Happy New Year's Day, everyone! It's the beginning of yet another revolution around the sun and therefore, a fresh start not just for all of us, but for Glowchus as well! We want to take a moment to say, once again, how much we appreciate you all and how much fun it's been having the community actively together again - especially this past year or so. Things have been really popping around here and we've had so many new people join the fray - and not just new people either! This past year has definitely been the year of returning faces. Hopefully it will be an amazing one for us all - but as for Glowchus, we have a lot of things planned and updates to cover, so we're just going to dive right into it!

Beta Status

The original plan was for the website to be out of beta by the time New Years rolled around, but unfortunately, we're not really comfortable saying that we're officially past the beta phase at this point in time. We're getting there, but we're not quite there yet. We're aiming for sometime within the next few months here, with a worst case scenario of mid-late June. There are too many features that haven't been implemented and values that are subject to change, but we're actively working on them almost every day of the week.

Staff Pay

We have come to a mutual agreement that, as of New Year's Day 2024, website staff (founders included) will no longer receive staff pay. Members of the Glowchus administrative team will play the game and make their earnings through said participation - the same as everyone else. From this point forward, with the sole exception of those of you contributing art to the community, staff positions will be purely volunteer and will not receive benefits in absolutely any way.

G2 Main Story Events

Generation 2 Main Story Prompts are available for both Sun and Moon for G2-001 through G2-005. Sun has an extra two prompts and theirs go all the way through G2-007, but we're struggling to find some of the information for earlier RS events so we need to decide whether we're going to rewrite them or keep searching for what we had previously. But we're still steadily working on getting them all uploaded!

G2 Post Story Events

G2 Post Story Prompts are live, starting with New Beginnings! Those of you who have been with us for a long time may recognize this prompt, as it was the first one we ran back when we had the original website! It's been updated a little bit since then. It's Plot Point and two associated Mission prompts will hopefully be along here shortly, but we're still missing a lot of the information we had previously and, like the G2 Main Story events, we need to decide whether we want to keep searching for what we had or just start rewriting things entirely.

Monthly Prompts

Monthly prompts should have begun the minute this update post went live, starting with Begin Again! From this point forward, there will be a new prompt with unique themes to participate in every month. We're still opting for the more leisurely/laid back approach to ARPGs, so these prompts will have no deadline, but each one can only be participated in once per user.

Evolved Characters

Glowchus is an ARPG, meaning that every form of both character and user progression is earned through participation in prompts, buying items, etc. Characters registered on the website can start at either their base or baby stages - they cannot be fully or partially evolved. This is nothing new - this was a feature in this community even as far back as the beginning of RS. Nevertheless, we've had some characters sneaking through the cracks and starting their ARPG adventures at evolutionary stages they shouldn't have. We just wanted to post this as a general reminder that characters cannot start out at evolved stages and while some characters have managed to get away with it, we'll be really cracking down on that sort of thing starting this year!

Radiance Distribution

There was some talk about possibly increasing the gallery rate for Radiance, so we wanted to let you guys know that, what we decided on instead, was change the prompt submission rate for Radiance. Because the focus of the ARPG has always been the progression of the player/their character through prompt submissions, we figured that the best way to go about any increase in Radiance distribution would be through ARPG specific activity. So prompts have had their Radiance distribution boosted by x2 (ex. storyline prompts were previously 15R but now they're 30R). It's possible that we may do one more boost in the future, but we're going to wait and see how these rates hold up first. Remember, we're still in beta and systems/rates/etc are subject to change drastically throughout this time period. Once we're out of beta, things like this won't change (and if they do, it will not be without good reason).

Character Submission Eligibility Requirements

Eligibility requirements for Main Characters have been lifted. You no longer need to meet any goals before you can submit new Main Characters. This is not the case for Sides, however. They will still be following the same guidelines for the time being. We are, however, reducing the eligibility requirements for them to a 1 week cooldown + at least 1 gallery submission (not counting their masterlist art).

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Once again, happy new years everyone!! We're so grateful for all the people who make up this incredible community and we're looking forward to seeing what this year (and hopefully many more to come) bring us!