. [h3]What's next?[/h3] The update we've been working on since late last year, which will be coming sooner than hoped, is specifically driven by community feedback, and our bet is that it will be very well received. Moving forward, 2025's ASKA will be defined by more consistent and vital content updates, dotted by any necessary in-between hotfixes, so major updates will truly feel major. We'll also try to be more present in discussions, because even if we go through the feedback and comments, we don't usually get the time to answer directly. The fact that Paige is our community manager and handles communication has sometimes been mistaken for a lack of community involvement on the dev team’s end. That being said, 2025 will also be our attempt to be a bit more active in community discussions. The animal respawn bug has been unfortunate and sadly the fix had to be delayed overlong, but very good things are coming to ASKA, you can count on it. On the topic of the roadmap, we have a solid draft and we're doing the final check-ups to make sure it's feasible. So that will be coming soon as well. It's going to be a big year for ASKA and we hope you'll continue to stick around for the journey, as we've got a lot of work to do yet! [i]Yours bug-fixingly, [h3]Sand Sailor Studio[/h3][/i]