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InnoGames TV InnoGames TV September Edition

DeletedUser1081

Not very helpful, were they. As predicted, they ignored the most important questions, and took the easy way out with the one about why they don't respond to our concerns, issues and questions. "We're too busy" - so make time! Grr
 

ddevil

Chief Warrant Officer
From the video I felt this month's episode is only based on this en server .... Bcoz when they showed the videos of them checking the forums they were showing only En forums ... SO maybe they do give a li'l bit more importance to this server or maybe we are the one's who make the most noise about the game on the forums....LOL
 

DeletedUser

Well, we did get some answers to a few of our questions; people have wanted to know about the bonuses for Great Buildings at levels above level 10 and exactly why the Hardware Acceleration feature was implemented. I think the players with Android devices will be happy to know that the app is being worked on, even if it won't be available shortly. It was 'nice to know' that buildings won't ever be rotated, although this has been addressed on the forum before.

Finally, although the reply about the devs not having enough time to reply to us on the forums is perhaps not the most welcome news, it is how the situation stands. It is good to know that they do read the forums and are aware of all the issues, and that the Community Managers are expected to report back to them on a regular basis.
 

DeletedUser

I would like to add we are making increased efforts to make sure that both bugs and game improvement ideas are being sent through to where they need to be much faster than previously.
 

DeletedUser101925

This was the first episode I was actually waiting for and honestly it's quite a disappointment. I guess my expectations were too high but I really thought some (important) community questions would be adressed. Sad to see that's not the case.
 

DeletedUser15432

Disappointing, many pressing questions ignored and not really worth the time taken to watch the issue
 

DeletedUser99588

Very disappointing and a poor choice of questions answered. The 23 languages excuse for not answering questions on the forum is very misleading as I suspect that the same questions/problems arise on each server whatever language they may be in. Got the distinct impression they were not happy at having to answer the questions. This is something I actually understand as from their point of view it isn't what they are paid to do.

What I will say is that the new Mod team seems to be having a positive influence and I hope we will continue to see improvements and the beta server being used to iron out bugs before hitting the main servers. Now fingers crossed the army management filter/sort order will be somewhere near the top of things to be improved in the future as currently it has a mind of its own shuffling them in a bizarre way every time you pick a unit. While they are at it they can add an identifier to know which barracks a unit has come from :D
 

DeletedUser

I wonder how many people are interested in every Inno game. Perhaps the video announcement can contain details of where (time stamp) each section (name the game) may be found as do other games of which I am aware.

I do not have the time to wade through the whole video until I get the game I am intereted in, nor to try to find that game on the slider bar. Therefore, I read what others have to say about it - so far, it does not appear to stack up to expectations. Ah well.
 

DeletedUser6

Hi guys,

Tracey just mentioned your concerns to me. Let me justify the choice: we have chosen those particular questions, because they were a good choice for a short video (and we had to keep it short). Also there are some questions that we could not answer (like "how much does the game earn") for obvious reasons. Some other questions would require much longer answers and thus we would not meet the keep-it-short requirement. Therefore we have made our choice and I believe that stuff like buildings rotation, which I can see over and over again showing up in community forums and even support requests, somehow is important to many players, even tho regular forum goers already know the answer for a long time and saying it again (but in the video this time) is not very attractive to them. I got it - but please remember that forum community is relatively small % of our overall userbase. So lots of people just did not know that and kept asking question about it. Another stuff - Android - basically the same thing. That question was under every single news and post that we have sent regarding iPad app. So I believe that it's also important.

Anyway, just to let you know: it is possible that at some point we will put the questions together again and either record another Q&A video (it's much more effort than just picking up a camera and a microphone and then throwing it all into Windows Movie Maker, believe me) or post answers in the text form.

Take care and thanks for your understanding!
Bartek
 

DeletedUser1081

Hi guys,

Tracey just mentioned your concerns to me. Let me justify the choice: we have chosen those particular questions, because they were a good choice for a short video (and we had to keep it short). ... Anyway, just to let you know: it is possible that at some point we will put the questions together again and either record another Q&A video (it's much more effort than just picking up a camera and a microphone and then throwing it all into Windows Movie Maker, believe me) or post answers in the text form.
Take care and thanks for your understanding!
Bartek

Thanks for responding (and thanks to Tracey too!). Just to be clear: The community is very much hoping for developers and/or management to respond to our repeatedly voiced concerns over various issues. There's absolutely no need to go to the trouble of making a video out of the responses or to "keep it short". We'd way rather have thorough responses, preferably on a regular basis. Thanks.
 

DeletedUser99588

Thanks for responding (and thanks to Tracey too!). Just to be clear: The community is very much hoping for developers and/or management to respond to our repeatedly voiced concerns over various issues. There's absolutely no need to go to the trouble of making a video out of the responses or to "keep it short". We'd way rather have thorough responses, preferably on a regular basis. Thanks.

+1 from me :)
 

Rosletyne

Warrant Officer
For everyone's benefit, here is the transcript of everything the video had to say about Forge of Empires, and my comments about it.

Q: Why do the bonuses on Great Buildings increase so slowly after level 10?

A: The thing is, the balancing is set up in a way that a Great Building is already very, very good at level 10, the bonuses it provides are very, very good. So for every level more than that, because the amount of levels you can get on a Great Building is infinite, so with every level more, the bonus can only increase by a little, because otherwise it would just break the game, Great Buildings would become way too powerful. But here is something that most people don't realize, that is the ranking points that a Great Building provides, they increase by a huge amount for every level, so even when you don't see a huge bonus directly that a Great Building provides, your ranking will see an increase.

While this is true for many Great Buildings, some of the earlier ones become outdated even if they reach level 10. This is why few advanced players have buildings such as Colosseum or Notre Dame, they have either sold them or never built them at all. For these buildings, additional levels could have given them a new lease of life, justifying keeping them in your city, and it is a pity that this possibility has been squandered. As it is, the bonuses for additional levels are so minimal that they are simply not worth the effort. The potential of infinite levels means nothing if the benefits are so low that no one bothers to try.

As for Great Buildings providing ranking points, I did not know how much they would increase every level, but now that I do I still don't give a damn. Ranking points from Great Buildings, no matter how high their level, are still insignificant compared to points earned from battles, and even if they were not, the rankings have been permanently tainted by the failure to respond to the infinite two-wave battles exploit. No one in their right mind is ever going to level a Great Building for ranking.

Q: Will we ever get the chance to rotate buildings around?

A: I'm sorry but I am going to have to say no, basically because our 3D buildings are flat. This means their backsides are not textured, so we can't rotate them freely in every direction. Also we could not just flip the image because the shadows are pre-rendered on the images, this would basically mean that the shadows would fall into different directions, and actually give the impression that Forge of Empires takes place in a weird alternate dimension where the Earth has two Suns. So yea no, sorry, but we think actually that the fact that you have a challenge of finding useable places for your new buildings is part of the fun.

It would be possible to generate flipped images by going to the original 3D files and changing the direction of the light, but even though that would not require too much work, I agree on the second reason. Not being able to rotate individual buildings is part of the challenge, though I think it would be nice to be able to rotate the entire map.

Q: So, what about the Android app?

A: Ah, we always hear this question, we are working on it for quite a while now, it already looks pretty impressive, but these things take time. It will come out at one point, but we want to make sure that it is a good quality product, so you just have to wait a little longer.

When the iPad app came out it was surprisingly good, considering the problems the browser game still suffers from, but it was not and still is not perfect. Take your time.

Q: What exactly is the new Hardware Acceleration feature and why do we need it?

A: First let me start by saying that in a modern computer your graphics card is far more powerful than your processor, but three and a half years ago when we started developing Forge of Empires Flash did not have the capabilities of using the graphics card, it only supported the CPU at that time. So as your cities grew bigger and bigger especially in the later eras, the current graphics engine could not always deliver the performance you would like the game to have. So this is why we went back to the drawing board basically and started developing a new graphics engine completely from scratch, and decided to deliver this feature early as an optional feature to you, the players. The new engine is basically far more powerful than the old engine, and will enable us to put even more animations inside the game without decreasing the performance.

Bull. I have still not heard of a single player who would actually have benefited from Hardware Acceleration, all it has achieved so far is to introduce new bugs and waste development effort. Additional processing power is no solution for the basic problem of bad and inefficient code. It is not the size of the cities that is the problem, prior to version 1.27 my city was running reasonably well, but the moment that update was implemented, game performance took a major hit from which it has never recovered. My recommendation would be to go back to the 1.27 changelog, figure out which change was responsible for killing game performance, and fix the problem. I don't want to see any more animations making the game even less playable until the speed issues are definitely sorted.

Q: Why don't you answer us in the forums directly?

A: Because I'm busy making videos? No, there is actually quite some truth in it, we don't have the time. There's plenty of forums, we run the game in like 23 languages I think, and we don't have the time to answer in all those forums directly. Also, by answering we kind of commit to the thread and we kind of have to stay alert and keep following it and keep answering it, and that's just time we don't have. But that does not mean we are not aware of the issues, we read the forums very well, we are in close contact with all the community managers, they report to us on a regular basis, so we are aware of all the feedback that comes, of the good feedback, the bad feedback, we are aware of all the things that people want to improve and we take them all into account.

If you don't have time to talk in the forum, how is it that you have the time to make these videos? It would be much quicker to answer questions in written form. I get that you don't have the time to participate in conversations, but it should be possible for you to provide written answers to questions from time to time.

Q: What does the guy in front of the monastery actually do?

A: I was wondering about that myself, so I went very close to the monitor, I looked at it very well and I think he's pressing books.

I hope you're proud of wasting our time with this.

One final comment, the quality of the subtitles needs work. The timing is frequently off and many lines pass by without enough time to read them, and that blunder at 5:08 is just plain embarrassing.
 

DeletedUser

... Anyway, just to let you know: it is possible that at some point we will put the questions together again and either record another Q&A video (it's much more effort than just picking up a camera and a microphone and then throwing it all into Windows Movie Maker, believe me) or post answers in the text form.
Bartek
Sorry but to people who make informational videos - that's just how it looks... point, speak, hit Movie Maker.
Rosletyne has, thoughtfully, provided a transcript. Maybe Inno would consider doing that for the people who speak the 23 languages you mention. They may understand what you are saying better in written form - or at least they could throw your written words at an online translator :)
 

DeletedUser1081

Thanks for the transcript, Rosletyne.

The response about GB levels is a straw man argument anyway. If they're afraid sensible rewards for higher levels would "break the game" why in the world did they uncap the GBs and decide to make the uncapping "infinite"? Much better to keep the levels limited, keep the attack/goods buildings functioning the way they were advertised when we invested in them, and cap the number of dratted duplicate BPs we can get.

Hi guys,
... please remember that forum community is relatively small % of our overall userbase.

So why did you ask the forum community to provide questions??

I know our CM/CCMs are working on increasing the meaningful responses we get from the developers and decision-makers, and I appreciate that a lot, but this whole "we want your questions" exercise has been a huge (if predictable) disappointment. We have been waiting a very long time for responses to the various issues raised in that question thread (and other forum threads), and took the time to respond to your request for questions in a (mostly) thoughtful way. We deserve better responses than this sort of sidestepping.

If you don't have time to respond to our questions and concerns either here in the forum or by solving the bad problems people have been pointing out with ill-conceived features messing up the game, then seriously: Don't ask us to come up with questions to use in a video and then complain that it takes a long time to make it. Grr!
 
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DeletedUser2989

I believe part of the reason for putting up the question thread on the forums wasn't so that it could be sole source of questions but something that could be used to help choose what to answer. The popularity of the questions seems to have been largely (but not entirely) decided by the history of discussion about them from all possible contact sources:
community forums and even support requests
Given that the entire Q&A seems to have been directed more towards the community at large (which misses most of the info on the forums unfortunately) thus it focused on answers that regulars of the forums would already know. During the video the dev's seemed to hint at the fact they were answering things they were getting bombarded with while still trying to answer something relevant to the forum questions (meaning even less time to answer). I hope out of this they get a bit less bombarded and don't have to waste as much time with so many of the same questions. Gives them more time for productive stuff :)

Additionally it was mentioned to start with that they had limited time to answer questions so it is hard to expect them to answer some of the longer ones, especially considering how frustrating it would have been to get the "short version" rather than the "complete version". One thing that gives hope that we may get answers to those harder questions is that if there are future Q&A's that they may take a different form to this one:
or post answers in the text form.
 

DeletedUser96901

the amount of levels you can get on a Great Building is infinite so with every level more, the bonus can only increase by a little
first: that is mathematically absolutely nonsense

in the infinity it doesn't matter if the bonus increase is little or much
the result would be the same: an infinite bonus :eek:

and second:
the leverls aren't infinite
1. your computer storage (or of the whole world) can't store an infinite value
2. if I make one level each second of my life I only reach a limit value

so please think better next time before talking about infinite values
 

DeletedUser97349

A strictly literal interpretation of the answers is perhaps a little limiting :)

Regarding the unanswered questions, I will be going back through the previous thread to answer what questions we are able, bearing in mind that we cannot release certain information ahead of time, and it may also take some time to obtain some of the answers, if indeed we can. The effort will be made to answer as many as possible however.
 

DeletedUser

I notice that many people are very concerned about hearing explanations of certain features/mechanics that are less popular amongst part of the community. I am curious, if a developer did find the time to drop by and answer some of the questions, would it really make that much a difference? Even with an explanation, I feel as though it's not likely that anyone would be any more accepting of the ideas that some of you aren't so fond of.

I personally, appreciate the answers we did get and am happy that time was taken to do even that much. I can't argue with the statement that was made about simply not having the time to visit the forums to answer all the questions. It's unlikely that anyone would feel satisfied with a single response from a developer. If one were to come and answer a question, it would only spark further debate and disagreement, and more and more response would be demanded. They simply don't have the time for that.

There are always going to be features and changes that at least some of the gaming community doesn't agree with. At some point, you either have to make a decision to accept it and play the way the game is designed for us, or decide to try something else.

My personal opinion is that I am very appreciative of the amount of feedback here that is actually taken into consideration and implemented in the game. You don't find that in every game, and I honestly feel we see it more here than I have seen in other communities.

Please also note, this is my opinion as a player, and does not in any way represent the views of the Moderator team - nor does being apart of the Mod team have any influence on what I just expressed. My views/opinions have not only remained the same, but were also expressed here well before I ever joined the Mod team.
 

DeletedUser

I notice that many people are very concerned about hearing explanations of certain features/mechanics that are less popular amongst part of the community. I am curious, if a developer did find the time to drop by and answer some of the questions, would it really make that much a difference? Even with an explanation, I feel as though it's not likely that anyone would be any more accepting of the ideas that some of you aren't so fond of.

I personally, appreciate the answers we did get and am happy that time was taken to do even that much. I can't argue with the statement that was made about simply not having the time to visit the forums to answer all the questions. It's unlikely that anyone would feel satisfied with a single response from a developer. If one were to come and answer a question, it would only spark further debate and disagreement, and more and more response would be demanded. They simply don't have the time for that.

Having read though most of the Game Discussions and Questions/FAQ sections of the forum, I know that in the past Anwar did drop by and answer some questions. I'm not sure that it did make much of a difference; people still disagreed and were dissatisfied to approximately the same degree.
 
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