Six months ago I had a great idea for EFER: let players keep what they earned forever. Big bases. Permanent factions. Cross-season progression. The kind of MMO where your year-two character is stronger than your year-one character.
I designed it. I wrote the spec. I built the data model. Then I playtested it for two weeks.
It was the worst two weeks of the project.
What I had designed
Cross-season progression in an MMO-style Roblox game sounds great on paper. Year-one players build bases. Year-two players have bigger bases. Year-three players have fortress networks. The world grows richer. The grind stays meaningful.
The GDD I wrote had diagrams. Flow charts. A year-two roadmap. It was a beautiful document.
It was wrong.
What happened in playtest
Three things happened in the first two weeks of playtesting that killed the idea.
First: the players who started in week 1 were unbeatable by week 2. They had the best gear, the best reputation, the best land. New players quit in the first session because they could see they would never catch up.
Second: the older players stopped playing. They had won. The game had nothing left to give them. They logged in once a week to maintain their base, then once a month, then not at all.
Third: my Discord went quiet. There was nothing to argue about. There was nothing to compete over. The drama was gone.
The replacement: a 30-day reset
I tore out the cross-season progression and replaced it with a hard 30-day reset. Every realm claim, every reputation point, every built outpost — gone at day 30. New season. New war. New fight for the same territory.
The first playtest after that change was the best playtest I had ever run.
Why the reset works
- New players could win. If you grind hard for two weeks, you can out-claim a veteran who logs in once a week. The season is the great equalizer.
- Veterans came back. The reset gave them a reason to re-engage. Every season is a fresh ladder to climb.
- The Discord exploded. Faction drama, raid coordination, post-season lore arguments. The community became the game.
The lesson I am taking forward
A beautiful design document is not the same as a working design. I will not commit to a major system again without a two-week playtest first.
The 30-day reset was almost a “ship it and see” decision. I am glad I playtested before shipping.
What I am working on this week
- Polishing the Convergence hub (visual fidelity is at 60 percent of where I want it)
- The Clockwork faction construct-summon skill (the animation is fighting me)
- The post-reset season-transition cinematic (15 seconds of footage, 4 days of iteration)
- One specific bug where the night-raid spawn sometimes picks the wrong territory — cause was a stale reference to the contested-zone flag. Found it yesterday.
Try EFER: Roblox -> Search “Eternal Fusion: Eternal Realms”
Read the lore book: Eternal Fusion: Eternal Realms — The Lore Book on Gumroad
Join Discord: farouks-fusion.com — link in the main nav
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