Addressing Wplace's Current Issues and Our Plans Moving Forward
Source: This official announcement was posted by WplaceOfficial on Reddit at r/WplaceLive. View original announcement---
Official Message from John Wplace
Hi everybody, I'm John Wplace, the main developer of Wplace.
I want to apologize to everyone for everything that has been happening on Wplace lately 🙇. We are aware that we are not doing a good job, but I want to make it clear that we are also not happy with the situation.
I'll try to address the main concerns I've seen from the playerbase. I just want to make it clear that it'll probably take some time for us to sort everything out, but we do have plans laid out.
Moderation
This is our main priority right now. Over the past few days, we rolled out the in-game report system to the first 3,000,000 users. We were cautious with the release because of the large volume of reports we were receiving (over 300,000 so far). Today, we decided to rip off the bandaid: the report tool will now be available to everyone. While I can't promise we'll be able to process all reports immediately, we are actively hiring more moderators and improving our internal tooling to handle them more efficiently.
We are also aware of cases involving unfair bans. To address this, we're developing better ways for our admins to monitor moderator activity, which will help us identify and prevent misconduct. If you've been banned unfairly, you can submit an appeal on our official Discord server in the #ban-appeal channel. Our admins will review your request, and your feedback will also help us evaluate the conduct of our moderators.
Servers
We have a team helping us migrate our servers to a new architecture that will hopefully make them more stable and able to handle more users. If everything goes smoothly, we should have the new server architecture in production in less than a month.
Void
Our current stance on voids is that they are allowed only if they do not erase existing paintings. Voids are a staple of pixel games. They are unavoidable. However, if you see a player voiding another player's drawing, please report them for griefing. Right now, we do not have the manpower to handle all void-related reports, but we might in the future.
Also, if you know of a more long-term solution for the void problem, let us know in the comments.
Bots
This is a never-ending fight, but we have some plans in mind to help mitigate them 😈
Captchas
I also hate captchas, but we had to add them to stop the swarms of bots we were facing. This made botting harder, but it is still possible. After we implement better anti-bot systems, we'll try to make the captchas less intrusive or even remove it.
By the way, if you have any suggestions regarding captchas and anti-bot measures, let us know in the comments.
Pay to Win
I personally don't like pay-to-win, but it was a necessary evil to pay our bills in the short term. We have plans to completely remove or nerf pay-to-win from the game. However, we can't make that move right now because our staff is growing, and the current microtransactions might not be enough to cover all of our long-term costs.
Why It Takes So Long to Address All the Problems
When I started making Wplace in April, I never expected it to grow this much. I was running the project completely alone when suddenly we went from 3k users to more than 10 million in just one month. I got completely overwhelmed, and I had to call some friends and family members to help me out. As you might have noticed, we were not prepared for such rapid growth. We've never worked on a project of this scale, but we are doing our best to solve the problems. However, we know that is not enough. We are already hiring new staff members to help us out.
The Future of Wplace
We have a very big update planned for Wplace. I can't promise when it'll come out. It'll probably take a lot of time for us to cook it, but when the time comes, we'll make an announcement.
In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, feel free to make posts here on Reddit. I'll be lurking here from time to time. You can also send suggestions to the #suggestions channel on our official Discord. I can't promise we'll be able to address all the suggestions right now, but we'll be taking notes.
Once again, sorry for all the problems, and thanks for your patience playing Wplace despite all of this🙇
---*This announcement represents the official position of the Wplace development team and was originally posted by u/WplaceOfficial on Reddit.*