Hey everyone,
I am recording a Triggered episode with the new game owners soon, please post any questions you have here and I will ask them on the show
Ben
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Hey everyone,
I am recording a Triggered episode with the new game owners soon, please post any questions you have here and I will ask them on the show
Ben
What steps will you be taking to bring new (and old) players back to the game?
What are the chances we can get a War Tournament?
What are your IRC nicks?
What are your plans with the game in the coming ages?
Vodka or Gin?
Will you make orcs sane again so they can merely break provinces that are 175% their NW and not 300%?
Will you stop the endless nerfing of TMs already? Don't you think 25 consecutive ages of making them incrementally suck more and more is enough?
Will you please make honor more stable and suck less?
Will you please find a way to balance war hero or else just eliminate it?
In before texn, dark elves please?
Will they have a second great utopian war?
Ways to bring players in/back? Facebook apps integration maybe?
Will you fix "The Oops"?
I for one welcome our new Muga Overlords...
(1) Why did you acquire Utopia? (One assumes that you either regard it as a good business opportunity, and have a strategy for turning around its ailing player base, or are passionate enough about the game as players to want to be able to improve it in some substantial way...or both. In either event, I'd be interested to hear the particulars of the plan.)
(2) What is Muga's overall vision for Utopia?
(3) Do you anticipate making major changes to the fundamentals of the game?
(4) Is Muga a new enterprise? Is it your full-time job? What other ventures do you anticipate for Muga?
How long before we see a mobile app? and YES we will pay for it!
Has there been any talk to address the "kick from game ticking" cause its a real downer.
I second the return of the great utopian war
I would actually like to see a kind of community driven statement of principles that would guide Utopia's development. For example, "The game should be balanced, but not perfectly," and "Races and personalities should fit archetypes generally." Part of this process would be really bearing down on what is the essence of Utopia and what is its incidental features. For example, 12/2 Orc elites is incidental, but "can't attack when too much overpop" is really fundamental.
Awesome, man. Can't wait to see some shakeups in the game.
I'm just happy to see this game go to ppl who care and wish to see it survive and thrive.
Will you be coding it all anew?
I would say the biggest obstacle utopia faces is it is not very beginner friendly. Unless one comes into a kd where there's a chat channel and teammates able/willing to help daily, one can go a year and still not really grasp a lot of more basic mechanics, strategy, or the team-play which makes utopia a great game. Moving forward what changes or resources will be brought to address this. Furthermore, if there's a big increase in new plays in the future, there's going to be a big disparity in old kds and new, a KD of new players won't have a chance, any plans to address this if it comes about?
Will you consider more integrated intel-sharing within KDs, so as to reduce the need, perceived or otherwise, for 3rd-party tools?
I'll sacrifice the necessary virgins to appease the new Overlords.
I actually hoped the announcement would be to naughty video from Palem with Taylor Swift. I clearly didn't anticipate this!
- Will you bring Fog back?
- When did you start playing?
- What's the chance on an age (even on Genesis²) to revert undead to a race you can only get if your province actually dies?
- Cats or dogs? Both is fine too.
- What are your opinions on midgets? Are they closer to halflings or to dwarves? If neither, does this warrant a new race to offset the amount of tiny people to the other races?
- Do you see faeries as tiny flying creatures or as the (more evil than mischievous) majestic creatures?
- How do avian multiply? Do they lay eggs or do they birth young?
I would just like to say this is wonderful that they are going on a community podcast so quickly to answer questions that the players have. That actually warms my cold little heart.
Questions:
Will we get to keep Bishop and Palem?
With the app production will there be push notification for when hit, and or op'd?
What is your stance on Bart?
How many crowns do you have? And why is it less than Godly?
Which one of you would win in a fight?
Will there be more features that people can buy?
Will you make a "binding" cf system with predetermined parameters agreed by both monarchs?
How do you plan on tackling the problem of player base? Not quality, but quantity in particular, or both.
When will tentatively start?
Will the game remain free?
What are your thoughts of how the game was ran during last 10 years? Highs and lows, better or worse, invigorating or debilitating, et.
How much time do you plan to commit to the game and how dedicated are you to making large scale changes designed to bring in new players or make the game fit into the lives of current players?
for example would you be willing to accept outside coders helping you implement things like munkbot or intell like stinger/lucid or are you just going to "develop" the game in the time you have available ?
edit....oh and what inspired you to buy the game
How do you envision updating the code base to newer forms that allow for more efficient transactions? Is there a specific framework you prefer?
Congratulations on your purchase of this high value internet property, and along with it, the presence of it's greatest asset: meep
-Will you commit that the game remains free of hard-balance altering paid features?
-Will you go ahead and just pay munk/integrate munkbot with the game?
-When will you give meep infinite troops, thieves, wizards, and generals?
-Can you finally let us post locs on the goddamn forums as long as it's not direct "hey attack these guys", or at the very least tell palem to stop being a giant turd and censoring locs from previous ages?
-Which of you has more crowns, why does the other one suck at uto so much he had to buy the game to be more competitive?
Who are these ghettos?
This is interesting both as a player and as a business owner.
I personally have considered purchasing Utopia from Sean & Brian and then operating it out of my own pockets simply for the love of the game. However, I also have a game development company in the largest mobile gaming market in the world (China) and realized it will be very difficult (and costly) to continue operating the game within the same business model - a website based MMORPG.
As users these days have moved to mobile, any game that is not mobile-friendly usually cannot compete within the market. Similarly, a large group of players in this game have played for many years and have literally 'grown up'. They have their daily lives of work and family which literally takes up quite a lot of time. Of course, this is also a main reason why a game and a close-knit community can help these people cope with their daily lives as it acts as a de-stress factor as well as a way to "get away from the real world". However, if it is not mobile-friendly, it can also be too much effort and become an inconvenience. I think I speak for a large group of "oldschoolers" within this game that they stay playing not because of the convenience of playing but mainly because of the social factor and the close-knit community within the game. But that cannot be a winning strategy from a marketing perspective as it will be hard to market this advantage to new players and younger groups as they will only feel "left out". Many of us grew up playing text based MMORPG, but a lot of the younger groups do not understand it and does not understand the fun of it. Educating them will be very costly.
So, my question to the new Lords of Utopia is 3 folds:
1) In terms of the new business strategy and marketing strategy, what is the demographic Utopia will target and market towards;
2) Secondly, is there a plan to convert Utopia to a mobile-friendly or even mobile-based game; and
3) How to you plan to educate and bring back text-based games to this new age of digital, visual and 3D gaming?
Finally, I really wish to thank the new owners for their passion towards this game. I have played for nearly 9 years and have grown up within this community and have met some great people a long the way. I came back this year to play mainly because of the good memories that this game has given me. I hope Dave and Jeff and make new memories for a lot more people.
Congrats on the acquisition. I am thrilled to know the game will be transferred over to those who enjoy the game for it's simplicity and it's depth in terms of strategy. I want to thank everyone who has been involved up to this point as I really enjoy this game and wish for it's continued survival and hopeful growth moving forward. No matter the length of time that player's are away they seem to always find their way back. So with all of that the questions I have would be..
1. Can I help build a guide (I was already in the process of this). #say no to wiki
2. Are there plans to bring back boats, fog, crystal ball?
3. Fame or Honor?
4. What do you most enjoy about the game?
5. What do you feel needs to change?
6. Will the formulas remain a mystery that players must solve? (I liked that aspect of the game)
7. Will you still play the game?
8. In hand to hand combat what would be your weapon of choice?
9. Is Brother Green still around and if so will his temple be rescued from the depths of despair?
Not the best questions but they are my own. Thanks and Goodluck
Such a surprise this news, and some (or all)of my questions are already listed.
1) do you intend to cooperate with the currently existing utopia app(by joshmg)? Because it offers a good basis for the casual maintenance and T/M part, attacking needs some tweaking
2) What will happen with the current staff (Bishop&Palem and others)?
3) your company is listed as being 2 months old afaik, in what direction are you planning to take the company and where do you both come from in terms of company/IT background?
4) How are you intending to expand the community?
5) Will you continue with the code currently existing or go for a real-time updating service (and thus rewrite the code)?
6) will the basis of the game remain free, with non-essential features such as sitting being paid services?
7) Where did you play over the years?
8) Are you intending to keep it a purely English game or do you have any interest in making it a multilingual interface to support the newer kids on the block?
9) Any intentions of cooperating with 3rd party websites such as Utopia temple, slack, upoopu, munk etc?
I think that is about it, curious to see where utopia will go from here, all the best.
...
Do you have any plans on releasing an API to allow people to build better third party tools for the game? There are a lot of potential in the community for mobile apps, browser extensions and other tools, that are currently limited by having to parse HTML pages in a very inefficient way.
utopiasupport@utopia-game.com still working? no one reply to us since 8 days ago
Will you commit to keep utopia ftp ?
Will you acknowledge this was my idea?Quote:
and adding some basic tour and explanatory features to the game.
Further to my previous post, I thought about this news all day and have some more questions I'm really curious to know the answers for.
As mentioned, I also run a gaming business, and as common sense may dictate - having and making a game and operating a game is completely two different things. The former requires an initial injection of capital (whether it's monetary or time) to develop and complete but once it's done then it is done. To operate a successful game becomes a completely different monster as this requires on-going support, updates, marketing and advertising, and user expansion as well as enhanced user experience.
While Dave and Jeff have taken the load off Sean and Bryan by purchasing the game with which I assume a lump sum purchase, the game still remains as it is. The cost remains the same as well. Changing some bugs and errors as well as some minor enhancement will not make much change (if any at all) to a diminishing community of Utopia. Further funding with a solid business model and plan is required to "take it to the next level". But in order to do that, the game needs ongoing funding or, it needs to fund itself. Games, similar to mobile apps and platforms can generate revenue two ways: 1) Have an ongoing user-expansion, high user = potential profit, collect funding from investors and bank on the fact that the game can eventually cash-in on the large user base or; 2) There are revenue generating functions within the game (for example League of Legends generates revenue from purchasing of skins and heroes).
Therefore, with this in mind, I have some further questions:
4) What model is in place (any case study to share) to 'expand' the game as opposed to going status quo?;
5) How do you intend to re-brand a dying concept (text based game) to a new-age crowd?; and
6) Is there a revenue model in place? How does the game continue to fund itself?
Sorry for so many questions. I obviously do not expect them to be completely answered but I'm just speaking out loud to myself as I'm very curious to see what Dave & Jeff envision.
Will Bishop keep his job? :-p
I thought of more questions this morning:
- Will the game's time still be based on GMT+0 or will it adapt for a new age to your timezone (if that's different)?
- Will either or both of you have a certain amount of personal participation or maybe reachability in the forums or IRC, or will you work through omnipotent proxy's like Bishop, Palem and other possible mods, or both?
- Is there a chance I could convince you to participate to the Utopian Secret Santa? Not as players (cause you have plenty of work probably), but as an extra tier people can choose when signing up. For example, John signs up for 1 gift (makes or buy 1 gift, receives 1 gift) but he'll send an extra gift to you guys. They could possibly send it to a postal box, addressed to the company. It's a nice way to show our appreciation of the effort you put in our favourite past time. Of course mods like Bishop could also do something similar. :)
- Will there be an (on demand) shop with Utopian merchandising? Those could be t-shirts or a cool office mug.
- Would there be a possibility to have a community input in the shop? Some people playing have some awesome skills to make great Utopia themed stuff. But it's expensive to just make it and ship it for free (part of the Secret Santa concept). It could maybe work as some market place (fixed prices) or auction (bidding option, tho I prefer myself fixed prices) where a fixed percentage would go to the dev company. Think Etsy or eBay but with only two categories: official merchandising and a community merchandising. It would be a way to get more funds for the game. The on demand system has as advantage that you don't need to invest in wares that maybe won't be sold, since you only order (official merchandising) or make them (community merchandising) when an order comes in the shop. It would of course take longer for the merchandise to arrive at the client, but if you calculate that in the expected arrival and announce that in the shop, I'm sure people wouldn't mind!