Today's development update is a little bit different to usual. There will be no art additions for this one. And unfortunately, we are delaying the start of May's new challenge to next week, May 15th. Thank you for your patience!

We have some new features and upgrades in today's update.

Blocking



Blocking has been upgraded. No longer will you be able to toggle a post's visibility - it just gets removed from view. The same for thread listings. Blocking should shield you from ever having to interact with that user again, so we felt it made no sense to still offer players the option to read posts by a player they had blocked. Additionally, this will now hide their entire den from view, and should you happen to stumble across lions they own - don't worry! Those lions will now be blocked from view too. This allows you, as a player, to customise who you do and don't want to see content from.

Marking Censorship

We have closely followed some of the heated discussions that came about since rumble markings were introduced. Whilst we have had to deal with a lot of problematic and offensive content, there have been reasonable discussions held amongst the chaos and we took a lot of note of those. Please remember, if your posts have been deleted, or you have been issued a ban - it's because you have broken our Terms of Service and Code of Conduct. Please make sure you are aware of our Code of Conduct when conducting yourself on Lioden - you must abide by these rules, and this is non negotiable. The main aim of our CoC is: be nice and considerate of others. Consider some of the things you are submitting when posting to the forums, or in News Comments, and make sure they don't conflict with this.

As a game, we always listen to our players. You may not always feel that your voice is heard, but be assured, we keep tabs - we just can't reply to every thread or many at all, as it goes. Unfortunately, we also cannot implement every change that users request, and have to make tough decisions. We also cannot please everyone, no matter how much we'd like to try. So we take our direction in a way that feels - for us - to be morally correct and in the true spirit of the game, whilst trying to indulge players where we can -- without throwing the game completely out of balance.

This brings me to finally discuss the other feature released today:



The Marking Censor can be found in your den settings at the bottom.

At current, you can list an unlimited number of markings that you wish to 'hide' on Lioden. When these are saved, markings will still be breedable and applicable, but you as a user won't see that lion's image anymore without first pressing a toggle. This will allow you to observe the lion's page and marking and decor list to decide whether or not you want to see the image. This will affect nobody else but your own account. The reason this hides the entire image rather than the marking is that we hope to eventually turn back to 'flat', saved single images for lions rather than the current layered state, and regenerating an individual lion picture for each player that views it would cause more strain on our server than it's worth. Additionally, this maintains the integrity of the lion - every lion has its own design - whether it was applied, customised or bred - and we want to make sure we are displaying true lion images for each one.



We hope to begin extending self-censorship where possible for users to customise their own experience. Blocking any image on the site is a rather ambitious task and one we are unlikely to be able to achieve at any point in the near future, but can be achieved by end users already via adblocking software. However, we realise that markings have many different stage files (over 400) and to block so many could be time consuming, unlike a single image in explore.

Tag Disabling



To add on to the above, you now have the option to toggle off user tags. This will mean no tags will appear at all on your account - but if you have one set, that will still show to other players that don't have this option enabled. Some animated tags with flashing or flickering lights can pose a hazard for users with photosensitive epilepsy, and as we do not pre-moderate user content before it is submitted, we cannot be sure if a tag would be a risk or not before it is flagged up to us. We hope this will aid in accessibility and also give users just the preference to not see them if they don't want to. As a note, on the members online page, if you have this setting enabled, it will just show our default image.

Finally, we'd like to end this news post by extending a hand to you all. We care deeply for all of you. You, as the community, matter more than you know. We love reading your theories, your jokes, your stories. We love seeing you trade and setup forum games and challenges. We love the excitement you feel when you breed that perfect cub and you can't wait to share it.

Thank you for playing.

Raffle Lioness

Congrats SlicedRadish (#106060)! You have won last week's Nudar lady, woo!
A new Sahara lady with Royal Lace, Feline 7 Noctis, and the ninth Dindefelo Falls background is up for impressing in the Special Lioness area linked here!

Tags!
Shad has remade some older tags, as well as added several new tags this month in the Appreciation, May, and Miscellaneous categories!

Poll Results -You voted for the "Night" combo base! But we've heardyour concerns about the stud breeding issues and we'll think about how to implement this safely! Meanwhile, we can't wait to see your night combo mockups in suggestion boards!

NEW POLL - What do you think V'Kai does to find groupies for you? Hmmm!!!

Next Update: Community + Challenge Update - May 15th!
Next Development Update: June 12th!!