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Theryon Wars: Community Q&A: One Week

Discussion in 'Entropia News' started by Ordaz, Nov 29, 2011.

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  1. Dec 7, 2011 #121
    misao

    misao

    Seems like you are taking a interesting approach to the ghost towns and it will be a painful year waiting for the release of T:W, but I'm sure in the end you guys will do a great job and all that waiting will be worth it ^_^

    I won't lie when I say I truly enjoyed the Q&A it was a pleasure reading your well thought out responses.

    Q: What is your approach to...... No just joking haha but I did have several more questions lined up =P

    Thank You for this great Q&A session and good luck!
     
    • Like Like x 1
  2. Dec 7, 2011 #122
    Danoclese

    Danoclese I sense a "Disturbance" in the Force

    Thanks, Ordaz, for all your input! And for the nice, refreshing way we, as players, are getting a glimpse of what is to come. It is, indeed, a breath of fresh air from what we are accustomed to when communicating with MA regarding what is in store for us. I hope it continues once the planet is launched.
     
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  3. Dec 7, 2011 #123
    Softhart

    Softhart

    The one in Harlem? Chicken?
     
  4. Dec 9, 2011 #124
    Ordaz

    Ordaz

    It's not just me dropping by and telling you how things are going and what we're doing; as far as I know, you've got plenty of Planet Partner Officials registered and active here at EntropiaPlanets. Interviews, introductions, spontaneous comments and participation... I hope this activity counts as a rough health-meter for EU.

    On the other hand, both when questions are prepared for interviews or with other interactions as this Q&A (for example) I hope people who haven't yet tried Entropia Universe and read threads and articles like these... will realize we're real people doing real things in our not-so-little virtual universe. This attitude and communication from both sides ("players" and "devs") is pretty uncommon in other games; I think as a collateral effect it should attract other, new players as a magnet.

    What do you think?
     
  5. Dec 9, 2011 #125
    Tass

    Tass Administrator

    I think we experience a change in communication lately. Thank you for your major contribution to this change. Unfortunately this change does not span our whole little universe yet, but there's hope.

    Often we use the term 'community' for the group of people considered more or less residents in specific games. Personally I would appreciate an expansion of this term. Community = all people involved, no matter on which end of the food chain, developer or player. MMOs are in a way special, it's not primarily high end graphics, super elaborated story-telling, consistency & persistency of the game world that make a MMO. It's the people and their interaction. In-game and off-game.

    Comparing the EU community and the quantity and quality of communication between developers and players to the situation in other games I cannot completely agree that "this attitude and communication from both sides ('players' and 'devs') is pretty uncommon in other games". Of course, like said above, quality & quantity of communication varies significantly among the meanwhile many different entities developing something EU. But there are definitely games companies/communities out there from which EU can still learn a little. May I say CCP/EVE?

    Sometimes I'm under the impression that MA's more or less subtle promise that you can go from rags to riches in EU and EU's rather radical free market and 'real cash economy' did attract not the most community orientated audience. The relation of givers & takers in EU might be a little different from what one can experience in other game communities. That's a very subtle personal impression of course.

    The fact that MA began to call us "players" of a game instead of "participants" in a virtual world RCE service is very much appreciated. Replacing one word with another doesn't seem to make a huge difference but to me it's an indicator of a major change. Protagonists of this change are game companies like Spaniard Blend focussed on making games creating'planets' for EU that are supposed to be games and not some virtual world environments hosting marketing gimmicks.

    More & better gaming, more & better communication, more & better community attitude. That's what I hope for and I'm convinced Spaniard Blend and T:W will continue to contribute increasingly to a move in this direction.
     
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  6. Dec 9, 2011 #126
    Nor Alien

    Nor Alien Wisker Fish

    I have nothing further to add.. Tass said it all!! :thumbsup:
     
  7. Dec 9, 2011 #127
    Ordaz

    Ordaz

    I STRONGLY appreciate your post, Tass.

    I see and share several of the points you've made and I believe time will prove us right.

    One thing I disagree with you is
    You may, but you shouldn't. I mean as in "look up to", not a good example.
    None of us would like to find out that employees of MA or a PP gave high-end equipment to their RL friends so they could "go pwning" other players and socs, destroying their in-game assets in the process, for fun and profit. That has happened several times in EVE. We could then talk about how they deal with exploits, starting with ancient tales of logoffskis or POS Bowling, continuing with the nerfbat of "today you lost 25 billion isk coz microwarp drives no longer work as they did yesterday" to "we care so much for long-time paying customers that we removed their only possible upper hand by 'democratizing' skill mechanics". That's like you got a chipped skill two years ago and today you found out not only the chipping but all skill advancement was removed from your character, just because, and that's good for you and will attract new players.

    Dear Tass, I could go on and on for hours. I did learn a lot from them; no-one said all one had to learn were good things, but the trick is knowing what's good and not-so-good for you. This could easily turn into a debate on what CCP and MA have or haven't, I just pointed what I considered enough not to go into full off-topic with this and if anyone feels like it, could start a brand new thread in EU-General.

    On the other hand and back to the beginning of this lil post of mine, what I'm not sure about is how "online communities" should evolve to better support "game-based communities". Developers should, imho, be able to play the game as players do, not just in "test mode". Interacting with other players, face their common and actual problems. Invulnerable armor and Finger Of God weaponry won't always offer a testing dev a gaming experience close to a player's :tongue (2):

    Also, I think players should be exposed to changes and improvements in a way that would permit fully understanding each of them and evaluating their impacts... but then, without "test servers" (thinking of Singularity here) I'll be missing something.

    Also, are text-based communities enough? What about more tools, API-based or similar, for those times when we can't log in the game but can check auctions, friends' activities, etc.? Just thinking aloud...


    Edited: A 'b' for an 'm' :jaded1:
     
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  8. Dec 9, 2011 #128
    NotAdmin

    NotAdmin Administrator

    I've been hoping for official APIs for years. Having to parse chatlogs or URL-scrape websites just plain sucks. A true ground-breaking real-cash economy should either offer such info natively, both in- and out of the game, or easily allow others to consume the full amount of data involved.

    Not this half-baked "last ten auction items that were not bought out and we will not reveal the buyer so auction price-jacking is easily done" or "you can collect data from people's chatlogs, but to make things dumb, we will not show a unique identifier per global, nor will we add MA server time to data points, so all global collection has to ignore any actual unique identifier, and instead you will have to just match the text lines and hope you can then figure out how to synchronize all the various client-feedss, and hope that all our servers manage to distribute the same global messages to everyone" (which they don't) kind of stuff.

    Seriously. If MA releases APIs, it'd truly be great. Of course they will find out ten minutes after that they involuntarily pushed out everything, and in a bugged way, so the change will be rolled back and then reimplemented in a crippled way so it becomes unusable again, but it'd be better than what we have now ;)
     
  9. Dec 9, 2011 #129
    Ordaz

    Ordaz

    Breathtaking optimism :biggrin1:

    But as for chatlogs, a GUID could be a start. First we take Manhattan...

    You know, these are Greater Words; the platform must remain safe but such improvements could really help it grow (usability-wise, community apps...).
    The GUID idea could possible be a nice and safe first step, right? :wink:
     
  10. Dec 9, 2011 #130
    NotAdmin

    NotAdmin Administrator

    Off-Topic, but I love Leonard Cohen :)

    It would indeed be a first step. At the very least, it would ensure that there would be an easy and safe way to handle all globals that way. We attempted various tricks when we first had a go at a tracker here, but due to several factors, things were greatly complicated by the lack of a GUID.

    We initially assumed that the timestamp in the logs was the MA server timestamp, which could have worked. Unfortunately, it is instead the local machine time, meaning it is not reliable as not everybody set their machines to synchronize properly with a time-server.

    So yes, a GUID would be awesome :)
     
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