UF NEWS: Interview with Brian and Sean: Owners of Utopia
Reporters Note: These questions were primarily answered by Sean and I must add that the interview has been very frank, straight forward and informative. I thank Brian and Sean for their time for answering the questions and I think it will clear up a lot of doubts most people have had or are currently feeling. I hope all of you enjoy this interview as much as I have.
1. What do you find the most challenging part of working on Utopia?
The challenges have changed over time. At the start, it was about understanding the intentions of the very cryptic Delphi codebase. After that, it was getting game performance and stability to an acceptable state. We are now in a healthier position, because any work we do can be on new features, which will help retain players, attract new players and make more money to run the game with. But an ongoing challenge is to try and find the time to do all the work on Utopia that we want to do, while at the same time making a living for ourselves.
2. Are there aspects of Utopia that you dislike? (besides the very vocal community)
Generally speaking, there are two aspects we?d single out. The first is the cheating. Since we introduced the anti-cheating system last year, we?ve got this problem more or less under control. But there are still hundreds of players trying to get away with it. This sucks up a lot of time for us, investigating cheating allegations, or provinces that the system has flagged, and going back and forth with indignant cheaters who eventually ?fess up. All this time could be spent on making the game better. At the same time, there are players that have technical talent, but use that talent to write scripts, run proxies and devise new and elaborate ways of cheating. Not only does this waste our time (developing counter-measures), but it?s time that they could be spending developing new tools for players.
The second aspect is the general complexity of the game mechanics. Obviously, over time, the game has become more elaborate and complicated. However, it is now in a place where it is pretty inexplicable to new users. We need to fix some of these (e.g., the honor system is on the todo list), but others are so close to the heart of the game we?d have to be very careful. The building efficiency and science formulas (and their interaction) are a good example. New players coming from other games will need something more easy to grasp, but this may require a new Utopia ?Lite? to be built from scratch, which would be a lot of work.
3. Are you playing Utopia yourself? If so, then what race/pers did you pick. If not, what race pers combo would appeal the most if you did?
Unfortunately neither of us play Utopia. This means that we?re completely impartial when it comes to various disputes that arise on support, and it means that players don?t need to worry about the slightly unfair advantage devs playing would have :-) However, the main reason is time. We?re always fully busy, and if we have any spare time it goes into developing or fixing features, and helping out on support.
4. What games, if any, do you play in your free time?
Sean: I used to play a lot of Quake and Counter-Strike, but began to play less and less after I got involved in the video games industry in my second company, DemonWare. We helped develop a lot of popular games there (Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Splinter Cell etc.). This was exciting, but for me it turned gaming into work.
Brian: If we?re talking about the past, I used to play a lot of old PC games from the early 90s (Kings Quest series and Civilization were awesome). We got a SNES at some point and that took over for a few years. I would still pwn any of you n00bs in Mario Kart or SF2 Turbo (on 10 stars)! A friend recently started me playing playing board games like Agricola, Citadels and Tichu.
5.When you first took over the coding responsibility of the game, there was a lot of flaming and the uto forums simply represented one huge complaint. How did this make you feel?
Sean: Terrible. We had made a promise to keep the game rules intact, and to do a faithful port of the existing code to a new system that could have a future, but we underestimated the challenge of deciphering the existing code and ended up spending about 6 months more on the first version than we had anticipated (launching it in October). We worked full time on this difficult job, mostly receiving abuse whenever we tried to interface with the community. To stay sane, we soon learned to stop paying attention and get on with the job (I guess it was around this time that we also stopped blogging). It would have been easier to hand the game back to Jolt to shut down like they did Earth:2025, but we were determined to finish what we started. Looking back, I think of 2009 as one of the most trying years of my life, which also makes me proud that we pulled through it. I?m also very glad that having eventually got the new code out, and got it stable and fast, everything started to get more civil.
6. What changes can we expect in the near future?
We are currently making a roadmap for the future. Our first aim is to add features that will increase revenue to a point where we can have people working full time again. Once we have people working full time we?ll be able to prioritize getting new players into the game. We already have a few features ready to go that we?re going to release very soon. One of these is called ?Taunts?, and allows you to upload a banner to any other kingdom in the game to replace the top leaderboard ad. I guess you could also use this to cheer your allies on, but we kind of expect the opposite :-) Another feature allows you to pay to do a province reset mid-age. Another provides a visualization of the hostility meter on the kingdom page.
7. What are your short, medium and longterm goals for utopia?
This overlaps with question 6. In the short term, we plan to focus on premium features so that we can afford to have some people working full time on the game. In the medium term, we hope to be focusing on bring new players into the game. In the longterm, we would love to see Utopia being successful enough to fund the development of a simpler version designed to attract less hard-core players, and funnel those who are able for it into the current version of the game.
8. Do you have any plans to have a more formal guide such as we have had previously, especially for the new players that join the game? (other than the current Wiki guide that exists).
Our plan is for the wiki to be the main text-based guide to the game. Of course, it can always do with more work. For the moment, we don?t have the resources to maintain even one text-based guide (which why its on a wiki, where everyone can help). We have some loose plans for an in-game tutorial for new players, but this would be part of the medium term plan and be one piece of a broader strategy to improve the game for new players.
9. Previously, the creation of a facebook application was mentioned, is this still likely to happen? If so, when is it likely to happen?
In answer 7 we said that our long-term hope for the game is to have a simpler version for more mainstream gamers. This could well be a Facebook game. For the record, we don?t see a point in putting Utopia onto Facebook without redesigning it first. Obviously, the minimum amount of work includes updating the page layout to fit, and integrating accounts with Facebook. We feel that even more is required for the effort to be worthwhile: putting Utopia on Facebook would be about targeting a new market, and we would need to make sure that it appeals to that market. In short, the game would need to be significantly simplified, which is a lot of work.
10. Smart phones have issues accessing the forums and with the increase of smart phone use for access to the game, is it possible to have the game adapted to suit?
Everything is possible. The specific problem with the forums and Opera is a known bug in the Lighttpd web server, and we?ll be replacing it when we have a chance. A mobile-friendly version of the game is also an aspiration, but not something we have the resources to focus on just yet.
11. Are there any measures being put in place or considered, to attract more players to the game, ie. advertising?
As we said above, our first aim is to add new features that the existing community will pay for, and after that to expand the community. This is the only strategy that will work. Regular internet advertising is not currently financially viable, because on average it costs more to get a user into the game than we can make back. When we have the staff to spend time on it, we will focus first on community-driven and viral promotion. When it begins to make financial sense to advertise, that?s when we?ll start.
12. One of the last posts we had from the both of you indicated a lot of tension between yourselves and the community (completely understandable). Since that post was made, not much else has been said by either of you. You explained about focusing on other projects as utopia was not making any money. Are there any plans to try and rectify this situation and to develop the game further so that the player base continues to grow and generates revenue for you?
Yes, that post was at a critical time when it really looked like the end may be nigh. Since the start of 2010 we have been unable to work full-time on Utopia because it couldn?t pay us, and we couldn?t afford to work for free any more. We?ve been working on other projects, and doing Utopia work in the evenings and weekends whenever possible. A lot of credit also goes to Bishop and Palem for keeping things moving along while we?ve been distracted by financial realities. Despite our fragmented attention to the game, we have managed to incrementally improve things. Cheating is pretty much under control now, due to extensive work in smart detection systems, and we?ve increased revenue enough to bring in another person to help out. We feel that we?re out of the danger zone, and at the beginning of a new growth curve. Progress is slow at the start, but we are accelerating.
13. The tick is still a huge issue for a lot of people within the game, is there any chance this can be restored to how it previously worked?
First of all, the problems with occasional missed ticks with subsequent double ticks for some kingdoms is one that needs to be fixed, and is on the list.
The more general question of ?how ticking works? is more complicated. The way it worked on the old code didn?t work very well, and caused performance issues (such as very slow page loading) as well as data corruption that could cause all kinds of bugs. The first version of ticking in the new code was kind of similar, but because we had put so much effort into making sure that the game data was never corrupted, performance was impacted instead (resulting is even worse page loading times). The current approach of ticking everyone in a controlled manner keeps page loads as fast as possible at the cost of about 30 seconds at the start of the hour. We would like to improve this, but it would involve significant work for uncertain payoffs, and isn?t a priority. When we do get around to it, it will probably require changing how the game behaves.
For the technically minded, here?s some details. The new code implements exactly the same behavior as the old code. One of these behaviors is ticking. Ticking a province requires some up-to-date info from the kingdom (war, free land, net worth etc), so kingdoms need to be up-to-date, which in turn requires all provinces in the kingdom to be up-to-date. So, you can?t tick one province without ticking all the provinces in the kingdom. The old way of ticking was ?lazy ticking?. Whenever a province was accessed (e.g., visiting the game accesses your own province, attacking another province accesses that other province, visiting the kingdom page accesses all provinces...), all provinces in that kingdom would need to be ticked. This would happen during the server-side processing of the page request, which is why it could take so long to load a page. In the old code, what would often happen is that different players might access provinces in the same kingdom at the same time, and the server would end up trying to tick the same kingdom simultaneously for each of these page request. There were no consistency checks in place, so you could get all kinds of problems with double ticks or with data being overwritten incorrectly. In the new code, we use database transactions to ensure this kind of thing can?t happen. The problem is that multiple concurrent writers to the same database record (the provinces or the kingdom shared data) cause database transaction rollbacks, meaning the whole kingdom tick needs to be re-tried. This basically results in a low performance system, with the web-server being tied up all the time trying and re-trying to tick kingdoms, with different server threads constantly fighting over database access. The fundamental problem here is that there is shared write-heavy data in a highly concurrent system. This is a Bad Thing - something to be avoided at the design phase (a choice we didn?t have). The solution would be to remove that data - i.e., change the ticking logic so that kingdom nw, free acres, war etc. do not feed into province ticking. This would make it possible to tick provinces independently of one another, and eliminate database contention.
14. Have you or are you considering bringing in the ability of players to buy resources with cash such as they have in other online games?
We are strongly against ?pay-to-win? features, and don?t intend to ever include any. We have lots of ideas for premium features that don?t fall into the category, so everyone should rest safe.
15. Is there anything you would like from the utopian community in order to help maintain the game or to contribute towards player acquisition?
Thanks for this question. We alluded before to community-driven promotion, so hopefully we?ll come back to that in time. Right now though, there are a few things people could really help with.
Cheating is an ongoing problem. People are pretty good about reporting suspected cheaters, but it would also be helpful if people would send us in any cheating scripts, proxies or instructions that are in circulation. We can use these to help us design more effective counter-measures. Ensure that your account information is up-to-date. If you get flagged up by our anti-cheating system, we always take a close look at your account to try and figure out of you?re a multi or not. If you have not filled in any account information, we have nothing to go on. This is especially a problem if you just opened your account recently, and have never bought any credits. Be civil to one another (and to us). If new players make it as far as figuring out the game (few do), they are often still driven away by the culture of abuse and vulgar language. People come from all kinds of backgrounds, and the only way to staunch the flow of offended players leaving the game is if we change that culture. Obviously, if you have a personal relationship with someone, you might feel free to go further, but if it gets reported to us we will need to take action. Smack talk is perfectly normal for an MMO, and is part of the fun (e.g., ?I will pillage your province?). However, we try to draw a line under vulgar language and anything that is personally abusive (e.g., ?I hope you are murdered in your sleep?). We have no tolerance for the latter, because it?s losing us players.
Graphic design. We are grateful for the offers from programmers in the community to help out, but we don?t have work that can be managed remotely at the moment. However, if people in the community want to volunteer good graphic design skills, please step forward. There is a place for both illustration and CSS work. If anyone wants to try design a new VBulletin skin for Utopia, please go right ahead. If it looks good, we can install it and make it available to everyone. If its really good, we might make it the default. Down the line, there may be an opportunity to try some game themes too.
Wiki. The question about the game guide was presumably inspired by the wiki being deficient. Anyone who understands the game and can write well is very welcome to pitch in and help out. To get editing rights, please create a wiki account, and send the name of it to utopiasupport@utopia-game.com.
16. A lot of people seem confused about who controls the game, whether it OMAC/Jolt or just yourselves, could you clarify this for the readers?
First of all, there is no OMAC. After acquiring Jolt, everything became known as Jolt, and that?s what everyone calls them. I bet most people who work in Jolt today don?t even know what OMAC is.
Second, the legal entity that controls the game is called Arcadia Games. That is a company that belongs to us, and whose sole purpose at the moment is Utopia (?Arcadia? means the same thing as Utopia). We (Arcadia) run the game in its entirety, and have no regular interaction with Jolt anymore.
17. Would you go back to writing blogs, updating the community, on how you are developing the game, what ideas you have for the game and responding to player concerns?
We hope to begin blogging again soon enough. We?re going to make more use of Facebook and Twitter too, so communication can be a more fluid.
18. There seems to be a belief within the game that you have refused outside help and investment, Is this the case and if it is, why was it refused?
There was one offer early last year from an interested player who wanted to help salvage things after our last blog post. We are not aware of what level of investment he was able to make, but we were not interested in the terms he required. We appreciated the offer however.
19. Why is it that over the last few ages, provinces that go into vacation mode to protect themselves from being razed or to protect their final ranking, now get kicked from VM instead of being left? Who actually controls this?
A better question would be - why were provinces that abused Vacation Mode not punished before? The answer to that is that Support did not have that button available to them. Support is made up of the developers, Thundergore and Bishop.
20. What do you primarily focus on and what is your role within Utopia? Have you determined a specific role?
We each do whatever is necessary, with a couple of specialities. Brian is mainly in change of making game balancing changes for each new age, while I usually do the actual age restart. For anything else, either of us will just do it when we get the time.
