Swirve Blog

It’s weekly blog time from Sean and Brian!

Comments here please as normal

Hey All,

Two main pieces of info for you this week.
1) We’ve done an interview with our kind friends at Alliance Rankings.
2) The results from last week’s poll are in.

The Alliance Rankings interview can be found here: http://alliancerankings.com/article.php?t=4296

Now onto the poll results…
Last week we asked you to vote on whether you’d prefer to restart the age:
1) At the start of August, on the current code
2) At the end of August, on the new code

The results are in and it was very close.  There were 7951 votes at the time of writing and the results were split almost evenly at 3996 - 3955 in favour of restarting at the start of August on the current code.  The extra time will only help the game when we release the new code, so we’re going to go with the majority.  Here is the schedule:

Monday August 3rd @ Midnight: Current WoL age ends.
Tuesday August 4th (Middle of day): Freeze time for new age begins.
This age will last for approx 6 weeks.  End of age is targeted between Monday September 14th and Friday 18th September.
Age ending messages will start appearing tomorrow in WoL.

Questions:

Luth: KD Page - why are the provs right justified???? this not only looks messy but makes it more difficult to easily scan the list to find what you want. also will make it incredibly difficult for themed kd
There are a few UI oddities that need we need to sort out, but functionality will come first.

Luth: Throne page - i see the monarch’s message is there, but i don’t see the time ticker… please put it back!
That’s a logged bug, and will be addressed.

Luth: Enchantment Spells - why on earth do you need to break them down into 3 different categories???
Breaking the spells up was intended to make the spell behaviours clearer to new users.  The UI ends up more cluttered though so we’ll review this and perhaps change it.

Luth: Forums - CENSOR BUTTON??? are you kidding me? after all the arguments in the forums about censorship you’d actually put a Censor button in the game???
Don’t like it?  Don’t use it.  Don’t like your monarch using it?  Vote for someone else. When something is censored, it shows up as such, so you know when you have Big Brother as your monarch.

Luth: Forums - will deletions of threads/posts still be checkboxed so we don’t have to delete one at a time?
You now click on the delete button to delete a thread. If people end up with too many threads to delete this way, we can look at it again.

elow: You sure the time frame you present is realistic?
With the poll results and age restart decision we hope your fears are alleviated.

elow: Are you not grown ups enough to just say it as it is? The age was supposed to last one month. Period! It wasn’t supposed to be normal lenght, so why present it as if it was? It’s really annoying when you present stuff like that.
In last week’s blog we also said:
“We are mindful that the current WoL age was supposed to be a short age”
We acknowledge that we made another estimation error, and were not hiding it.

dodge83: just one question are u sure the server will be able to handle the mass registering and login of users in the same hour you launch the public beta?
Part of the scaling up from Alpha to Beta and then into the release is about slowly increasing the load on the server and seeing how everything reacts.  In the last week we’ve dedicated a lot of time to increasing the speed of the code and it’s natural that we will want to make it run faster and lighter the more users we have.  We’re planning for a load spike when the beta goes public and we’re looking forward to handling it.

Lead Pipe: Will a new guide be published? Is the wiki supposed to take its place? The wiki is not very newbie friendly.
We’ve always maintained that the guide wouldn’t be rewritten for the start of the new code.  The wiki has the potential to replace the guide, but that decision hasn’t been made.  We’ll see how the wiki progresses as it is written and edited by the community.  If it’s not going to meet the needs of new players we’ll provide something else.

camel: do you think its professional to set a time period for an age and miss it by 3 times of that amount? and regarding the consequent misjudging of any date you set in the past, do you think anyone will ever take any date you will set in the future seriously?
Yes, we’ve missed the dates that we predicted and we’re not happy about it.  We have been quite open about our progress however, which leaves everyone free to decide for themselves whether or not they have faith in what we say.