Gardens of Time at RockYou. Ive been working on the game now for about 2.5 years in different capacities, and my current role has me managing the team of artists/designers/engineers/producers that work so hard on this title. Ive joined a couple of the larger GoT groups to be able to keep you all better informed on what the team is currently working on / looking into. Ill be here periodically providing some updates, but feel free to also ask questions. To start things off on a positive note, I know many of you are probably enjoying the new content we released yesterday, however, heres a super early sneak preview of one of the finished items for next weeks release. About the level 200 We will be increasing the level cap again. Most likely either with the release of Chapter 122 or slightly before. When the in game buildings reach unlock level 200 is when were essentially planning on raising it. So we have been noticing some slowness with FB as well which has been affecting us and the general speed of the game. Looking at ways to optimize the speed of the game is always something which is on our roadmap of things to do, however, more often than not its easier said than done and tends to just be an issue with old games because of all the stuff that has been added into it over the years. In terms of neighbors missing. when we transitioned the game from Playdom to RockYou we could only transfer data for players that gave consent to the Terms of Service popup that we put in (where players basically gave consent for Disney to hand your data over to RockYou). So if you had neighbors that didnt accept the Terms of Service popup, then they were removed from your neighbor list because we no longer had access to their data. That is how it was supposed to work, and was thoroughly tested, however, as with most things, there was probably random edge cases that people fell into where even though they accepted the popup, they were still removed from being your neighbor. The ads during gameplay (idle ads) show up if youve been idle for 3 minutes (I believe is what we currently have it set to). Theyre setup such that if you purchase gold, you no longer see them for 45 days (which we just fixed yesterday, though its still not 100% fixed, currently the 45day rule isnt in place and well be fixing it next week). So youll be pleased to know that we will be removing World view (most likely with next weeks content release). World View, was supposed to be this grand idea of offering access points to new features and providing context for the world that the Time Society members live it. Needless to say, it didnt quite live up to the hype, and more people seemed to be confused with it moreso than anything else. Due to time constraints, we wont be able to fix it, so well just be removing it. We are definitely sad to see it go though Assuming that you are talking about the expired Time Crystal quests, that is also scheduled to be fixed, though probably not for about 2 weeks or so. Currently the way it works is, once it expires and you click on it, you get a popup that lets you purchase 1 of the 2 items you might have missed out on. Clicking on it also activates a 4 day timer after which it will disappear, however, if you never click on it the timer will never start. The plan is to basically remove that timer such that it just disappears right away and doesnt stay cluttering the quest log on the side there. Also, if it seems like everything is suddenly magically on schedule to be fixed, its mainly because we just got some more engineering resources, so we have the people now that we can actually start making changes with So we will unfortunately not be translating the game anymore. So what that means is that for each language, after a certain point in the game it will only be in English. It basically comes down to the cost of translating compared to the revenue from that region, once it becomes a net negative we stop translations. January of this year we stopped all translations and continued only in English. So that is the big issue that is really confusing us unfortunately. We have been looking into it for weeks now, but we have yet to be able to figure out exactly why a small subset of players are having issues with their gardens and not being able to visit neighbors. I dont believe theres anything you can do to fix the issue, Im pretty sure its all on us. Assuming youve submitted a ticket to our support staff, weve basically been using peoples facebook ids in order to try and find out if theres anything in common with the players that are experiencing the problem, and if theres any issues with their game data. At the moment, we dont know when well have it fixed by unfortunately, but we are aware of the issue. Were talking about possibly removing the stamp icon, but keeping the stamp feature, however, thats probably a couple weeks down the road at this point. Allen Diaz The primary way for adding neighbors is clicking the My Neighbors tab just above the game and adding them there. There is a limit to the number of neighbors you can have, however, I believe that number is fairly high and shouldnt be an issue. I started at Playdom a few years back and have been with the game ever since. We are currently working on bringing the Inner Circle back and hoping to have it working again before the end of August. The artists have already finished the exclusive building, were just waiting for the engineers to work out all the technical details with re-enabling it. (Edit: Well be increasing the amount of gold you get from the Inner Circle and most likely removing the Time Crystals, since Time Crystal chapters have been cancelled until further notice.) In terms of submitting tickets there are 2 important updates there. 1) RockYou has just recently (yesterday) finished upgrading their admin tools to be able to start addressing simple issues that players are having. So we have a backlog of tickets dating back weeks that they are now working through. 2) For larger issues and bugs that people have been reporting, essentially what happens with those is the following: Every week I receive a report for our Community Support team detailing major issues, # of tickets we receive about each of them, and any key details that will help us resolve them. I then have to schedule in time for our engineers to both look into the issues as well as try to fix them. If its something thats both an emergency and easy to fix, we will quickly put it in game, otherwise any fixes will generally go out with content releases on Wednesday/Thursday. How long it takes to fix something is affected by both how complicated it is to find the actual problem as well as how much open time we have for our engineers to work on it. Also, this just in. For those of you playing the current chapter, it looks like we accidentally released the wrong art assets for the Wizard Stone artifact, causing it to look like the Wizard Hat after you place it in your garden.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 05:54:52 +0000
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