Dear Community,
Next friday another “community roundtable” takes place in the German speaking community which is a podcast that involves the production team and the players directly, something we would also like to initiate in our English speaking communities and so forth in the future.
We would like to take this opportunity to give you some more information about what’s planned to happen in Empire until the end of this year.
First of all, we would like to present to you the Roadmap for the upcoming months. The following features are planned for the fourth quarter of 2016, even though not everything has a final design or concept, yet. We will give you more definitive information about these things just before their implementation.
In addition, you might notice that the roadmap has its focus on balancing. Depending on the capacity of our balancers, some features may be brought forward or pushed back. A first look at our roadmap is as follows;
Even More Bug fixing
The Bug count has been reduced to ~50% so far.
Various technical implementations, to:
...reduce the amount of bugs and ensure the stability of older systems
Implementation of a technical bug analysis to identify unstable systems and to improve its stability afterwards.
If we can’t do that, we will rework the unstable systems. (e.g the decoration reward system)
...improve performance/loading times
Implementation of additional monitoring to target systems which cause high server load
Optimizing the server configuration
Adjustment of the current server load, which changed with changes with feature sets during the last couple of years/month/weeks, e.g. increasing the index caches of the database to keep all indexes in the memory.
Rework of the architecture for the castle view
Open Beta/Test Server
With this, we can release and test new updates and their features before we go global. Thus, we want to ensure that the Live Servers are spared from a negative impact. More info below.
Automatic recruiting
We want to make it easier for you to play and make the use of bots obsolete. The operation is simplified by reduced clicks during recruitment, also "unlimited" recruiting will be possible. Further details can be found below
Reduction of pop-ups during login
Too many of these popups prevent a fast and easy game entry.
Offence/Defence Balance
It should be worthwhile to defend, but still be challenging to attack. We have prioritized this topic very high and already have some good Ideas which we have to evaluate first, there is nothing carved in stone yet. The optimizations could affect units, gems and items and we will of course test these on our Beta Server around November/December.
Here is a short list of topics we have already had a look at (more topics could be added but that doesn’t mean something has to change in all parts)
Strength of different Units (offence/defence)
Production cost and time for units.
Secondary defense values of defenders
Hall of Legends
Gem effects
Items and their max effect of different effects
Adjustment of event rewards
We want to adjust event rewards and introduce new ones, mainly where you can shop with event currency. These include, for example, the “Coast Of Blades”, “Thorn King” and the “Underworld”.
Various graphical improvements in the castle view
Rework of kingdom resources
Here is a short list of topics we already had a look at (more topics could be added but that doesn’t mean everything will be changed)
Production values for all resource buildings in all kingdoms
Amount of 100% workload buildings per castle
Costs for buildings and tools
Adjustment for loot effects
Taxes for resource transport between kingdoms
Kinds and amounts of resources you can loot from NPCs and events
We hope to give you more infos about this in December/January and once our Beta Server is live.
These are our plans for the near future. If you are interested in the further details regarding the bug fixing, beta server and the fight against bots, please read on.
Bugfixing
We have spoken a lot about Bug fixing recently, and we are taking this topic very seriously. That’s why, just like our last update, the next one will mostly consist of bug fixes. We've done polls in the worldwide communities to find the most annoying bugs, and we are trying to give you a detailed overview of what's going to happen right now and what's going to happen in the near future.
First of all, we managed to fix the well known loot bug with the last update on the 28th of September. Here we would like to thank you once more for giving us helpful information. This kind of collaboration is also beneficial for resolving many other bugs in the game, as we can not always find or fix the cause of many of the reported bugs. Here, we usually need accurate information from the player's side, otherwise the process will be delayed due to the lack of reproduction of the problem.
Server issues
Another problem, which has been particularly acute on the last weekend, are the recurring server problems. We have noticed your feedback on all channels. Last Saturday we were able to identify the Berimond event as one of the many causes and ended it instantly. After that, the situation improved for a while, but the performance deteriorated again the next day. After further analysis, the server had to be rebooted on Monday as some of Berimond's data still had a heavy impact on the servers even though the event was not running anymore. Further research already has the highest priority for us, and we always appreciate your help to narrow down the problem areas.
Open Beta
When it comes to the problems in the game, the question arises again and again, why we would not have a beta server? This is a legitimate question and in the last Community Talk our site has finally confirmed that we are planning a test server! With this approach we would like to focus on improving quality and reduce bugs in the near future. Once this server has been set up, each of you is invited to join it. We will not only release updates in advance to fix bugs, but also test upcoming features and events in the future.This means that each player on the server will have the opportunity to exclusively test new features before the global release. We will keep you posted here, of course, when the server is live. Detailed information will follow soon.
Events
We have teamed up with our Product Management team to discuss event planning in-game. We have already made some changes in September.
We adjusted the event frequency to an appropriate number.
In total, big events ran parallel on just 4.5 days, in August there were still 6 days of big events running in parallel!
For October, we are not planning to run large events at the same time anymore.
There were even three days, when there were no big events.
In order to give you more time in the future to collect the rewards, we will run the “Samurai” and “Nomads” more often for 4 instead of 3 days.
The “Bloodcrows” and “War of the Realms” will run this month together only 11 days. In September, both events were running a total of 19 days.
In general, we would like to bring in more events that are interesting and fun for you with optimizations, including the “Berimond Invasion” and the “Alliance Tournament”. We will release a poll soon for this, in order to determine which events you would like to fill these spaces.
We will continue to pursue this plan in the future. Meaning, no big events at the same time and an optimization of the event frequency, taking into account your feedback. At this point, we would like to give you a brief outlook of the upcoming event schedule (Please be aware that the times can change):
“Halloween” Event (20.10 - tbd.)
12.10 - 16.10 Nomads Invasion
16.10 - 20.10 War of the Bloodcrows
20.10 - 24.10 Samurai invasion
24.10 - 29.10 Berimond Invasion
29.10 - 01.11 Nomads Invasion
01.11 - 05.11 War of the Realms
Upcoming additional events
Royal Battle (18.10 - 21.10)
Berimond (as soon as we are able to fix current issues)
Bots
The use of additional support programs aka "Bots" has been part of discussions in our meetings for many months, which some of you have already been able to attend. It took a lot of time to develop a clear line of development, but we think that the way we want to go with it will have a positive impact on the game and the gameplay. Fairplay plays a very important role for us.
What are we doing now in product management to make the use of bots unattractive?
We are currently testing a feature that automates the recruitment of units because we know that the recruitment process can be very time-consuming and annoying. The feature is already running in Italy and Poland, where we will continue to customize and improve it before we add it to the rest of the servers. We think the feature is a good alternative to the additional support programs.
How do we actually find bots?
These programs give us an insight into where playful deficits are present, but let us be honest, no one likes to be an attacker or a player who has to resort to these means in order to gain advantages in the game! It's unfair to the others, so we've developed a tool in the last few months and weeks, which identifies bot players and automatically removes them from the game. After a first ban, there are various escalation stages, with which the blocking time increases. If the player keeps using bots to play the game, the ultimately permanent exclusion from the game is the last step. Of course, all affected players will be notified beforehand and informed about the upcoming suspension.
We hope there are plans here that are in line with what you hope to see in the following months, we would be very interested to know what you think to these plans so far and if you have any feedback to add, you can share it here.
Regards,
The Empire Team
If anyone is able to speak German, I would like to at least offer you the chance to listen in to the German 'Talkrunde' aka Roundtable. You can find that here live right now, or if you see this later you can check the past broadcasts by selecting 'VOD'.
As said, we hope to have something similar in the future for the EN/INT communities if you are interested in this.
Take care all
- Rosie