The State of the Game

[Imperial Aegis]

To all who care & those who do not,

First
Thank you Zarksoft for building this game. EotE has been interesting to say the least. It has great potential even though there are issues, frustrations, failures when you went public with this game.

I want to encourage you to maintain your perspective as the naysayers, doomsayers, & sqankers post their complaints on the forums. Right now it slowly seems as though some want to make you the enemy because they are not receiving their 199 cents worth of game.
Having been a QA tester and a fan of video games - a game such as yours will have it's hiccups like every MMO I've tested(8). In time when you have balanced the game, fixed the crashes, and solved some of the big issues peeps are having you will probably become be hailed as a hero.

Second
Fellow gamers let us remember that this is a game. It is not polished but it is on it's way to becoming something that has lots of potential. If you do not like what you have experienced stop playing wait till the next patch, or wait a month or two and try it again.

Some of the gripes on the forums are legit and constructive some are not. Let's help make this game to succeed by contributing to the forums and being patient with the devs. They want this game to succeed as well. They are working long hours to fix the many issues we are having.

Remember nobodies perfect.
We aren't
They aren't
EotE isn't either

IA

[romars]

I agree with IA lets have patience because If we want to have a good stable game we need to know that this is a new, fresh, complex game also interesting and if u are a 8 years old kid u wont understand that big things came from mistakes.
So lets encourage devs to go ahead and do their work, if 2 - 10 ppl leave that means after some time 50 will join.
Go go Zarksoft !!!

[ChickenHawk07]

Agreed. Just keep in mind that we are all participating in a Beta of sorts. The game is constantly evolving (thanks to the Devs taking our concerns into consideration and acting upon them) and it will get better. There are two outcomes here, either the game gets polished and complete or the Devs keeps working at it until their coffers run dry and they have to close up shop. I've purchased a Year subscription, as I personally feel they will make this right. My 12 months of subscription will not start until the Devs feel the game is up to their standards, which we can see is high. They want and need people to play this game if they want to turn a profit. Have faith that this will turn out for the best.

[VanderLegion]

While some of the issues are definitely to be expected with the launch of a new MMO style game (servers crashing, lag, etc), and others are just to be expected in a new game until things have had time to settle and get balanced (unbalanced specialties or win conditions), losing 3 servers completely was a bit outside the normal expectations, and some of the issues that have cropped up seem like things that really should have been noticed before release (victory conditions that simply don't work, trade problems, the original object count limit not working which they at least got fixed quickly). The game just doesn't feel like it was ready for release yet. That said, I'm still having a lot of fun playing it and am willing to give the devs the benefit of a doubt. They're obviously working hard to get things fixed and are (somewhat?) responsive to the community, more than most devs (though not quite as much as some, which is understandable since I'm sure they're quite busy working on fixing/changing stuff). The fact that they're extending subscriptions for free until they get things settled means I'll keep playing and give them a chance to fix things. Otherwise I'd have probably quit by now (or at least when my 1 month ended) and probably come back in a few months to see how it was doing, since I really want Empire to succeed and become a great game and one I feel I can recommend to friends, I was looking forward to it from the time I first heard about it.

[Tsagoth]

I think a large part of our problem is that even I, the pessimist, really severely underestimated the problems that would occur by only having two developers. Personally I have pretty much stopped posting because when I'm posting I'm not coding, or reading the bug reports, or doing any number of other things that need doing. It can take several hours to pull the logs, and run through them to investigate a single "my ship is missing" report. That's time that would probably be better spent fixing the bug.

I think in the short term, you're going to see less posting from us because there are some massive changes coming that I know Lee has been working on with people on the forum. Z has pretty much wrapped the combat simulator, so once he gets that to me I can start working on it and he can start updating the client. I'm sure we'll all still be posting, but not like we were for the first few weeks after release. We're also working on addressing the shortcomings in our infrastructure so that operating the servers is less manpower-intensive and doesn't result in disasters like what caused the loss of those three servers.

There are two outcomes here, either the game gets polished and complete or the Devs keeps working at it until their coffers run dry and they have to close up shop.

This comes up now and then, so let me put it to rest right now. The game will not be ending because we ran out of money. It could end because Z and I drown in the Bahamas or something, but running out of money for colocation fees just isn't even on the radar.

Besides, someone bought a lifetime subscription. How could we pull the plug on that kind of optimism ?

[VanderLegion]

I'm all for working on coding instead of looking into missing ships or weird combat results (especially since combat is changing), but some input on victory conditions would be nice.

[ChickenHawk07]

I'm all for working on coding instead of looking into missing ships or weird combat results (especially since combat is changing), but some input on victory conditions would be nice.

T posted about the Victory conditions just a little while ago. (Probably after you posted here). But it still isn't very straight forward. I think the question still stands: How the hell does one win in the current servers?

[Balian]

I agree with this thread, personally I don't need to be or care to be placed into a free statues, I'm perfectly happy to continue paying and thus help support efforts and so on to improve the game. Stay strong Zarksoft!!!!

[Tsagoth]

From last night's dev chat we're going to be working on pushing out:

- the combat changes
- the PCC control system
- the rest of push notification

The other stuff listed under future changes will come later when we roll out the next version of the server.