Operations

Running the game as a live service: how players find it, how the community is kept safe, what a new player sees first, what we measure, and how it reaches more people. Numbers are starting targets for beta and are revised from data. Systems details are 03-systems.md’s; infrastructure is 04-architecture.md’s.

1. Go-to-market

Phase	Audience	Channel	Goal
Phase 0–B	Foster only; bots and AI playtesters (D28)	None: private until launch	Feel and art sign-off, bot-measured pacing and load
Reveal (D29)	Everyone on web and desktop	Steam page, a playable web link anyone can open, short clips, creators	Wishlists and first-week players; retention data starts here
Phase C (launch)	Everyone	Steam, App Store, Google Play, web	1–5k CCU, D30 targets below

The web link is the hook. No other MMO of this kind plays in a browser tab in under a minute. Every clip, post and creator video links to it.
Clip-ready moments, built on purpose: a titan docking, the Kneeling, the Charge, the Pale Tenant’s resolution, the Convergence. Each Act event is a dated marketing beat, announced a Turning ahead.
Creators: a creator program from Phase B (early access to Act events, cosmetic codes, no pay for coverage).
Positioning: “MapleStory’s feel in a world that moves”, never “MapleStory clone.”
Pricing: free to play; cosmetic shop and subscription from Phase B in test mode (00-canon.md). Prices set from beta conversion, not guessed.

2. Community

Discord is the home: announcements, patch notes, bug reports, LFG, one channel per region. A bot posts each Turning’s Stride, the Sunline and upcoming Act events from the event bus (04-architecture.md §3).
Patch notes every content push, in plain words, linked in game.
Dev updates each Turning in beta: what changed, what is next, the top three player complaints and what we did about them.
Player council after launch: 10–15 invited players across play styles, a private channel, read-only access to roadmap drafts. None before launch (D28).
In-game: the Archive records world firsts and Act outcomes; titles for event participation.

3. Moderation operations

What can carry user text at launch

Surface	Launch state	Control
Chat	Pings, markers, raid callouts and preset phrases only (D17)	Nothing to moderate
Character names	Free text, 3–14 letters	Filter at creation (wordlist plus a model check), reserved list (NPC and lore names), rename on report
Guild names	Free text, 3–20 characters	Same filter; GM review of reported names within 24 h
Guild free chat (later, D17)	Verified 16+ only, opt-in	Filter, report button, 7-day log retention for review
Market listings, mail	Item ids and brass only, no text	Nothing to moderate

Reports and actions

Report button on every player name and guild (reason picker, no free text at launch).
Reports go to the GM queue in worldd’s admin tool (04-architecture.md §9), with the reported character’s last hour of actions attached.
Actions: warn, forced rename, chat or trade mute, temporary ban, permanent ban, bot flag (silent zero on the Sunline, 08-scale.md §10). Every action is audited.
Response targets: names within 24 h; harassment and child-safety reports within 4 h in beta, 1 h at launch; appeals within 72 h.

Child safety and privacy

Age gate 13+ at account creation; under-13 accounts are refused, not restricted, so COPPA consent flows are not needed. Store ratings target ESRB E10+ / PEGI 7 (no gore, cartoon fantasy violence).
No free text for under-16 accounts at any point.
CCPA/CPRA: privacy policy, data export and deletion requests through Nakama account tools within 45 days; no sale of personal data; analytics events keyed to an internal id, not email. GDPR applies when the EU region opens.
Child-safety reports escalate straight to Foster and are preserved; legal reporting obligations followed.

Staffing

Phase	Moderation
Phase A	Foster and agents triage; volunteer moderators from the player council for Discord only
Phase B	One part-time paid community manager and moderator; GM tools v1
Phase C	Two moderators covering US evenings and weekends; on-call rota for child-safety reports; agents pre-sort the queue

4. First-time experience

The first session must teach three things only, in this order, and nothing else is required before level 10: 1. Move and fight on platforms and ropes. 2. Your lantern keeps you alive, and the dark is dangerous without it. 3. Motes go home: every Lampghost you put out banks fire that makes your town stronger.

Step	Where	Time	Teaches
Create	Class pick in the Lodge yard: a small platform map where any of the four can be played with its level 1–8 kit (the level-30 mobility skill arrives with branches) against dummies, switching freely, each with its complexity label (`03-systems.md` §4.1); then appearance. The base class is permanent, and players pick on how a class moves, which a video cannot show	≤ 4 min (yard skippable)	Class fantasy and feel
Prologue	Instanced: the Pilgrim’s Stair during a staged Kneeling, Fen Cobble, the Lighting at the Vent; beat sheet in `11-prologue.md`	≤ 5 min	Move, climb; your lantern
First field	Mossy Field: Puddlings, motes cling to your lantern	≤ 5 min	Fight; motes are cargo
First bank	Back to the foot of the Stair; the motes you banked stream up into Mossback; the Sunline gauge ticks	≤ 3 min	Every kill matters to everyone
Into the live world	Step out of the instance into the live Lantern Town, crowded	—	This is an MMO
First party	A quest that is easier with others; party finder offered, never forced	by level 6	Together is better
Lodge	Induction at 10	~45–60 min	Your class’s place in the world

The Create step as built: New character opens the yard (map 20) in the client’s own sim, as the Warden; the class buttons switch on the spot, Choose goes on to naming, and Begin makes the character as the chosen class on worldd and plays it. Choosing straight away skips the yard. Appearance is not built yet and comes later.

Rules: - One new UI element per step; the HUD starts with health, the lantern gauge and the class resource bar only. - No text box over three lines; no screen that cannot be skipped after the first time. - The first death happens near light and costs nothing but motes, so the scatter rule is learned cheaply. - The bot suite plays the whole first session on every merge (06-roadmap.md Phase 1).

5. Analytics and retention

Event taxonomy

Events go to Postgres events (later ClickHouse, 04-architecture.md §3), named domain.action, each with account id, character id, level, platform, channel, map and world time.

Domain	Events
`session`	`start`, `end`, `transfer`, `disconnect` (with reason)
`ftue`	`create`, `step_complete` (step id), `skip`, `first_death`, `first_bank`, `first_party`, `lodge`
`progress`	`level_up`, `quest_accept`, `quest_complete`, `quest_abandon`, `branch_choose`
`light`	`lantern_out`, `relight`, `motes_banked` (count, where), `motes_scattered`, `motes_recovered`
`world`	`sunline_contribution`, `stride_change`, `act_event_join`, `world_boss_join`, `dawnmark_seen`
`social`	`party_join`, `party_leave`, `guild_join`, `friend_add`, `ping`, `report`
`economy`	`brass_in`, `brass_out` (source or sink), `market_list`, `market_buy`, `trade`
`store`	`view`, `purchase`, `subscribe`, `cancel`
`tech`	`fps_bucket`, `rtt_bucket`, `load_time`, `crash`

Retention targets (beta, revised at launch)

Metric	Target	Why
First-session completion to Lodge (level 10)	60%	The FTUE works
D1	40%	Genre norm for a good free MMO on PC
D7	20%
D30	10%
Players in a party by level 20	50%	Pillar 4
Weekly actives banking motes to the Sunline	60%	`08-scale.md` §12
Median session length	45–75 min	Fits the 3 h cycle without demanding it
Payer conversion (30 days)	3–5%	Cosmetics and subscription only

A drop of more than 10% at any FTUE step is a release blocker for the next content push.

6. Localization

All strings through tr() from day one (04-architecture.md §8.4); no text in textures; UI layouts tested at +40% string length.
Launch: English. First wave (season 2): Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Latin America), German, French. Second wave: Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, which need CJK and Thai font fallbacks (Noto Sans, D20) and a second region.
Translation by LLM with a glossary lock (09-glossary.md terms translated once and frozen per language) and native-speaker review of every quest line before release.
Proper nouns keep their English form unless the glossary gives a translation; puns in names get a translator’s note.

7. Accessibility

Area	Requirement
Color	Hostile Lampghosts read by the coloured coldlight body plus the stolen ember, never by cyan alone (`05-art-audio.md`); colorblind presets for UI accents and raid markers
Light and dark	Brightness and gamma sliders; a “readable dark” option raises the floor of darkness without removing light gameplay; Glare intensity slider
Motion	Screen shake and footfall tremor toggles; reduce flashes option for Lampghost pops and the Second Noon
Text	UI scale 80–150%; Atkinson Hyperlegible as a dyslexia-friendly font option (D20); subtitles for every voiced or sung line
Input	Full key and button remapping; hold-to-toggle options; one-handed touch layout; auto-pickup; gamepad on desktop
Audio	Separate volume for music, effects, ambience and UI; visual cues for every gameplay-relevant sound (Bells, the Charge warning, Lampghosts nearby)
Timing	No quick-time events; every timed mechanic in solo content has a slower assist mode; raid callouts also shown as markers
Cognitive	Quest tracker with the next step always visible; the three FTUE lessons repeatable from the Lodge

Accessibility options are tested by the bot suite where possible (UI scale, remapping) and by at least two disabled players in each beta phase.

8. Backups

Until pgBackRest lands (04-architecture.md §7.5, D30), the game host takes nightly logical dumps. Nothing else on the host is backed up, and nothing leaves it yet.

Item	Setting
What	`pg_dump -Fc` of `delve_world` (worldd) and `delve_nakama` (accounts), as `postgres`; other databases on the host are not ours and are not touched
When	`delve-backup.timer`, 03:30 UTC nightly, `Persistent=true` (a run missed while the host was down happens at boot)
Where	`/var/backups/delve/<db>-<UTC stamp>.dump`, root-owned dir 0700, files 0600; each dump is checked with `pg_restore --list` before it is kept
Retention	14 days, pruned only after a night where every dump succeeded
Failure	The service exits non-zero and logs to the journal (`journalctl -u delve-backup`); a failed dump leaves no partial file
Install	`deploy/host.sh install-backups`, run by every `deploy/deploy.sh`; the script is installed as `/usr/local/sbin/delve-pg-backup`
Roles	Not in the dumps: `host.sh ensure-db` recreates them from `/opt/delve/env`

Restore drill: ssh fdhproperty sudo /opt/delve/app/deploy/restore-drill.sh restores the newest delve_world dump into a scratch database, delve_world_drill, compares count(*) of characters with the live database, and drops the scratch database. It only reads the live database. A mismatch fails the drill; characters made since the dump also cause one. Run it after the first nightly dump and after any change to the backup path.

Restoring for real: stop delve-worldd, delve-server and delve-nakama, then pg_restore --clean --if-exists -d <db> <dump> as postgres, and start them again.