Swirve Blog

Wednesday rolls around so quickly, latest from Brian and Sean below. Comments as usual on the forums :)

Hi everyone,

This will be a short post, since there weren’t many actual questions asked since last week (though there sure was a lot of excitement). So, I’m going to provide an update on progress, try to clear up the censorgate scandal, and then answer the one direct question I could find.

Over the last week we’ve managed to get the bug count on the alpha down nearly to 0, and if all goes well we should have an update to the alpha server deployed this evening, and invites sent out to a 50 - 100 of the registered testers. There are 220 people registered for testing right now, and we hope to have them all invited onto the server within the next week.

There was some confusion as well about our roles versus Roisin’s. Let me confirm again that Brian and I are working on the new code, and that Roisin is still responsible for running the old code. She will remain in charge of that until the old code has completely replaced the new code (when we start a new WoL age on the new code).

Regarding the censor button scandal, hopefully I can clear it all up here. The idea of the censor button was originally borrowed from a different piece of forum software, which supported censoring instead of deleting. The rationale seemed sound - it limits the power of the moderator, making it impossible to delete posts without a trace (the worst form of censorship). Instead, it called a spade a spade (i.e., called deleting “censoring”), and made it clear to users when it was going on. We copied the feature without too much deliberation, on the basis that the community might like it because they are anti-censorship. Wow, were we wrong. Well, now we have removed it from the game on the basis that there was no point having both a censor button and a delete button. The censor button has been replaced with a delete button. When something is deleted it is gone for good, and the post is removed entirely from the thread.

In other forum-related news, threads are now sortable by subject, last post time, reply count and post count (default is by last post time). We also hope to have a feature to edit or delete one’s own posts available shortly as well. Combined with rich text formatting, these are significant feature improvements over the current forum, and we hope that people will enjoy them.

So, leaving censorship behind us hopefully, I found just one direct question in the thread (that was actually directed at us):

Ezzerland: Can you guarantee us that this age will last the exact allotted time you have give us and that if it cannot you will be prepared (or Roisin will) to end the age on time and restart another?
No, we’re not willing to give you that guarantee. We can guarantee you that we are being entirely open and honest with the community, and we can guarantee that we believe that this age will end on time and that we believe the new code will be ready. But if one of us is hit by lightening and the other by a bus, then there might be a problem. If only one of us was to get killed in a freak accident, then the other might have to make a choice about whether to delay the next age by a week, or restart and delay new code by months. That would be a tough decision, but hopefully we won’t have to make it.
Bottom line is that the new code should be ready with time to spare.

–Sean

[Brian: Looks like we have individual personalities now.  If I get struck by lightning I want the code to be cremated with me.]

And here we go with this week’s blog from Brian and Sean!

Comments in the thread please

Hi All,

We hope you enjoyed the interview with Alliance Rankings last week. They sure had a lot of questions about leprechauns.

It’s been a week of intense bug fixing here, and we’ve made a lot of progress. As is normal for these things, we had lots of bugs to start with, and could resolve most of them easily enough. As you fix more and more of them, what you get left with are the harder ones, which take more time. Last week we have over 150 bugs files from the alpha test in our system… now we have just less than 30, but they are slightly tougher than average to solve.

Our hope is to get that bug count down into the single digits by the end of this week, and then invite in a lot more people from the pool of about 200 who registered their interest with us by email. That larger group is going to turn up many more bugs that a smaller group can’t, especially with respect to wars. Once we get the bug count down to single digits again while all 200 testers are playing, we’ll want to start to push it even harder, and will open it up for general access.

You can still take part in the Alpha testing by sending a mail to utopiadev@utopia-game.com with ALPHA in the subject line.

That’s all the news we have this week, so on to your questions.

Questions:

Scontan: Once the code is up and running smooth, what roles, if any will you, Sean n Brian, if any have in Omac/Utopia?

We’ll continue to work on future features of Utopia. We’ll also be responsible for changes between ages on the new code.

Scontan: Will there be changes for the restart? what might they be?

Fate1316: What will the changes be, if any for the next age?

Roisin will be providing changes to the restart of WoL. These changes will announced on the forum.

Luth: And I still don’t see any schedule for ending Gen? can we get an idea there as well?

Stella: When will gen start over? are there no plans at all, or is gen waiting on the new code?

The short answer is that Genesis will end when we’re ready to move the new code into public beta. The Alpha testers have been making great strides finding bugs, and in the last ten days or so we’ve fixed the vast majority of them. We’ll be increasing the number of Alpha testers until we’ve used them all and the game is stable. We predict that this will take 2 - 2.5 weeks. Genesis will then be restarted on the new code and will be open to all.

Katt: am I wrong about the loss of delete posts?

You’re right about that Katt. We lost the ability to delete individual posts in a thread. This wasn’t intentional, just a feature that accidentally got lost along the way. We’ll add it our to-do list.

Ezzerland: Do you feel your changes to the in-game forums are beneficial to those whom use them? Your “don’t like it, don’t use it” attitude will not exactly be beneficial to anyone in utopia, period. It’s also significantly different from your answer in the interview regarding player suggestions. Don’t you think?

Fundamentally the in-game forum has not changed very much. We’ve added new features - text formatting and a monarch censor button. The text formatting at least should be beneficial to users. We’ve accidentally dropped the post deletion feature, but we intend to add it back. Our attitude since the AR interview hasn’t changed at all. We’re happy to listen to suggestions and take advice on board. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll agree with that advice or indeed heed it. In this case the censor button is an additional feature - not something to be getting overly worked up about.

Ezzerland: Would it not be more professional to say something like “We are working on the new code and will repeat WoL on the current code until after the beta has been completed on genesis. At that time we will move the server onto the new code, when it is ready to harbor the entire community.”

uhgmebashu: [had similar suggestion]

It certainly is easier not to be wrong if you say nothing at all. Hoewever, we’ve tried to keep the community as informed as possible and to be honest we doubt many people would have been happy about being kept in the dark about progress with the new code while there were few (if any) bugs being fixed in the old code.

raiman: There was talk of inactives being tradeable, is that happening anytime soon?

That’s not planned for the first release of the new code.

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.

It’s weekly blog time from Sean and Brian!

Comments here please as normal

First up, let’s give you an update on progress. The initial test group has been doing a spectacular job of finding and filing bugs from the Alpha game. We’ve been dividing our time between fixing these bugs and speeding up the performance of server in anticipation of inviting in the rest of the registered alpha testers. The performance work is nearly done, so we’ll both be focusing exclusively on bug fixing from here on in. There’s currently about 20 testers in the alpha split between two kingdoms. Our next milestones are:

1. Invite in all remaining alpha testers (about 180 players).

2. Go to Beta, which will basically mean replacing Genesis with the new code, and making it available for anyone to sign in.

3. Make the code active for WoL.

We want to move as quickly as possible, but can only move onto the next milestone once we have the bugs from the previous stage under control. We are aiming to invite in the remaining alpha testers next week, and estimate it that it will be the start of August before we can make the new code publicly available on Genesis. It will take us a week or two of hard work to fix the bugs that will be submitted at that point. This leaves us with awkward timing regarding the current WoL age - it is likely to be late August before the new code is sufficiently bug-free to represent an improvement on the current code. This leaves us with two options regarding the current WoL age:

* extend it to the end of August, and then replace it with new code.

* end at the start of August, and start a new short age on current code. The age after this short age would be on the new code.

We are mindful that the current WoL age was supposed to be a short age, so we are reluctant to just extend it without consultation. So, we’ve created a poll to gauge people’s opinions. This is available by following the link below, and will also be available from a link on the throne page at some point this evening.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dElRekRFcWE4TmRqUEh4X0xhOUc0RHc6MA..

Please take a moment to visit the link and let us know your preference.

In other news, we would like to announce the community wiki for the game, at http://wiki.utopia-game.com. As of writing this, it is password protected, but that restriction will be removed either today or tomorrow. It is far from complete, but is a great starting point. What the wiki needs now is some dedicated players to give it care and attention, to expand it and drive it forward in terms of content and accessibility to new players. We would like to ask anyone who’s interested in becoming an editor to get in touch with us. Just email us at utopiadev@utopia-game.com, and put WIKI in the subject line.

Questions:

Fate1316: Would it be possible to create a list of bugs that have been fixed and which ones you are working on?

Using the current bug tracking system this isn’t very easy, and for the moment we want to focus exclusively on fixing the bugs. There’s a lot of bug turnover right now, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense short term. Longer term, we hope to get around to exposing a limited view of approved bugs/feature requests that are in triage system.

Stella: By the look of the screenshots posted last week, it seems like you’re still using frames. Is that something temporary or will it actually be changed?

Styling is a touchy subject with a lot of people, and for many style-related decisions we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. As it turns out, what you see in those screenshots aren’t frame borders - they’re just borders added in to divide the content, and styled to give the pages a bit of a ‘classic’ look. There are no frames in the new site.

Stella: What are the thoughts from the developers about different themes for the players to choose between?

We’ve mentioned this a few times in previous posts, if you look back. We intend to add this feature down the line, as soon as we have time. This will permit people to choose the old-school look, perhaps a new-school look or a work-safe look, and eventually we might even be able to support community-submitted themes as well. It would be a nice feature, and very useful for some people. That said, it’s relatively low priority right now, so we’re unlikely to get around to it for some months yet.

Here is the latest Wednesday Blog from Sean and Brian - as usual please post comments in the forum.

Hey All,

Thanks for all the feedback last week. It was nice for us to be able to finally show you the something. We were also really encouraged that there were a lot of positive comments.

The initial alpha testers have been doing great work during the week. A few bugs have cropped up (nothing too serious) and we’re currently working on those. We’ve just started ticking the game (no longer in freeze mode), so soon a lot more features will come available. We expect a new crop of bugs to come out of this too.

This week, we’re going to be working on bug fixing and performance. The current alpha testers will soon find the most obvious bugs and at that point we’ll want to start loading more players onto the server. Again, this will raise its own challenges.

We can’t go into all the questions from last week, but here’s some general comments on the topics discussed.

The new navigation side menu: Some of the names, such as “Send Armies” and so on, are actually placeholders. We don’t expect to keep them. A lot of small things like this may change during the alpha. In other cases we have split out items into multiple links. Typically, this relates to a division of function which allows screens to be cleaned up. The grouping of menu items, particularly as you move further down the list) is also likely to change. Wizards training has been moved into the “resource growth” section along with building, military training, exploring etc… Mystics is for using you wizards, as Send Thieves is for using you thieves and Send Armies is for using your military.

3rd Party Tools: The third party tools developers are going to have some work to do. Obviously not all the screens are identical to before and even small changes can throw these tools off. For this reason we’ve made sure that the 3rd party tools developers were included in the first batch of alpha testers, thus giving them as much time as possible modify their tools.

Old bugs: Our aim has been to very-closely replicate the existing functionality of the game. In many cases this includes unwittingly replicating bugs. A few bugs may have disappeared along the way, but in general don’t expect things like Paper bugs to be fixed. In more positive news however, once this code is up and running we’ll be able to kill these bugs off without too much fuss.

Integrate IRC: Yeah we’d love to do this right now, but it’s going to have to wait. We are working like crazy to get the re-written game ready for you all. As developers one of our favourite things to do is dream about future features, but the reality is they have to wait until the current job is complete.

Brian & Sean

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

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