As always, on behalf of the myriad of developers, artists, and designers who have worked on Pox Nora over its lifespan, I want to thank you all for your support of the game through all these years.

As we enter the 18th year of Pox, I (meaning myself, Slugbait) wanted to give an update on what my goals for Pox Nora are in the immediate future and further out.

Immediate Future
First of all, another balance patch is in the works and should be released in the next few weeks. This has a significant amount of changes for all factions including new abilities on some champions. Keep an eye out for that in August.

Later
Further out, a lot of the focus will be on three things:
1. further balance changes as needed and submitted by the player design team
2. continued quality of life improvements to the Pox Nora client
3. bug fixes in game logic in the Pox Nora server

Long term
The biggest long term goal is to improve the Pox Nora client's performance, and for that I want to explain a little and discuss what kind of effort it will take to fix it.

Pox Nora's Unity client was written initially on Unity 5 and was written primarily using the Unity canvas system. This is a system primarily used by UI but in the case of Pox Nora, it allows the underlying code from the original Java client (ported to a c# library) to perform the same visual layout of the map, units, visual effects, and the like. The new UI is then layered on top of that as another Unity UI canvas. The short version of the problem with this is that the Unity UI canvas system breaks down when you have many elements, and various visual effects or having a significant number of units or things like terrain changes cause the system to spend a lot of time reordering and repainting that canvas. Unity's official response to this is that the canvas should be used sparingly, or newer UI systems they have designed should be used. In short, their answer is don't use this.

So what kind of solution is there? This is something I've examined and mulled over and will continue to look at solutions for. I have some things in mind and want to approach this in a way that will fix the overall performance profile.

After that? There is still work to do in order to make maintainability of the game easier. This has already been ongoing with patch tools created that make larger patches significantly less time consuming (and theoretically less error prone). I want to take this time to thank some members of the Pox Nora community for providing tools to the design team for this, particularly Lanu.

Aside from that, I need to talk to the Desert Owl Games team as we would love to somehow update the PS4 client and do so in a way that allows easier updating so that there is less hamstrung by having to support that client (and the PS Vita client as well, but I really don't know what to do about that since I'd have to drop down to an older version of Unity to even support that device).

So what about another expansion?
At this point, you might be asking yourself "All this talk about updates, balance patches, and QOL is all well and good, but wasn't there talk at one point about another expansion being in the works?" Well, I think it's pretty common knowledge that there was a lot created for that by Desert Owl before things went into hibernation. However, it's not something that is really ready and it's not something that can be easily released, especially with the PS4 client lacking the assets in place for it. So where does that leave it? Well, to be blunt, not anytime soon. It's something I need to discuss with DOG but I can only apologize if this is something that was implied to be happening in the near future. I think it's important to set expectations here. When there is more information, more information will be given.

Anyway, that's enough rambling for one day, so again I would like to thank everyone for playing and I'm looking forward to another year of Pox Nora.

Slugbait
pox caretaker