Swirve Blog

Now for this week’s episode of the Sean and Brian Blog - as usual comments Here please:

Hi all,

There weren’t too many questions since last week, so this isn’t going to be a very long post. We’ll answer them below, but first of all want to give a general update on progress.

We’ve spent the last week purely on site styling and on deployment onto real servers.

Styling wise, it currently looks very much like the current game, with the same rough layout and same colors. When you see it we think you’ll probably be underwhelmed by the changes. Our plan is to go into alpha with this theme, and look at improving it as we go. We were initially tempted to try to create a look-and-feel that doesn’t look like something from the nineties, but decided that it would cause an unnecessary delay. So we hope that when you see it, you’ll forgive us for not making it as shiny as it deserves to be. As well as improving the design incrementally as we go, we hope to introduce a feature later on in the year that will allow you to choose your preferred theme for the site, which can be either an official or community-made theme.

In terms of deployment for alpha, we’re pretty much ready to go.

The alpha version will be complete, apart from unfixed bugs and the purchasing of credits for premium features (will be disabled). On Monday we plan to start with a very small test group - tools developers, staff and some mods mainly. At that point, these people can get a bit of a preview of the site (and pass on their impressions and screenshots to everyone else, if they like). The server will be up and down for most of the week as we deploy fixes. If things go well, we’ll invite in more testers as the days go by.

Alpha testers will be notified by email about when then can visit the site and sign in. To get in, they’ll need to validate their email address, which is how we’re going to manage the size of the testing group - i.e., whitelisting people’s email addresses as we go.

So, initially, we’ll invite in a small number of people for a kind of sneak look, and expand the group over time as quickly as we can manage. During testing we expect we’ll be working fast to keep up with the bugs that are reported, although we’ll hopefully nail most of the big ones early on before most people ever see them.

On to questions:

Luth: [regarding start of alpha testing] Is this on gen, or some sort of private testing grounds?

The alpha we’re talking about above is going to be a private testing ground, into which we’ll invite people from those that have applied via email. When we think the code is ready for wider consumption, we’ll arrange to move it onto genesis. What this will really entail is decommissioning the old genesis server, and pointing the genesis link on swirve.com to the new server with the new code.

Domain name questions/suggestions

We hear what you guys are saying about the domain name being potentially blocked from some locations by fun-hating firewalls. Our solution to this is that we’ll create another domain that the site can be accessed from, probably something like utopia.joltonline.com, but still keep utopia-game.com as our main domain. This should help people access the site from where they need to. Thanks for all the suggestions for other names, which we saw in the forums. However, we intend to stick with utopia-game.com, because (a) it properly reflects the fact that we’re talking about the original version of the game, not a spin-off, and (b) we want to move on from endless hours of domain hunting. If it’s any consolation, we had considered many of the same names as you guys suggested.

Hurlin: If the monarch had the ability at the end of the inactive period when the account was going to be auto deleted to be given the option to “tick a box” and retain that province and invite a new player to occupy it; that would greatly improve Kingdoms and create a much more solid environment.

Thanks for the feedback. This makes sense, and is more consistent with the existing workflow, so we’ve put it on our todo list. Hopefully sometime during testing we’ll get a chance to drop it in.

Thanks everyone for your continued patience.

Sean & Brian

Time for this week’s instalment from Brian and Sean - please comment here as usual:

Hey All,

Thanks for the enthusiastic and boisterous response last week. :-) We’ll update you on some news and then we’ll deal with the questions from last week.

We have decided that the domain name for Utopia will be utopia-game.com. This means Utopia will still be called “Utopia” - no “Classic” to be seen. There’s nothing of interest at utopia-game.com as of yet, but everything new will run there - from the closed alpha onwards.

Last week, there was a pretty big furore over our comments on two topics.
1) Changes to the forum regarding suggestions.
2) Whether we’ll be able to discern good ideas from bad ideas.

Regarding the changes to the forum. We misinterpreted the question. It was our fault, we didn’t read the question correctly. Let’s try again:

Is it acceptable that the community and the community support team work together to revamp the forums for a more productive outcome, possibly benefiting your development processes and the environment of which we currently live?

Yes. It’s acceptable to work with the community support team to come up with ideas for revamping the forums.

If the above answer is yes, and the community has your permission to help in a recreation of the forums, can you in any way aid us in actually accomplishing something, or having someone see that it is promptly addressed and action is taken?

No. We also want to improve the suggestions process, but we’ll take time to consider it. We’ll try using it in its current guise and see where it falls down for us, then we’ll establish how it should change to facilitate our needs. We’ll also want to consider how you guys want it to change and we’ll do our best to choose the solution that’s most beneficial for the game. This job will take time and dedication from us. With the current release we can’t afford to do that job justice at the moment.

If that above answer is no, then do you already have something in mind to address this issue, and when can we expect to see some results?

We will turn our eyes to it after the release when we’ll plan what comes next. In the meantime, we’ll have a sticky added to the suggestions forum, where discussions on how to improve the suggestions forum can go. Anyone, community, mods and support team will be free to contribute there.

The other contentious issue was that we boldly claimed that we could tell a good idea from a bad one. Some people asked:

Why do you expect us to take this at face value?

Is it true that you eat babies?

Fair questions indeed. We’re learning about the game. We know a lot about the inner workings, but we don’t know everything about the game. We’re going to make decisions about the game and sometimes, hopefully rarely, we’ll make the wrong decisions. Even when we’re sure we’re right, sometimes it’ll turn out that we’re wrong. We’ll ask for advice and we’ll listen to that advice, but we may not always follow it. In the end it is important that we are capable of making sensible strategic decisions for the long term future of the game.

OK, on to the other questions:

Fate 1316: Could you please elaborate more on the invite system? How exactly would that work?

A monarch can invite people (other province leaders or email addresses) into his/her kingdom. These invitees can either be invited into a space in the kingdom or an abandoned province. A province can become abandoned in a number of ways:

1) A province leader decides to leave the game - they can optionally choose to abandon their province, leaving resources intact.

2) A province leader decides to accept an invitation into another province. They can optionally choose to abandon their province, leaving resources intact.
The province will grow/decay while nobody has access to it. It can also be attacked.

Palem: How will you define an ‘abandoned prov’? Simply Inactive or will the owner have to like ’sign off’ his prov to the kd or something like that?

See above.

Palem: If an abandoned prov is just an inactive one, will the 10 day inactive rule still be in effect?

See above.

Palem: Aside from that it’s nice to see things are almost done. When can we expect the new Gen age with the new code?

We expect to start the closed alpha next week, we’ll know better then.

Sweetiepie: What exactly do these comments imply?

“Eventually need to revisit the broader topic of kingdom formation, getting into a good kingdom, balancing kingdom skill levels out, creating a nurturing environment for newbies, and keeping it all fun”

This is future-talk. In the future, we’ll look at lots of things in the future to maintain a healthy, competitive environment for everyone.

Spoiled Techie: You said you will keep Utopia up and running until it stops making money… Have you done any estimates of how many users it will fall when it stops making money?

No. That’s actually not what was said. We said:

Fundamentally, so long as the game can be run without losing money, no one will want to shut it down.

We’re not thinking about minimum number of users to survive. We’re thinking about growing growing growing. We wouldn’t choose to work on a dead-end project. Put all ideas of a user-countdown to self-destruction out of your head. This game is here to stay.

DHaran: Some blogs ago you talked about new ideas on preventing cheating. Will these new systems be in place for the new age of WoL? And how exactly are they an improvement from the old cheating detections. Specifically, xlogging since xlogging is lame and xloggers should all burn. And multis too, they suck.

We said that we will progress cheat detection slowly to avoid false-positives. The main difference will be in using a heuristical approach in addition to the current methods. The heuristical approach will take time to tailor. Don’t expect any big changes immediately.

MorbidAngel: Are there any plans regarding advertising utopia after code is done?

Yes. It’s worth saying again. We plan to advertise the game once everything running smoothly and looks well. That won’t be day-1 on WoL. Timing is crucial. We will be advertising as soon as we believe the game is ready for it.

Brian & Sean

Time for another blog entry from Brian and Sean - please comment Here as usual:

We’re tight on time this week, so let’s get straight to Q&As.

Ezzerland: So you’d only consider mergers of kingdoms that are without enough provinces to handle the merger? In the hypothetical situation that this is true, would it be against the rules to kill people off in your kingdom until you are small enough to merge with the kingdom you want to, with the players you want to? … Is there any possible consideration on how the game should be fit to expand?

The mergers idea isn’t decided on or finalized, so everything regarding them is, for the moment, hypothetical. We imagine that if we implemented them, it would be to help out very small kingdoms. On that basis, only two kingdoms that can fit together into one kingdom could merge. It sounds like you want to instead do something about the problem of in-actives. That’s a different problem, and not one that we’re talking about solving with mergers.

DHaran: Sean and Brian, can you comment on this? What are the chances Jolt takes UC away from you and closes up shop like NS? The player base is already dying, what realistic time frame are they giving you to rebuild the community?

So far as we’re concerned, there is zero chance of this happening for as long as we’re here. And there’s no time limit set for rebuilding the community. Fundamentally, so long as the game can be run without losing money, no one will want to shut it down.

Luth: and i’m a bit disappointed that this much time has elapsed and we still have no definitive (or even possible) dates. Are we looking at 2 weeks? another month? another 6 months?

Ezzerland: In terms of coding the game itself, dismissing plausible bugs or other errors that may set you back, on a percentage scale, how much of the games recode would you say you have complete? 75%? What area’s are left to cover?
Ezzerland: If the game is intended to head on genesis for testing first, with the new code, how long do you believe the testing will last? May this delay the WoL age further?

We’ll take these three questions together. In terms of code completion, we are about 98% done. Left on the board are:

* Changing/resetting account password
* Defecting
* Site styling/layout/graphic design
* Production server setup and deployment

We’re hoping to start inviting alpha testers in next week. We’ll then be busy with fixing bugs and optimizing site performance for a while. It’s hard to say how long that will take until we see how the first week or two of testing goes. We’re keen to get the game onto WoL as soon as possible, but at the same time (as we said before), don’t want to comprise on quality. You should assume that the current WoL age is going to continue for at least another month, while we get all this testing done.

Ezzerland: Is it acceptable that the community and the community support team work together to revamp the forums for a more productive outcome, possibly benefiting your development processes and the environment of which we currently live?

We’re afraid we don’t know what you’re referring to here. Is this in relation to a particular suggestion already made? In any case, the forums in Lydias’ jurisdiction, so if you want to change something about them, you should probably direct your question her way.

Ezzerland: Will the games current functionality change in any way? Are you intending to keep the game on track with its original core purposes?

As we’ve said before, none of the game play is changing at all, at least not yet. Some functionality will hopefully be improved, with a better sign up and log in process, cleaner navigation, no frames or MIDI music, and an improved version of trading/moving based on invites instead of copy-and-paste codes.

Instead of move codes, a monarch can send invites out for empty slots in a kingdom. Instead of trading, a monarch can send out invites to take over abandoned provinces in the kingdom. Both of these have the same limits in place as moving and trading, for the moment at least. We know that moving/trading is perhaps one of the most contentious issues in the game. This new implementation is at least more streamlined and easier to use. We’ll know we’ll eventually need to revisit the broader topic of kingdom formation, getting into a good kingdom, balancing kingdom skill levels out, creating a nurturing environment for newbies, and keeping it all fun. For the moment, the invite system works nicer than passing codes around while basically achieving the same thing, and will be a good basis for future improvements. Soon enough you’ll get a chance to try it out and give us feedback.

Ezzerland: Do you believe you know enough about the game or the history of the game to discern what is a good implementation and what is not?

Toadi: Do you think you master the game well enough to analyze these suggestions and determine whether or not it is something that would be good for the game or not?

We’ll take these two together again. Apparently there’s a real crisis of faith in our abilities! It’s a broad question, and its impossible for us to say that in all circumstances we have an immediate intuition on what the right direction is regarding an issue of game design. However, in most cases its pretty obvious. We’ve been steeped in things utopian for 5 months now, including having completely analysed every line of its source code, and have a very strong understanding of it. But don’t worry, if we don’t have a confident opinion regarding a particular suggestion, we have no problem looking for other opinions. And before you worry about the quality of the opinions we might receive, accept our assurances that we can also tell the difference between the good, the bad and the ugly in that department too :-)

A little later than usual here is today’s blog post from Brian and Sean :) Comments here please.

Hey All,

Thanks for all the feedback last week.  There was some really constructive discussion which has got to be beneficial for all of us.

Clearly people are quite polarized on the Council of Elders idea.  Don’t fear, nothing has been decided on it yet.  We’ll review all your input on this again later before we make any decisions.

Regarding gathering suggestions in a structured format.  After this release we plan on focusing some effort on this process.  What structure that process will take is still to be decided.  There is already a suggestions forum section (rather than just a thread) by the way.

There was some discussion about a feature to share province information with the kingdom monarch.  Any feature like this would have to be optional.  At the moment a monarch can’t force their kingdom-mates to use any tools outside of Utopia.  This is handy as it’s easy to draw a line in the sand regarding monarch’s power.  To make an in-game tool optional would require a a rewrite of the Utopian constitution!  It’s not hard to do, but philosophically we’d have to be ensure it would be good for the game.

Now for your questions…

Shockwave’s Minge: Are there any plans to add formal in-game options and features for alliances?
We have talked about allowing kingdoms to “declare” their alliance.  Perhaps they could add an alliance banner in addition to the kingdom banner.  I’m sure your question relates to more substantial features though - we haven’t discussed anything further on alliance features yet.

Ezzerland: Will you consider focusing the forum in a more organized an proper manner for future suggestions? Do you have that power?
We’ll definitely consider it.  Suggestions will play a much larger role in the next round of development, so this is important to us.  Regarding power, we shouldn’t need to fight anyone for something like that, we’ll try asking nicely.

Ezzerland (re kingdom merges): What happens if two 20 or 25 prov kd’s conjoin, where do the “lost” provinces/players go?
Bearing in mind that this kingdom merging is a fictional feature… while there is an upper limit on kingdom sizes we wouldn’t allow two kingdoms to merge if combined they would exceed the max kingdom size.

redhorse: When is this age gonna end?
Nice question.  This age will end when we’re ready to put the new code on WoL.  Clearly that’s not a definitive answer, all we can say is we’ll give plenty of notice.  The new code will go onto Genesis before WoL, so until that happens you can rest assured that the age isn’t about to end.

Brian & Sean