Swirve Blog

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

Hi Everyone,

We’re going to keep it quite short today, since we’re tight on time and are trying hard to get the alpha version ready for the first test group before end of business. If all goes well, by the time your reading this, the first group should be signing up and getting a first look at the new site. We’ll leave it up to them to comment on how they find it. In the meantime, here’s some screenshots of how it currently looks.

http://yfrog.com/52screenshotutopiathronepp

http://yfrog.com/45screenshotutopiagameprep

On to questions:

Scontan: [Re: IRC] Are you guys considering to help us by providing an official server, wich wont (becosue it cant) be abused by certain groups with administraton powers with the community?

We are thinking about the general issue of instant messaging for the game, and what we can do to make it better. For the future one option is to stay with IRC, in which case we would be interested in hosting an official server. However we are also thinking about promoting a move away from IRC to in-game instant messaging. This would have the advantage of understanding in-game relationships, such as what kingdom someone is in, whether you are at war, and so on.

This seems nicer to us, and is a big benefit from the point of view of new players who will typically be unfamiliar with IRC. We know however that there is more to think about than this - we’d need to look at all the different ways that people use IRC at the moment, including the use of bots, and see how this would fit in.

So, the answer is, yes, we are considering it, but no, we have not come to a decision.

Lead Pipe: So PLEASE consider making some game changes when you begin this next age, and get them figured out early so the transition runs smoother.
A lot of people have been saying this, so we’re going to listen. We don’t want to delay things any more than they already are though, so any changes we implement will not be big.

Infidel2K:   Back on the 20th of May you talked about working on the guide. Are you still looking at the idea of a wiki guide?
Yes, we’re setting up a community driven wiki.  We’ll have more details on this next week.  It may even by live and open to the public by next week.

Luth: Sean and Brian, how long are you anticipating the “alpha” phase of this to last? genesis has already gone triple time, and we’d like some kind of indication as to when we “might” expect it to end.
We’re surprised that you’d even ask!  One thing we can all agree on is that our time estimations haven’t been exactly Nostradamian.  We’ll see how it goes over the next few days with the first small group of alpha testers.  After that we’ll be in a better position to call it.

Sean & Brian