EI and the Future of Horizons 2.1

[Nagafen]

We're going to try this again. This thread is intended to continue a dialogue about EI's plans for Horizons and to give you an opportunity to ask questions directly to an EI representative.

We encourage you to voice your concerns to us. Feedback is essential to measuring our progress. We realize that we've not been as communicative as Tulga was and we're working towards finding a happy medium between their communication style and ours. I think that it's important that we communicate our disagreements and concerns in a way that not only articulates our points of view, but also works towards a solution.

Let me also offer a brief synopsis of what was said in versions 1 & 2 of this thread:

-EI in going to be further developing Horizons. This means that there will be new events, new content & new real estate.

-EI is committed to improving and repairing existing flaws in the game. Initial development will be lighter, because we will be doing work on improving the foundations of the game.

-EI is in negotiations with GN about the Unity shard. The results of those negotiations have not yet been determined.

-EI is going to be engaged in broader advertising for Horizons, in the future.

-EI has hired Amadan, Dyn and Jeff Gully, from the original Tulga team and is still in the process of further building a development team.

-EI is currently developing a newsletter that will be distributed to all present and past Horizons players, to further encourage better communication.

[CallakDW]

I'm really happy to see these answers all in one place. I feel finally the right things are being done.

I have another question reguarding the developers:
I'm a programmer myself, and sometimes I know the right thing that needs to be done to make a system more robust and resiliant than it is, but most often my managers will not allow me to proceed in that direction because of the whole "We need it yesterday" attitude.

After enough "we need it yesterday" responses, quite often the system that I i've been developing resembles somthing like a leaning tower of pizza ready to collapse in apon itself at any time because the foundataion was never designed to support the new additions to the system. At some point the core needs to be redesigned so that it doesn't fall apart.

I feel that this is the situation with HZ and the old Tulga company.

This may not be an appropriate question, I know if I was an EII rep, like you Nagafen, I'd be tempted to report a positive answer regardless of the truth, but I'm curious about the Dev's opinions of EII.

Do the developers finally feel that EII listens to them more than Tulga did as to what needs to be done to make the game work better, and allows them to move forward in that direction?

[Chioxin]

Looking forward to seeing what they are working on. Maybe some specifics about what they are trying to fix or play with in the "foundation" of the game as they call it to improve it? Would it be the Client, or the Server stuff? What are they looking into? What exactly does the "foundation" of the game mean? Is it the basic code? The tools? Can we know? =)

You mentioned they were looking into a way to implement mods better? More efficiently? Some details on such a system would be nice if they are available.

Billing issues... When is the next installment of the 3 parts coming out? What will the second installment include and what does it fix? What do we benefit from it? [Hopefully a stable billing system =) I know]

Umm, there's a few for ya Nagafen =)

Laterz!!!

[Kulamata]

Short, sweet, and effective.

As the development team and the study group progress, it would be nice if possible alternatives for development work were discussed here, so that the player community could comment on assigning priorities.

I think as a practical matter, that having some content development (light as you say) in parallel with a client replacement effort is the right way to go.

[Safire]

1. Is group exp going to be set so that you do not lose 70% of exp per person in a group? (i may be a little off with 70% but it sure seems like it)
2. Is there any plans on making the rating system less insane?

[Sunuke]

Tulga is Hz past we should look at Hz future with EI now which you guys seem to be working onto in a good way. I'm one of the players that left Unity because of the NO service level of GN, because they left us for example a whole weekend without the game and on monday finally found out something was wrong, The icing on the cake was how they messed up the blightend tree ant event where the whole server used some exploit thinking there would be a roll back which was the only logical thing to do yet GN didn't and ruined the economy which was overloaded with cheap formula's and xtals of any type, even the expensive tech resources dropped to shamelessly low pricing.
I hope that in any agreements with GN you will safe guard deals about dealing with exploits and with people misbehaving and support which has hardly been done.

I really liked reading the Heralds which i got for a short period and then were dropped. So getting those back and being able to read what's going on on the server would be really great.

I think there should be found a balance in fixing issues and adding new content because as we all know software has bugs even the best written software. I would be really happy to see a sollution to the spawn issue.
Right now you have to run into an area to populate it instead of running into a populated field which you'll eradicate.

Wouldn't it be a sollution to make it so the sector before will populate so once you would come into the area there would be an actual population instead of needing to way? dunno if this is a too technical question to ask thou

[Justa Mirage]

I would like to know if we will be seeing the "Quest Editor" for players to submit quests to EI for approval.

There are a lot of avid lore writers that would love to add spice to the world their characters live in... and the best part is the feeling you get when others that play, are interacting with something you helped write.

[Sharduk]

Here's a question not yet asked to an EI official.

What is your position on exploiting ?

AFK Macroing ?

Would reporting it with evidence < screen shots / logs / multiple player eyewitness accounts etc > do any good ?

Finally , if reporting it would cause some action, who to and how to report it ?

Sharduk

[Nagafen]

CallakDW,
It's a stressful balance, between getting development done as soon as possible and making sure development meets the highest realistic standards of quality. If you roll it out too fast, it ultimately hurts the game and you lose players. If you wait too long to roll it out, you run the risk of players losing patience and leaving. We're going to be handling development in a very deliberate and organized way, so that we avoid both of these extremes.

Chioxin,
At this point, we're in the process of asssessing the game, in its entirety. We're listing every problem we can find and deciding which ones we can work around and which ones need to be fixed. Once we prioritize the fixes, we're going to start knocking them out. For a while, these efforts are going to be running parallel to our development. Once we've finished these fixes, which will take quite some time, the full efforts of the team will be devoted to development.

When I say that we're interested in further supporting player mods, what I mean is that we're open to the idea of patching players' favorite mods into the game. If we decide to move forward with that possiblity, we want to make sure that we have a practical and fair system of rating the mods. We would also have to determine a way to make sure that the creators of the mods are given full credit. We haven't come to any conclusions yet.

Safire,
I'm sorry but I don't have an answer for you. I'm afraid I'm not much help with really specific stuff.

Kulamata,
Once we have some specifics nailed down, we will definitely be talking about them with the players. Feedback is key. However, we're not going to be depending solely on the boards and the IRC for feedback. The population of Istaria is larger than these boards and it's important, for the future of the game, that we stay true to the tastes of the majority. Hence, the aforementioned newsletter.

Justa,
The Quest Editor has been put on hold while we make the assessment of what our next steps should be. One of our priorities is going to be further development of Lore and we intend to very much include the players in this process.

Sharduk,
At this point, dealing with exploiting and AFK macroing hasn't been at the top of our list of priorities. I'm not going to make an official statement about the topic because, frankly, I'm not prepared to do so.

[Vlisson]

We have great plans for Horizons and it's future, and within the next two months you can expect a more concrete schedule of events to come. As of right now, the development team is focussing on staging the hardware and stabilizing the current system. As we've said before, we don't plan on repeating the mistakes of Horizons' past. We want a firm foundation to build upon going forward."

could you give me any clarifications on this?

2 month to make a more concrete schedule?

its good to hear that you employed 3 Tulga members, so we can count now 3 peoples working on HZ?

what are the mistakes of Horizons past? bugs? no communication? too slow progression of the game? not enough manpower?

[Aria]

Nagafen, in one of the other future of horizons threads you mentioned something about a two month mark for development.

I was curious, did you mean in two months EI would be ready to start development? ~ ie patches, etc?

Or in two months EI will have a team together and will then present a design preview and/or development goals/plans/ideas?

Thanks in advance for the clarification

[Nagafen]

Sunuke,
We've not yet decided how we're going to use the Quest Editor. We want, very much, to involve the players as much as we can, in shaping the story of Istaria. However, having "too many cooks in the kitchen" wouldn't be good for the game. Our goal is to find a balance.

CallakDW,
I'm not directly involved in the hiring of developers and the building of that team, so I don't have much inside information about the process. I can tell you that former Tulga employees are not going to be the only people working on Horizons and the team is going to continue to grow.

Vlisson,
I'm afraid I can't get much more specific about when we're going to make an official announcement, regarding the direction of development. The game certainly has some shortcomings, but I don't see any point to speculating as to why they exist. Throwing stones at Tulga & Artifact accomplishes nothing. It is our intention to learn from the past and continue to move forward.

Aria,
The two-month statement referred to our goal for presenting our development plans and ideas. At present, our focus is split between development and repairs.

[snickel]

(...) I can tell you that former Tulga employees are not going to be the only people working on Horizons and the team is going to continue to grow.
(...)

The team is going to continue to grow... announcements like this raise hopes and are a fine antidote against the 'cassandra attitude'.

Thank you, Nagafen.

[Tzael]

Vlisson,
I'm afraid I can't get much more specific about when we're going to make an official announcement, regarding the direction of development. The game certainly has some shortcomings, but I don't see any point to speculating as to why they exist. Throwing stones at Tulga & Artifact accomplishes nothing. It is our intention to learn from the past and continue to move forward.

Let me rephrase Vlission's query if I may.

What are the issues with Horizons that EI sees holding the game back, and what does EI intend to do in order to address those problems ?

[saphosar]

-EI is in negotiations with GN about the Unity shard. The results of those negotiations have not yet been determined.

Can you say something about the progress of those negotiations?

Can you give a short summary of your goals (don't support unity aynmore? buy the unity database and do a shard merger? work closer with GN and let them do the european business? take over the european business by yourself? do something to grow the player base on Unity and not only in NA? etc.?)

What is the timeframe we can expect to hear about results? (of couse GN states that they already answered EI's questions so I would assume that there already are some results (even if not final yet))

Please, give us some facts.

[Nagafen]

Tzael,
I've not been able to get in touch with a programmer today, to get more specific information about what fixes they're considering. I'm working towards finding an answer to your and Vlisson's question, though.

Saphosar,
I realize that I've offered few details about the Unity negotiations and I'm sorry about that. Since the discussion is still in progress, there's not much information that would be appropriate for me to release. As it is, I don't even have information to keep confidential. I've not been able to confirm anything and I think that posting speculation would be a bad idea.

[Scarn_de_Diabolic]

I left this game long ago because of issues with spawn lag. Running into an area and standing for say 2 minutes then suddenly dieing from god knows what. Then monsters begin appearing letting me know something was in the area. I know it's not my machine, 2 Gig DDR, Athlon XP 3800+ with Dual SLI geforce 6800's;even my Hardrives are Sata Western Digital 10,000RPM Raptors in Raid 0. Oh and a gigabit Ethernet port with DSL. All the lag had to be in the client and on the server end. What if any changes are you planning to do to the client to fix this. I loved the game, Hell I helped beta it, but the lag just killed it for me.

[CallakDW]

I left this game long ago because of issues with spawn lag. Running into an area and standing for say 2 minutes then suddenly dieing from god knows what. Then monsters begin appearing letting me know something was in the area. I know it's not my machine, 2 Gig DDR, Athlon XP 3800+ with Dual SLI geforce 6800's;even my Hardrives are Sata Western Digital 10,000RPM Raptors in Raid 0. Oh and a gigabit Ethernet port with DSL. All the lag had to be in the client and on the server end. What if any changes are you planning to do to the client to fix this. I loved the game, Hell I helped beta it, but the lag just killed it for me.

I can assure you that it's not your system or connection. I'm running top of the line stuff myself right now, and it still happens. This is also the same reason I left the first time. Or rather the final draw. If there is any way of changing the spawn system from localized spawning to world wide like it was originally, that would be a HUGE improovement to the entire game.

[Deth]

See this thread http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=6259 for the reason for the slow spawn rate. It is not lag it is the way it is programed. The ability to fix things on the fly with no downtime is also the reason why we have the slow spawns. Now back to your normal Q&A session.

[saphosar]

As it is, I don't even have information to keep confidential. I've not been able to confirm anything and I think that posting speculation would be a bad idea.

Sorry to hear this, but of course you are right. Posting speculations is bad.

Anyway, thanks for your quick answer as I think at least this is a big step forward.

Regards,
Sap