Triggered: Ask Dave and Jeff questions

[sexual harassment panda]

Which one of you would win in a fight?

[feast]

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.

[Persain]

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

[Osaze]

How do you envision updating the code base to newer forms that allow for more efficient transactions? Is there a specific framework you prefer?

[Meep]

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?

[Palem]

Who are these ghettos?

[baka]

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.

[Attero]

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

[Sephi]

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.

[brandonc204]

...

[chadde]

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.

[Bart of Sparta]

Will you fix "The Oops"?

This. The rest is all quite irrelevant atm.

Oh, and #2, can you either remove caps from sci OR make size have at least SOME influence on the effects. Hard caps + no size effects = lame.

[Loons]

Who are these ghettos?

Palem .. don't steal Folnubs quote

[Loons]

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.

+ 1

[Magicus Lex Non Scripta]

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.

This is a nice summary IMO. I think before I would ask the questions I might have not listed, I'd want to know the answers to those.