Evony community info

Yeterday evening, Aug 22nd, 2009, at about 8pm EST, the Evony server network had an outage.  Players couldn’t login for about three and a half hours.  Every website that had anything to do with Evony got bombarded by complaints by players who were afraid of being attacked or hacked and demanded financial compensation, and some of them couldn’t find the official Evony contact form.   For the record, this is the official Evony contact address: http://www.evony.com/index.do?PageModule=Static&type=ContactUs.   There are other ways to contact Evony, like through their bbs, or its admins, if they happen to be related to Evony, but however it happened, you did manage to get through to them!  Thank you and Congrats!!!

Evony did something uncharacteristic of them in my opinion, but also probably their first truly intelligent and decent promotion (masked as damage control), and their best promotion so far in my opinion, as well.  I’ll let you read it in their words.  Snipped:

Evony Community,

Today we experienced a critical downtime of over 3.5 hours with all servers and the main website being unavailable and then some issues with the forums.  We understand that this has made many of our great players frustrated and disappointed.  We’re disappointed too.

… Today’s downtime was caused by an error from our hosting partner, The Planet.  … as we’re a small company, when problems like this arise, it affects us very deeply.  We’d like to take this opportunity though to try and make something good out of it by offering a token of goodwill to all players.  We are releasing to all players a Compensation Pack consisting of 10 Amulets and 100 cents, FREE.  While we cannot make up for the issue that The Planet has caused, we do hope you accept our apologies and gift and still continue enjoying the game.

Please allow us 3 business days to send out this pack to all accounts.  Accounts must have been created before today in order to obtain the pack.  You will be able to claim the Compensation Pack in the left hand corner in the game.

Evony had pretty much killed the competitive advantage of players who don’t pay them when their servers cut down the drop rates of medals astronomically.  In particular, it’s nearly impossible to get enough rose medals to be promoted even to a baronet – which is just your second promotion.  Which means most players who don’t pay Evony are stuck with two cities, and if they are not careful they have to destroy the second city to build NPCs level 5 around them to farm.

Don’t get me wrong.  You can still be the best player in the game and on the server without giving Evony a dime.  SoCCo did it on W19 quite dominantly.  You can be really good in terms of prestige if you have the right strategy.  What I am saying is that ultimately without those promotions you are at a major disadvantage, mainly militarily.   With 6 cities you can build your army 3 times faster than with 2 cities.  You can do your research 3x faster.  You might need to spend more time to maintain the cities, that is true, but you clearly have a huge advantage. 

Now that you have 100 free cents you have the ability to equalize the odds just a tiny bit.   You could buy a junior medal box which contains 6-12 random low level medals for 80c, or you can buy 16 Amulets for the same price.  Which is better?   Evony claim the wheel of fortune pays out 24c each spin (5c) and that they increased the average daily reward 4x to like 100c.  I wonder if the median reward was increased at all…  Anyway, you might get lucky with 16 spins, or you might get 16 speakers.   I’m going for the junior box.

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Finally, after so many weeks of hard work and frustration, the evony map is going into open beta!  That means that all of you can go to the map now and start entering data.   Yes, it is time for you to work now.  What? You think I’m meant to suffer alone for this great tool? 

Truth be told, you and I would have been spared a lot of headache if Evony had allowed us to access their map data.  There are preliminary indications that we will be allowed to do so soon, hence all your hard work may be for nothing!  Hahaha! 

Wait.  What are you doing?  Go back to work on entering that map data!  Do you have anything better to do while you’re building another cottage now that you’ve discovered you need people to recruit armies?  Maybe you think you’d better take up blogging?  Nah, it takes a special caring person like myself to do that.  I’m not judging you… You care too, it’s just that… you care about the map more.  Which is good for everyone!

My cottage is nearly done building, and I’m thinking of taking a short nap in there, you know to test it out for my residents.  So let’s wrap it up:

Currently all the map is, is a fancy game map.  You can see the real Evony world and you can see how it zooms to the small Evony map, and you can actually see about 10 times the detail that you can see in that small Evony map.  That said, it gives you no additional advantages.

But if you enter the data here is what the map will be in a week’s time:

• The map is integrated with EvonySocial.  By default, only your friends from the Evony social network will be able to search for your name and find your cities.  The permissions can be changed by you in EvonySocial, so that for example all you EvonySocial alliance members will be able to search for you.
• At the moment city markers are only visible on the grass patches.  Later on, when you login to EvonySocial you will see all the icons of your friends and others who allow you to see them on the world map at any zoom level.  So you can see your friends right away at different states with a global map zoom level.
• You will be able to enter enemies and friends coordinates manually, and share them with your alliance members by default.  The enemies and friends will be visible on the world map and you’d be able to search for them by name.
• You will be able to customize flags and assign them to enemies or friends, say one flag for one enemy alliance, and another flag for another one.

I believe this will be a greatly enhanced set of map feature, long overdue for this game.  It should be out in about a week my time.   Given that my brain calculates at the speed of light most of the time, it means about 10 days for you ground folk due to time dilation.  Hey, blame Einstein not me. 

I’ve also worried quite a bit about security here, and I hope you find it adequate.  Like it?  Hate it?  Have suggestions?  Please leave me a comment – unless you really do hate it, then just go away, why do you need to insult me?  What did I do to you?!

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