Q&A-svar från live-sändningen 10 juli

[DeletedUser3]

Hej kära alver och människor,

Här kommer ett massivt inlägg med frågorna som ställdes och svaren som gavs i vår live-sändning förra veckan:

What are your plans with Elvenar? What kind of features can we look forward to? Do you have an estimation of when the next tech tree expansion will come?
It feels like the endgame already. Are new features, apart from Fellowships planned?
New buildings, new technologies, new gameplay content? There are awesome ideas on the forums. We are already working on several big new features. Of course, we can't announce all of them today, but I can share with you that we are indeed working on a tech tree expansion. And - I think I can say that much - this expansion will certainly be more than just some more buildings and upgrades. We hope this expansion will deliver a surprisingly new and challenging experience to you. Since we are already working on that for quite some time, I'm sure we can tell you more about it in a few weeks.

What will make Elvenar different from all those other city-builder games?
Elvenar is a City Builder set in a unique fantasy setting. Until launch, we focussed on creating a traditional and proven city building experience. Now, having a healthy and stable foundation to build on, we will add more and more fantasy elements to our core gameplay. Features that are only possible because of our setting. Today might still be a bit early to talk about that, but we will definitely share more information about those features soon.

After hearing about a chat, I was wondering if there are also plans for something like a Fellowship Forum, where information can be shared within the Fellowship?
Actually, there are two reasons why we didn't add a Fellowship forum. First, we wanted to add the fellowship functionality as soon as possible so you all can enjoy playing Elvenar together. Thus we focussed on the core functionalities like adding and removing members, trading without fee and Neighborly Help. We will certainly listen to your feedback how you want the Fellowship feature to be extended in the future. The other reason is, that when taking a closer look on how Guild forums in other games work and for what they are used, we came to the conclusion that most forum features can be replaced by using the message system. You can write circular messages to all your fellows and share information with them that way. Most Guilds in other games actually behave like that: Using the forums only occasionally, most stuff is done with messages.

Is there a way to alter the amount of members in a Fellowship?
What is the reason for limiting the size of fellowships to 25 members specifically?
I get a limit in general, but 25 is too small when accounting for less active players, those lower levels, and with the same boosts as you etc, and will mean only a few people you'll actually get to trade with There is currently no way for the player to extend the limit of 25 members. We also discussed this number internally a lot. What we really want to achieve with the Fellowships, is that every player can be part of a vivid community. Now, the bigger the community gets, the less personal it gets, the less important is your own part within that community. In other games, bigger Guilds tend to have lots of inactive members, and oftentimes, even the active members don't know which members have left the game and which they can still rely on. That's why we choose a relative low limit of 25, to keep the group members closer together. To give more importance to every single of your fellows. We want your Fellowship to be personal!

Will be there any easy-to-access list of my fellows like in FoE or... I have to maniacally click my fellowship, scroll down, click members name, click menu option 'visit' just to aid them?
Currently, that is indeed the best way to do that. We know this is not optimal and we are already thinking about how to improve this. The challenge for us is, again, to keep things personal. It is important for us to speed up daily routines like this, but it is also important that social interactions like helping each other still feel social. Originally, we also thought about adding a button where you can help all your Fellowship members with one click.

Are there any other features that are being considered/in the works to add to the fellowships?
I understand they've only just been released, but I won't know without asking. As said before, our top priority was to the fellowships to you as soon as possible with a reasonable scope of content. We would like to add more "meat" to this feature in the future - we already have some ideas for that. But we also want to gather your feedback on this one to find out what you would like to see there.

Chat is mentioned in the video. Can you elaborate on what players can expect from the chat (the system itself) and also when it might realistically be released?
We will add a fellowship chat system simultaneously or shortly after releasing the fellowship feature itself. Our research regarding chat systems came to the conclusion that the fellowship will most likely be the place in the game where a chat is most helpful, that's why we concentrated on creating a fellowship chat only. For communication with other players in the game, you can still use our message system.

What is the goal (final purpose) of th game?
Now that's a big one. If you follow the story line a bit that is mostly told through quests, you might have heard about the background story of Elvenar. There once was a great race, called the Elvenar, which is regarded as the highly developed first mother of all other races on this planet. Unfortunatelly, this race and most of its deriving races somehow disappeared over time. Only humans and elves survived. Your task as a human or elf is to uncover the secrets and mysteries of this planet's past to lead your culture to former glory.

Are there any plans to do group events?
We can't announce anything specific today, but of course, now having fellowships in the game, it would be a wasted opportunity not to offer group events and activities, right? For us, this is a very interesting and important direction since Elvenar is supposed to be a full-blown MMO, and right now, the Single-Player part of it is far more developed. Certainly we will consider features where players can actively play together in the future.

Will it be possible to rotate buildings? It would make easier to build my city.
This is a question we actually receive quite often. Now, the short answer is no. But here is why. Every city builder needs features that make placing buildings challenging. In Elvenar, this challenge comes mainly from two sources: The one is that most buildings need a street connection, and the other is that every building has a fix shape. The combination of this makes it challenging to build an efficient city. Of course, the downside of every challenge is that sometimes it feels like a burden. If you could rotate the buildings, this would make things much easier. But the downside of a low challenge is: when it gets too easy, it also gets boring quite fast. So, since this "city puzzling" is a core mechanic in Elvenar, we never implemented any technical base to make it possible to rotate buildings.


I would like to know if later on in the game, we will be able to plunder or battle another player? If not, are we going to be stuck with battling provinces?
I would like to know if there will be, later on, a PVP battling system?
We have no plans on adding plundering to our game. Even though we put a lot of effort into our battle system, many of our players play the game peacefully, and we want to keep an environment where a peaceful playstyle is possible and successful. On the other side, I don't see why we shouldn't enhance our battle system for the players who like it. I'm sure the future of Elvenar will hold more opportunities for you to send your army into battle. But for now, that is all I can tell you about that.

I would like to know if there will exist any rivalry between the Elves and Humans?
You did create both races for this purpose I suppose. The Humans and Elves are not rivals. They have very different philosophies about many things, which results, among other things, in different architecture and also a different storyline. Their relation is more like one between two sportsmen: They are in a fair competition about whose culture will emerge being the more successful one. Consequently, you can have a colorful mix of humans and elves in your Fellowship.

Will we have special buildings that give us bonus in our city? Like: Attack, productions of coins, supplies etc…
Well, we are certainly working on new kinds of buildings that will make growing your city more interesting and more divers. I think it is very important that, once you have become accustomed to a certain set of buildings and building relations, we should add a new element to the city that mixes things up a bit. Whether that will be a building that gives bonuses or that introduces a new mechanic - there are many interesting options. In fact, I think we can introduce you to some of those ideas in the not too distant future. Stay tuned on that one!

 

[DeletedUser3]

Will the game have a mobile version in the future? Like FoE does?
Any chance to become Windows Phone friendly?
Elvenar has just launched world wide on the browser. At the moment, we are focussing our efforts to make this version successful. We aim to add content for our players fast and steadily while keeping the quality up and the bug count low. This takes all our energy at the moment. So, regarding mobile versions, we have nothing to announce at this point.

Will there be a way to find certain people on the map?
In Elvenar, thousands of players play together on the same map. However, when you enter the map from your hometown, you can only see the players that are sitting right next to you. Of course you can scroll around and try to accidentally find the player you are looking for. But in the end, the map is not a good place to look for certain player names. It is just way too big. If you want to visit another player, click on his name to open the player context menu. There is a "visit" option. This is by far the fastest way to visit other players. You can click on any player name in the rankings, the notifications window or in the trader as well as in the message system - and soon in the fellowship window. In the rankings, you can also search for player names, so you can find any player fast and easy, even if you only know some part of his name. Try it!

Do you plan adding an Orc race?
When we started developing Elvenar, we talked a lot about which races players should be able to select from the start. We liked the idea that everyone can pick his favorite race. At the same time, since you invest a lot of time into one city, we feared that most players would only play with the one race they picked first and would consequently miss out on all the other beautiful races. Creating buildings for lots of different races would slow down our development, and still players wouldn't see most of our work. So we decided that we should focus only on two races to make them very distinct and outstanding. We hope that, in the end, many players will love our game so much that they create a second account on a different game world just to experience the other race. But we are not planing on adding further races to the race selection at the beginning.

What is the percentage of the different bonus goods for players which are located near each other? On Beta and DE I have almost the same bonus goods, only one is different, is that coincidence?
Yes, that is actually coincidence. Your bonus goods depend on your world map position, which is more or less randomly chosen when you create an account. Just go to the World Map and check the six neighbouring provinces around your town. The northern, south-eastern and south-western province define the three relic types that can boost your good production. If you want to know what kind of production boosts another player has, just look on his World Map position and which provinces surround him.

I noticed that you often have too many knowledge points because it’s not yet balanced right. But I have to admit that I currently don’t spent money yet. Because of that I’m quite slow in progress. Will the knowledge points get rebalanced or did you choose it to be like that on purpose?
We balanced the game in a way that you can smoothly progress through the Tech Tree and all other content without paying money. That is our understanding of Free-To-Play after all. However, Elvenar is not a game without challenges. In the Tech Tree for instance, the challenge basically is to prepare the technology costs before you finish the research. I know some technology costs are tough. I can only encourage you to always look a few technologies ahead to see what costs will wait for you next, so you can prepare your city to produce them in time. I would even go as far as to say - the smoother you can progress through the Tech Tree, the better you've build up your city apparently.

With the battle system I have the feeling that human units have a slight disadvantage. But this is only a subjective feeling. Will some units get a rebalancing in the future?
We are collecting data fom our servers and feedback from our players to get more insight on how our balancing in the game is perceived. That is also done for our battle system. If we detect obvious imbalances, we will fix this, yes. On the other hand, we think carefully about balancing changes before we apply them because, you know, you should adjust the balancing only if it is absolutely necessary since players have adjusted to the former balancing and might have disadvantages afterwards even if you just wanted to improve the system.