Swirve Blog

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