Utopia is currently under critical pressure from widespread cheating, which is both ruining gameplay and swamping the server that it is hosted on. The scale of the problem is immediately obvious by the volume of complaints, and from our increasingly frequent late-night emergency support sessions.
We understand the degree of frustration that many of you feel at these destructive forces being left to tear the community apart. We feel it's time to openly discuss the state of affairs from our point of view.
Before we took it over, Utopia was a game that was in danger of being shut down by Jolt, much like Earth:2025 eventually was. Simply put, the difficulty and cost of running the game exceeded its potential profitability. However, we (Sean and Brian) felt that if we could re-write the game, then we could get around these difficulties and give it a future.
We personally invested in this effort as a project for our own company, at our own personal expense. This, as we all know, took longer than we anticipated, but eventually we got it running again. The game is currently loss-making, and we have shifted our focus onto more commercial projects. Nonetheless, since Christmas, we have been working weekends to keep Utopia running, on a good-will basis.
Our hope is that this would be enough for the moment, and that at some point in the future we would be able to justify further investment in the game to try to make it profitable. This would require promoting it in new languages, and simplifying the game to make it accessible to new players.
Unfortunately, it is beginning to look like working at weekends is not enough. Wide spread scripted cheating is killing game performance, meanwhile moving to more powerful servers would mean that the game wouldn't break even against its hosting costs. Hunting down cheaters, and/or building software to help identify them, is a never-ending war of escalation with both sides constantly improving techniques with no end in sight. There is a limited rate of progress that we can achieve in our fight against cheaters, and we are currently overwhelmed. We know that one of the most prolific cheaters is also one of the most publicly vociferous anti-cheating complainants. We don't know why these people want to kill the game, but they are.
Our plans for the future of the game don't extend past attempting to maintain it. Immediately, we are looking at improving performance of the game, and creating admin tools so that we can devolve responsibility for finding and banning cheaters. To even get this done, we need your cooperation. Many players are being abusive not just in the utopia forum, but in other forums as well. Jolt staff members have received personal abuse on blogs, social networking sites and via PM and email. This is frankly appalling. As a result, the Jolt-run Utopia forum is on the verge of being shutdown completely, since it is too much work to moderate, and it is unacceptable to remain the host of such aggressive content. Meanwhile, we are under pressure to shut down the game itself. To those of you that are responsible: we understand your frustration - please help us keep the game alive by conducting yourselves better. To ensure that you have a reliable point of contact, Thundergore will be in charge of the Utopia forum from now on, and he will be able to pass your concerns on to us.
Like most of you, we feel that we have invested a lot into the game, and don't want to end its long tradition. However the game is at risk from the behavior of part of its own community. Since we are currently unable to properly police the game and forums, we hope the answer will come from you.
The Utopia Developers
