Hover bikes are coming in v1.3.9a!!!

Hello Maiden Nation! This is your Maiden Commander speaking. Ok we've got some good news and we've got some bad news. Which one do you want first? The good news? Alright... the good new is WE'VE ADDED HOVER BIKES AS MOUNTS!!! The new hover bikes are amazingly fun to ride, much more practical from a usage stand point and the colors for the hover bikes are customizable from character customization! Now for the bad news, the hover bikes are replacing the horses as mounts. What!?!?!? Ok, ok calm down and allow us to explain.

First and foremost anyone that has purchased a horse mount is free to request a diamond refund and removal of the hover bike from their account if they are not happy with the hover bike mount that replaced their horse. To request it PM me and we will take care of it as soon as possible. As for the why, as we get closer and closer to open alpha we have to look at some of the older systems/mechanics in the game that need to be cleaned up or revamped and make a decision on how we should proceed.

To date we have always made the decision to revamp instead of remove but the horses unfortunately had too many cases for remove and I will list them below.

1) Horses were great to use as mounts but for the scene and setting they seemed out of place. Flying and running at super speeds made the use of horses kind of meaningless outside of taking photos with them. We tried speeding up the movement of horses to make them more viable as a transportation method but it just looked really, really bad.

2) The horse mechanic was added extremely early in the games development and as many of you know was riddled with bugs. We had 30+ bugs to clean up on the horses alone and because the code was so old and complex it would have taken a significant amount of time to fix them.

3) Keeping horses would have limited the existing mounts that we could add. Horses are extremely specific in their movement and control and we didn't want to have an overly complex system for managing mounts.

With horses having their own unique movement and traveling style it would have had us creating an entirely new system to manage adding non-horse mounts.

The above are the primary reasons why we've decided to move forward with a new system for mounts that would not at this time be able to accommodate horses. The newer more simpler system allows us to do new and cooler things with mounts because the mechanic is more simplified. For example you can get off of your hover bike and it will stay in the 3D space allowing you to walk around it and take pictures while you are not on the bike. Also we now have unique idle animations while you are on the bike. Hover bikes also have lights that can be turned on and off and other special effects being that they are mechanic in nature. Those are a few neat additions that we can add that would have been much more difficult with the outdated and much more complex system for the horses. Also the ability to add the mounts to character customization for color customizing makes way more sense with a mechanical mount than it does with a horse. 

We do understand that some of you with be displeased with our decision but hopefully you will understand that we felt it was a necessary change for the overall health of the game moving forward. We have to make sure that these mechanics are cleaned up and expandable for open alpha.

Feel free to discuss or post questions about this change in #general or #how-to-play. We will be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Maiden Commander Out!