Questions about Age of Ascent |
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asasama 
New Poster  Joined: 13 Feb 2013 Status: Offline Points: 20 |
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 Quote Reply  Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 01:26 |
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After listening to this livechat, I think that you guys have a lot of really good ideas for AoA. I understand that systems developed for AoA can be co-opted to enhance illy, but my concern is about the timeline of these releases. You are about to go into an alpha for AoA and launch a kickstarter in order to finance the majority of the game. If the funding comes through, you'll have at least a year (and probably more) of development before AoA can be completed. After that these systems need to be adapted into illy which will also take time. In illy we've already gone near a year without a tournament and longer without a major content update. I know you won't comment on exactly when new content is coming to illy, but from today's interview I can only conclude that we will have more of the same for years to come. We play this game because we love it, but if we aren't thrown a bone once in a while I really fear for the future of illy.
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| Epidemic
Postmaster   Joined: 03 Nov 2012 Location: USA Status: Offline Points: 768 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 01:28 |
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I respect your honesty, that is something extremely rare in online gaming.
I listened to the podcast and really like the idea of AoA. I took from it that the professional help you get with AoA would also be used to improve and update Illy, am I correct in assuming this? We also heard you comment on alliance limits being a bad idea that should be fixed. I'm not sure if an alliance of 600 crows is a good thing, but I can see that getting rid of alliance limits could be a good thing, of course it could be a bad thing as well. Edited by Epidemic - 09 Mar 2014 at 01:30 |
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| GM Stormcrow
Moderator Group  GM Joined: 23 Feb 2010 Location: Illyria Status: Offline Points: 3820 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 01:28 |
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Hi Daefis,
Think it would be helpful (possibly to you more than me) if you could mentally separate and practically catalog the "....current problems in Illy" from new things as-yet-unreleased such as the Broken Lands and upgrades.
These are very different things with very different priorities.
Best,
SC
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| GM Stormcrow
Moderator Group GM Joined: 23 Feb 2010 Location: Illyria Status: Offline Points: 3820 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 01:34 |
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Thanks Epi.
The illy codebase isn't perfect, as you all know. But it's no better or worse than it was last month either, so I do hope people bear that in mind.
On your first question, absolutely. The work that's been done on AoA - even on ostensibly unrelated systems - has been a bit of code epiphany for us in terms of writing scalable code, and that's going to directly help illy from today (or, in fact, 2 months ago) onwards.
On the alliance front; I'd love to get feedback on this from you guys. Is there a big difference between having 6 alliances of 100 players, or 1 alliance of 600 players? I understand that it might make communications a bit more difficult etc, but that seems like a kinda artificial constraint. Is there a good reason why we shouldn't raise the cap on alliances (in AoA, or indeed in Illy). I'd love to hear thoughts on this.
Best
SC
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| GM Stormcrow
Moderator Group GM Joined: 23 Feb 2010 Location: Illyria Status: Offline Points: 3820 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 01:40 |
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I get this, asasama, I truly do.
atm we're fixing things in illy, and working on AoA at the same time.
If the funding comes through we can hire more people to work on AoA things (which are largely also illy things). I don't think you should look at things linearly, however. Whilst
I'm extremely conscious of not wanting illy to become a "testing ground", if
there's (eg) a proven, robust, scalable, cloud-based crafting system built for AoA that's ready to go, we can port the data across and it can go in illy before the rest of AoA is completed.
SC
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| Rill
Postmaster General   Player Council - Geographer Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Location: California Status: Offline Points: 6903 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 01:42 |
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Personally I'm not in favor of larger alliances, unless you give us some more tools to manage them better -- such as the ability to cc mails to select people; now we have the choice between sending to a whole alliance or manually forwarding it to 20 people. Even then I would be at most ambivalent.
Leading an alliance of 100 people already takes hard work and dedication, and can often lead to burnout. Leading an alliance of 600 people would be a more than full-time job. I think you'd see a much higher churn rate of the people who are usually your most dedicated players -- the folks who choose to lead alliances.
I would MUCH rather see multiple user-controlled chat rooms. This would obviously require more programming work than just lifting the limit on alliance members, but would be a more useful and interesting change -- and could accomplish something similar for the mega-confederations if there were multiple people allowed in chats.
Out of the many recurring suggestions I've seen on the forum "let us make bigger alliances" has rarely or possibly never been among them.
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| Daefis
Wordsmith  Joined: 05 Aug 2011 Location: London Status: Offline Points: 128 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 01:51 |
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| GM Stormcrow
Moderator Group GM Joined: 23 Feb 2010 Location: Illyria Status: Offline Points: 3820 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 02:02 |
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Sure, there's been a massive war that may or may not be winding up (I don't follow the actual ins and outs very closely, but I've read a huge amount in the forum about the war), with alliances and players doing all sorts of great things that make me proud of the sandbox game we've developed that allows these awesome player interactions to happen.
Illy continues on.
If you specifically mean "are we releasing any new code right now?" then I think you should prepare (as we do every day) to receive very conflicting (and passionately delivered) advice on whether we should:
a) fix some of the bugs that are currently out there ingame and affect people who are playing the game, versus
b) releasing new stuff that, whilst cool, will probably introduce more bugs that we weren't expecting and aren't prepared to handle atm
It's just that there are competing goals and different priorities (on everything, even within illy, let alone AoA) and we have to assign resource where it's most effective. The development of some systems, independently funded by AoA backing, that will massively benefit illy is, in my opinion, a good use of resource to benefit both games. Others may disagree, and that's absolutely your prerogative to do so.
Best,
SC
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| Daefis
Wordsmith Joined: 05 Aug 2011 Location: London Status: Offline Points: 128 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 02:21 |
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Sorry GMStormcrow but war or no war the last tourney was nearly a year ago. And the fact that there's a war going on should be irrelevant in a sandbox. Current events shouldn't be an excuse to not deliver anything? a year is far too long..... As for anything new believe me we're expectant.....
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| Malek
Forum Warrior  Joined: 09 Jul 2012 Location: Australia Status: Offline Points: 247 |
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Quote Reply Posted: 09 Mar 2014 at 03:11 |
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Illy is what made AoA possible, am I correct in saying this? Illy is already established and has a nice steady cashflow for you, why jeopardise that, you may be passionate about AoA, though if you let illy fall into a state of disrepair your cashflow will dry up. People will only buy a product if they get a perceived benefit out of it.
Why dont you do a kickstarter for illy, you have the stakeholders that play illy that want to see it flourish and develop. Get the income increased for illy where you can hire more people for illy and you can concentrate on AoA with oversight on the work undertaken/completed on illy.
Set goals for target funding, we reach the dollar goal, you hire someone or work on a specified update illustrated in the kickstarter goals. The rewards for assisting can be newly created special units or something else that could be better than that. I
f all you have to do is tell someone what is needed and then review their work and test it where ever you test things it should speed up the process significantly. Get the community to work for you and to assist you, Illy is a great game it's slow pace is what has kept me playing and interested.
Another solution to the PR issue that is happening is to further use the current players by stating that some of them can get early access to BL and to write about it in a forum where they can tell us their perspective their experiences, when it comes live everything is reset. In other words, exploit the player base to do some of the work for you not only will they love it and the other players will, it will also free up some time for you guys as well.
The lack of communication has been increasingly frustrating, though from the comments made by SC it appears that the dev's are hopefully listening and steering the ship back on course.
And that's my 2cents,
Malek
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Daefis wrote: