Utopia Developers’ Update 19th August
An early Blog this week!
Please comment on the relevant forum thread as usual.
Hello fellow Utopians!
We have an general update, question time, an anti-FUD statement, and a clarification to make.
UPDATE
We invited all the remaining testers in last Friday, bringing the total number of white-listed email addresses up to 240, of which 110 have registered so far. The weekend was a little bumpy, with a negative peasant growth bug rearing its head (which Brian came in on Saturday to fix) and a crash bug in messaging and forums rearing its head (which we got fixed on Monday).
Despite these obstacles, the testers have been doing a great job of rooting out issues, and have been keeping our bug support system busy, with the number of outstanding alpha support tickets surging back up to about 140 from roughly 10 on Friday. Thankfully, most of these bugs are less severe than the ones we were typically getting a few weeks ago, so despite the large number of them, we know we’re making progress.
The outstanding bugs right now are mainly aesthetic issues to do with layout, badly generated grammar and typos. Some others are more serious, and are querying the correctness of calculations. This latter kind is significantly more time consuming to fix, because we have to very carefully verify current behaviour versus old behaviour, which can be hard to set up in a test environment. It’s going to take us a while to sort through all the outstanding support tickets, let alone fix them, so next week we probably won’t have a lot of news, except to report our progress through that bug list.
Since it looks like only about 50% of registered testers are actually signing up, we’re happy to let more people into the program. If you’d like to try out the test server, drop us an email with the subject “ALPHA” to utopiadev@utopia-game.com, and we’ll email you back over the next few days to let you know when you’ve been whitelisted.
QUESTIONS
Safri: how long do you plan to stay in charge of utopia for? will you be here for a few years at least, or do you plan to move on to other projects once you have utopia recoded?
We have a long term agreement in place to run the game, which should be for many years to come.
DHaran: So B&S, I have heard from Alpha testers that major gameplay elements are non-existent, such as GBP, and others are faulty, such as troop losses. Are these categorized as bugs, and are these types of issues being corrected?
Yes, these are exactly the type of things that are categorized as bugs. Gang Bang Protection initially had a bug which prevented it from working. This bug was fixed a few weeks ago. Other issues, such as incorrect troop losses under certain circumstances, are examples of the typical kinds of bugs we’ve been fixing for the last number of weeks.
Oh, hmmm, those seem to be the only questions directed at us. Oh well, on to other things…
FEAR, UNCERTAINTY AND DOUBT
In an unfortunate turn of events, mass panic ensued last week. What seems to have happened was:
1. Ezzerland asked if we could put Kingdom names in monotype, so that they could contain ASCII art.
2. Brian hypothesised that we “could consider” it in the broader context of customizing the kingdom page.
2b. Off-the-cuff examples of the kind of further customization that could be done were kingdom crests and alliance affiliations. Brian has assured me that he didn’t say “alliance” as part of a greater conspiracy to destroy the game, but instead was trying to find another example to finish his sentence with.
3. A series of forum responses resembling a game of Telephone/Chinese Whisper ended with us having apparently committed ourselves to turning Utopia into an alliance-only game.
4. Mass panic.
The thing to keep in mind is that we at no point were planning on building in an alliance-orientated feature. We simply gave a speculative response about the kind of customizations that could be put on the table for future consideration. We take some valid points from your responses, such as an official feature for alliances essentially endorsing and popularising them. However, the furore was premature. We will sometimes talk about the kind of features that we *could* do, and everyone has to remember that this is different than us saying that we *will* do them.
For the record: We don’t intend on turning Utopia into an Alliance-only game, or do anything that would ruin the game.
CLARIFICATION
Separately, we need to address the allegation that we’ve been spamming people. Every invite to the alpha we have sent has been in response to an email received containing “ALPHA” in the subject line. We have confirmed that we have such an email from the poster in question, and have contacted him to verify that he wants to be unsubscribed.
We are VERY anti-spam.
That’s all - See you next week.
Sean