Dear Time Travelers,
Wait, why do we start our posts with Time Travelers? Why Chromie? Is this server the right one for me, why are you open-source, etc? We hope to cover all this and more given our recent influx of new players on Chromiecraft.
Welcome to Chromiecraft!
First things first, a huge welcome to everybody either joining us for the first time, rejoining us and of course our awesome existing player base for being so kind and accommodating to our so called ‚refugees‘. To say it caught us slightly off-guard is an understatement, with over 4000 new accounts made in the last 7 days. That meant capped out email limits, manual creation of accounts, capped out tickets etc. Thank you all for your patience whilst we got solutions in place.
For those that had accounts manually made and linked, please check your inbox for an email from us confirming the account was made and inviting you to set a new password. We have had a handful of tickets opened where people hadn’t received the emails (some found their way into spam boxes), if you didn’t please click on this link and reset your password to one of your own choice – https://www.chromiecraft.com/en/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword.
Chromiecraft: a small history lesson
Chromiecraft started back in December 2020, by the same people behind Azerothcore. The aim was simple, have forced level brackets (so 1-19, 20-29 etc) where content can be tested, bugs can be reported, triaged, a fix put in place, tested then made live (all of which comes with rewards of Chromiepoints, more on that below). We truly believe that Open-Source is the way forward in this scene and one of our founders, Shin, created the below video to best explain it:
That’s also why we have the name Chromiecraft (moving through timelines, crafting the server up as we go) and start with ‚Dear Time-Travelers‘ (as you are all going through these timelines with us!).
All about those contributions (and bugs, many bugs)
To date, over 8300 bugs have been reported, with just shy of 7000 of these bugs resolved so far. All of these were reported through Chromiecraft. This was always going to be a multi-year challenge, especially given the makeup of the team (yes, we really are a registered non-profit organisation with each cent reinvested into the server to continue on its mission), each and every fix is open-source, and goes back into Azerothcore and we are steadfast in never allowing the sale of any sort of power, progression or P2W items (gear, player stat boosts, profession / reputation items etc). That’s why we give out on average over a million Chromiepoints (the currency used to get store items) each month to our community! Do check out both our ‚Monthly Contributors‚ posts as well as ‚Monthly PvP winners‚ to find out more, as well as our ‚How to Contribute to Chromiecraft‚ guide. All bugs are handled in Github, this allows us the scale to track them from report to fix, the option to refer back on regressions and is where our dev team spends the majority of their time. We have a form to follow to make it as simple as we can, we do know some people do not want to spend the time to learn how to make a report however so if you find a bug, there are a load of willing players out there who will happily report it and get their rewards for doing so.
Chromiecraft – Features
As mentioned earlier, we have what we call a ‚Hyper-Progressive, Progression through Expansions‘ take on the 3.3.5a base we operate on. As of now, we are about midway through our trip through Northrend, with the next major releases covering Wintergrasp then Ulduar. To answer a common question, no Chromiecraft will not proceed into Cataclysm, but more on that below.
Our base EXP rates are x2, however we have our version of ‚Joyous Journeys‘ active which enhances your XP gain by an additional 50%. This is running until the 20th May, allowing everyone who wants it a quicker journey to level 80. If you wish to disable this, run the in game command .weekendxp j on / .weekendxp j off.
You can also adjust your XP rate anywhere from 0.1 up to 2, by using the command .weekendxprate 1 (adjust the value to what you wish to have).
We also have a ‚Recruit-A-Friend‚ module running which will offer you unlimited rested XP as well as certain rewards for 30 days, click on the hyperlink to find out more. Lastly for our returning players, if you have not played your account for the last 6 months, check your account panel as you will be entitled to a rested XP boost also in the form of our Scroll of Resurrection. This can be toggled by the in game commands .rscroll disable on / .rscroll disable off.
That covers rates, we also have Transmog on the server (the NPCs can be found in the tailoring shops in both Stormwind & Orgrimmar), if you aren’t a fan of the mogs then you can disable it with the ingame command .transmog on/off. Our realm is fully crossfaction (so that means guilds, raids, parties, battlegrounds & arenas), you will still be attacked by other factions guards if you wonder into their territory however. Lastly, we also have multiple different challenge modes on the server! Hardcore, Bloodthirsty and Ironman, are all available, you can also do various combinations of both for exclusive rewards unique to the challenges. All challenges are run on base rates (x1) and are not affected by XP boosts such as Joyous Journeys, Recruit a Friend etc. They also have unique rulesets to them so do please make sure you are familiar with them before commencing your journey to 70 (we introduced these during our TBC phase and to be fair to those who completed it, will remain to 70. We might one day have a unique 1-80 challenge but nothing yet confirmed).
Rules on Chromiecraft
That moves us nicely onto a key feature of our server. Our rules are actively enforced and we expect all those who are playing on our server to follow them at all times. We are famously against all forms of political speech / player names here (there are plenty of places on the internet one can get into those types of debates on, we ensure this is one of the rare places where you cannot), we are here to enjoy Azeroth and escape from the real world, any topic designed for drama or to be divisive in nature isn’t welcome here. Neither are people who use any form of hacks, cheats, automation, or think they can purchase gold or gear. Not only do we permanently ban, we do that for all associated accounts. For gold sellers / buyers, all parties involved are banned (all accounts). We have almost 3000 permanently banned accounts so please don’t become part of that number.
If you see somebody breaking our rules, please do report them using our Support-Ticket system on Discord (unfortunately we don’t support in-game tickets, however if you are not a user of Discord you can also make a topic on our Github forum board for the team to get back to you on). We are a small team of volunteers and Chromiecraft is a hobby for us all, with our own lives, jobs and families in the background to take care of, so please do be patient with us, we do aim to answer all tickets made within 24 hours of them being raised where possible.
The future of Chromiecraft
Given we have now reached the level cap of 80 and are marching towards the final progression bracket (Ruby Sanctum), a lot of people are querying what will happen with the realm. We are honest in that we have years of work still ahead of us to resolve all the reported bugs on Azerothcore, providing there are players on the realm then the server will remain on with all content open.
We also know that regressions happen, changes and modernisations made to the code (the original base is MaNGOS) can throw stuff out elsewhere and not all bugs were captured or dealt with in the earlier brackets. So there is value for us to ‚go agane‘ at some point in the future to catch all those issues, continue to fix stuff etc. We have had some very early conversations internally but our focus is 100% on current content (VoA, Wintergrasp then Ulduar) but when we get to ICC, we will start to make a future plan for another realm to commence. That however is not in our current plans to make it clear but is something to start to review, potentially towards the end of this year.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post, again a warm welcome to everybody joining Chromiecraft and have a best possible rest of the week as you can. Cheers!
The Chromiecraft Team