State of the Service, 1st March 2005

[Luca Mazzasogni]

Hello folks of Unity!

Here?s a brief statement from the crew at Game Network about the current state of the service for the European shard of Horizons as we would like to inform you about a few things that are going on in our offices:

- New CSR aboard: a new Customer Support Representative joined our time today, he?s already under training and in a few days you should see him active on the support website (his nickname will be revealed as soon as he has found a good one for himself).
- New website in concept: we?re currently working on a new concept for the Horizons product website (europe.istaria.com) to give a proper community place also for European players. Feel free to give us your suggestions about all the features and sections you would like to see added to it.
- New maintenance schedule: with the improved server performance in the last few months we have decided to try a new maintenance schedule and go back to a single maintenance downtime. This will be tested starting from next week and the chosen day will be Thursday morning. This choice has been made for two main reasons: is close enough to the update release day on North American shards so you won?t have to wait too long to receive them and they will have enough time to test them correctly on live shards, second the maintenance would be still close to the weekend to give better performance for the most busy period of the week for the server.
- Security Certificate for login/support website: as you know the certificate has been bought back in October when it expired, unfortunately we will not be able to register and apply it until we receive a written authorization from the istaria.com domain owner. This received a further delay although we posted that the issue was resolved a few days ago, we apologize about this.
- Random Events: as some of you already experienced last week with the attacks on Aughundell and Dalimond, we?ve started working on some random town raids from Withered Aegis forces. We know that many of you like this kind of events and would like to see them almost daily, but their schedule will remaind just random? so you might have 3 attacks in 2 days and maybe then nothing for a week and at different times during the day. The point of these attacks will remain to be random and mostly unexpected!

That?s all for now, we hope you will enjoy these improvements for Unity and feel free to send us your feedback!

[Royal]

Whoot, thats nice work guys!
KEEEEEEEEP'm commin'

[Doombreak]

All of the above sounds rele good, glad the security thing will get sorted out and a few more event like attack on aug...maybe try it in a less laggy place [:)]

The game is about battleing the undead hoards and those attacks will be a step the right way.

Less downtime is good toomeans i can craft a lot more [:)]

[Sibbe]

[Y] yay

- New website in concept: we?re currently working on a new concept for the Horizons product website (europe.istaria.com) to give a proper community place also for European players. Feel free to give us your suggestions about all the features and sections you would like to see added to it.

is this going to replace the community.istaria.com websit for euro players? And if yes, do we loose contact with the devs then?
Or will it just be an informative site?

- Random Events

cant wait to be attacked somewhere by total surprise :)

[Luca Mazzasogni]

Sibbe, in answer to your questions:

1- We still don't know if we will have a Forum there or not, although we would like to have a big multi-section Forum for European users instead of keeping them in a small sub-section here. We will ask for your feedback on this, but we believe that it would be nice to have an official European Forum again.

2- You won't loose contact with the Devs as I'm pretty sure that they will keep visiting European Forums as they always did in the past (they're still the developers of the game [;)]) and you would be still able to use this Forums as well.

[Cadfael]

Sibbe, in answer to your questions:

1- We still don't know if we will have a Forum there or not, although we would like to have a big multi-section Forum for European users instead of keeping them in a small sub-section here. We will ask for your feedback on this, but we believe that it would be nice to have an official European Forum again.

2- You won't loose contact with the Devs as I'm pretty sure that they will keep visiting European Forums as they always did in the past (they're still the developers of the game [img]/Web//emoticons/emotion-5.gif[/img]) and you would be still able to use this Forums as well.

Luca, I definitively agree with you on that !!

Concerning the communication with devs, as I understand they decided to lower their communication by sending info (if any) on irc.

Imho, Euro community wont miss lot by leaving this board to NA players

[Cerjar]

- New website in concept: we?re currently working on a new concept for the Horizons product website (europe.istaria.com) to give a proper community place also for European players. Feel free to give us your suggestions about all the features and sections you would like to see added to it.

Well most information are in english on the community-site from Tulga. So it would be nice to have as many information in other languages as possible. I know this is a huge task, but would fit best for the european multi-lingual market.

Many people would like to see the consigment list that the NA-Shards have, for unity as well.

News: Andmorenews then the normal site, their last post is the Live-Patch from the 15. February. Andi would also like to see in the news of a website where i dont have to login when the shard is up.

[Daedra]

- New website in concept: we?re currently working on a new concept for the Horizons product website (europe.istaria.com) to give a proper community place also for European players. Feel free to give us your suggestions about all the features and sections you would like to see added to it.

Good post and nice to see it e-mailed too. Will this website include the consignment listings that are currently available for the NA shards? Its a very good feature and one I know would benefit many players.

[Luca Mazzasogni]

Good post and nice to see it e-mailed too. Will this website include the consignment listings that are currently available for the NA shards? Its a very good feature and one I know would benefit many players.

If people like the feature, we'll try to get it included in the new website.

[Fhrain]

Nice update there Luca[:)]

[Spirit]

Sounds grrrrreat.. [:)]

Spirit

[Tzael]

I really don't like the idea of distancing ourselves by having a 'european' website, 'european' forums, and so on. We're all playing the same game, if anything we should be working to get the Unity specific stuff up onto the existing community website. Why have someone repeat all the work that Tulga have done ? Waste of time imo. Much better to work towards a common place for ALL players to visit instead of separating us like this [U]

BTW for what it's worth with the forums, Unity players do use all sections of these boards, we're not restricted to this one area.

I'm pleased to see progress being made on little things like the security certificate, and an addition to the CSR team, one period of maintenance per week also sounds good.

Looking forward to the random events too !

My biggest problem is if we're having seperate forums and a seperate website for Unity players then I'm going to be visiting twice as many websites. Please, please, please work with Tulga and come up with an acceptable means of 'sharing' the existing community website !

[eollyn]

Great to see updates Luca, both on forum and e-mail, verrrry good. I did fall a bit over the mention of improved servers, shudder to think what they used to be like then... (0.5-5 fps in Kion is rather normal it seems but is verrrrrrry laggy) But am glad there's now good news coming the players' way.

[Milandra]

Thanks for those infos Luca :)
Can't wait for all this stuffs [:D]

[Enoeth]

If there are going to be supposed future raids, I'd like to suggest the fallowing thing:

Make raids accesable for all tier players by using this method : If raids come in waves, like the first wave are tier I , then II , then III and then IV , don't know where to stop - there's the surprise , then we could actually make up tier I, II, III, etc groups and we could efectively group togather .

If we just make one big group or several ones, we should get overun and wouldn't be able to fight all the monsters and some low level guys would ulimately die : this might force the very high level guys to concentrate on their tier rating monsters and a bit below, and let the lower tiers to lower players .


I would really like to see a cool graphics / flash interactive website, maybe we could have a section where we could post SHARD / WORLD events set to come in the world ? ..... and we could vote for that type of event at that time and if we get XX votes the event is OK to go ? ... perhaps this might encourage more unity players to check World Events : Crafting, Contests , and other type of events .

[Enoeth]

Could we work on this thing ... or get this thing done for Unity in a roleplay manner at Unity website ? Perhaps a Unity Tavern :P with cool graphics ,

[A thought came through my head: a some kind of database (not neccessary made by me) in which everyone can click on a tech resource and the amount of the tech resources they need : WTB (What to Buy), and a possible price they're paying for each of the techs .... and below that request tech res a line with WTS (what to sell) and how much they want to sell the items at.... the people requesting tech resources should contact the sellers .... they decide are the best ones]

Perhaps this thing could go not only for tech resources but also for : Looking for Work, Asking someone to work on your plot (hiring), selling formulas ....

All of these without having to sell items at consigner and not knowing if they are sold ... at the price you're asking *(in this system you could negotiate the price with the buyer and the items would be for sale forever ... not just when you're online in-game and at market channel you post a notice)

P.S. We could use accounts (created accordingly to the Unity characters) that work only for unity players .... and the password is sent to the e-mail of the account .... If we could manage the tavern in-game too , that would be so amazing ... but i think this should be the dev's thingie ....

[Lystiga]

Hello Luca,

Many good news as CSR aboard, maybe the concept with a new website will be a good one too.
Random Events were fun and a good way to get tension in game, but try to find a way out of the biggest laggy towns or pleace try to find a way how the fps could stay on a playable niveau.

About the new maitenance shedule, maybe I'm the only one to see a hair in that soup, but
we have now two maitenances downtime normaly and mostly there is after the weekend a loss
of many features in game. Maybe the DB is not stably enough, but we loss the last days :
road bonus, npc in mahagra, storage of house tents and the storage (put into) ofthe guildhouse.

Not easy to believe that a one week maitenance shedule would be the right way.


Lystiga

[HAG]

First, Great News Luca! [:D]

Glad to see that GN finally got their things settled with Tulga, so we can get treated like real costumers again.

Next, i fully second what Tzael has written

I really don't like the idea of distancing ourselves by having a 'european' website, 'european' forums, and so on. We're all playing the same game, if anything we should be working to get the Unity specific stuff up onto the existing community website. Why have someone repeat all the work that Tulga have done ? Waste of time imo. Much better to work towards a common place for ALL players to visit instead of separating us like this [img]/Web//emoticons/emotion-50.gif[/img]

BTW for what it's worth with the forums, Unity players do use all sections of these boards, we're not restricted to this one area.

I'm pleased to see progress being made on little things like the security certificate, and an addition to the CSR team, one period of maintenance per week also sounds good.

Looking forward to the random events too !

My biggest problem is if we're having seperate forums and a seperate website for Unity players then I'm going to be visiting twice as many websites. Please, please, please work with Tulga and come up with an acceptable means of 'sharing' the existing community website !

[Luca Mazzasogni]

we have now two maitenances downtime normaly and mostly there is after the weekend a loss
of many features in game. Maybe the DB is not stably enough, but we loss the last days :
road bonus, npc in mahagra, storage of house tents and the storage (put into) ofthe guildhouse.

Those you describe are the symptoms of a world server crash and in all honesty:

- we had one yesterday after few months without one happening (and that was not related to database load)
- still for several weeks we haven't had any support ticket opened about the problems you mentioned

I know that yesterday's issue (now fixed) had some consequences on the gameplay in certain areas but I believe this cannot be turned into a"After every weekend we have in game problems" issue.

[Lystiga]

Sorry Luca, but I didn't wrote after every weekend, just mostly and that it was not only once
that there was some problems like storage and road bonus problems that I know. I'm pretty sure you has get morethan one ticket about.

But if you (GN) think it will be ok, and you are right, I will be the last to critisize a single
maitenance.

Lystiga

Btw. we have no road bonus in Balzar (28658/15131) since Tuesday and we has it neither after the maitenance.
No big problem, just want you do know, now you're reading here.