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?!
Alright loyal subjects, your fearless leader (not me of course) has released a new Evony themed toolbar. It is cross browser compatible, and has a few neat features such as:
You can search all of our sites using our new customized google search at AskEvony.com. You can use other search engines as well.
A chat button where you can go to the Evony chat site and chat with other Evony users online.
You can change the toolbar to show buttons from another Evony toolbar with many more links to other blogs.
Coming up is a feature that allows you to enter your construction time, and it will notify you when your construction is done! Like the idea? Hate it? Please post here and let me know.
Today is Monday, July 13th. If by Thursday, say, July 16 you do not see that feature, please feel free (or even obligated) to write to editor at info@evonypress.com. Believe me, he loves hearing from you, as much as you love sleeping. Emails are really his caffeine fix and fairy dust. I dare you to doubt me - I will forward to you the emails I get daily from him, which will teach you a valuable lesson in trust at least when it comes to this blog. On a typical day, I get around 40 e-mails from him, 3 from the rest of our team. We also have close to 5 million domain names, and growing, all thanks to him! So don’t be shy, write ahead.
Evony is adding servers quickly. A few days ago they added 160 servers in one shot! If you were subscribed to our Evony new server notifier then you have received an email titled “160 New Evony Servers Launched!” listing all the 160 servers you can click on. Of course, none of them worked. Evony decided to simply place 160 servers online, even though probably they’d have to move them later to a different machine. And it screwed up our server notifier. I even thought they had done so on purpose so that our site doesn’t give any player advantage anymore. It took us all of a couple hours to fix it, and make it better than ever, and still without violating any of Evony’s terms of use. They broke it again later, and we fixed it again later, but that is a different story.
My point was that there are many Evony servers. You have to agree to that at least. I played on server 14 for a long time, and then when server 25 launched I started playing on that as well. I was the first one on that server thanks to our new notifier!!! With the help of our start up guide I also went up in ranks quickly (what, you think I stayed the only one on the server?) and was one of the best players. Next morning I was in a 200th place. Next two days in 2000nd place. I’m not complaining, I don’t play as much as others. Did you read that editor? (these are tough financial times, and I have to cover my rear. Even though I don’t get paid, I don’t want him to charge me for being affiliated with him. I did say he’s a very nice guy who would never do such a lousy thing didn’t I? Good…)
The problem is, I click on map on the new server 25, and nearly every square around me is occupied! I kid you not - take a look yourself!!
What is going on? Did I pick a prime real estate location? I am near a lake, but I understand it’s long enough to supply everyone everywhere. I mean I wanted a secluded foresty spot, how did I end up in a major metropolitan area? In server 14 which has been running for almost a month there are at least 10 times fewer cities around me. There are two options that I see:
There are many new users.
Many old users want a new chance to beat up on new users.
Did you also notice that the Evony overlords have announced that the Wheel of Fortune will now give you 4x the daily reward it did before? How come that is that every time I spin it I get 1 speaker. Almost all the items there are useless, but the speaker is the worst. I have like hundreds of speakers lying around. I will never use them, why should I? I understand conceptually it was a way for Evony to control spamming, but when chat is free for new users this entire concept is ridiculous.
Finally, you should have noticed an Evony system message about the ievony program. Right now it’s in beta, which means you have to be invited personally by someone, or just use the codes from their bbs forums. By signing up - in the Evony game client click shop, then click earn game coins, you’ll go to a website, enter your code, and download a windows referral client - you will be able to earn really miniscule amounts of cents by referring your friends to the game. Instead of them signing in at www.evony.com they’ll sign in at say evonynet.evony.com which is the link I have at the beginning of the post.
That said, you like me right? I’m nice to you after all. I tell you about cool stuff, and I try to make you laugh, so you should be nice to me too right? You wouldn’t try to spam me with your own ievony account right? Depending on the number of friends you have, you may want to avoid spamming the ones you want to keep as well.
Seriously Evony, isn’t it better for your reputation to start having affiliate websites? Why do you want to be known as the internet gaming company which pays game money for spamming?
With the latest nix by Evony on the access to their servers (voluntary on our part) we are forced to do business blind to in-game data. Mostly, nothing will be affected in terms of functionality, however, you will have to help us enter the data in instead of getting it automatically. No biggy right? Really? You really think so? Great! Go ahead and you do it, but send me the code afterwards, I want to take credit for it. Pretty please.
The way the map stands now, you, the user, will get to click a grass patch area and tell the map what exists there. Is it a forest, a lake or a city? You will also specify its level. Sounds simple enough, but it’s a lot of clicking so start saving your clicks from now for the map.
When you add cities to the map, you would be able to specify the lord for the city as well as the alliance and other information visible in the Evony map. This information will not be searchable due to Evony’s concern over unfair game play using 3rd party websites. One of the most desirable features in building such a map is showing all the alliance cities on one world, and actually searching for alliance members city coordinates (one of the biggest peeves by Evony players).
Ideally, we would want to show such information only to players in that alliance, however, now that we can’t access Evony servers, we cannot verify a person indeed belongs to an alliance she claims to. Since the feature is so useful that we have to implement it, essentially Evony has created an unfair gameplay problem for themselves by restricting us from doing our due diligence and securing the map browsing. If you’re as concerned as we are, please write to them and complain.
The devs. in our team (I just sit around chat all day and give them orders) decreed that the prerelease beta of our Evonynet social network will go online today at midnight. Who’s midnight it is is anyones guess. Either way, watch for it!
Devs. if you make me a liar here I will command you twice as much next week. Be warn.
You can embed flash movies in your blog, here, by using a similar syntax to the one for embedding you-tube videos:
[kml_flashembed movie=”/files/$yyyy/$mm/$swf” height=”$x” width=”$y” /]
Substitute the right values for the $ed values. Good luck and enjoy blogging.
The initial map has been released. You can find it at Evonynet.com/maps. Keep in mind it has no cities for now, but we’re working on getting them in there and showing you your friends in your alliance and maybe enemies too, if you promise not to attack me. In fact, I’m going to hide my city. It’s going to be a forest level 11 in the map. A forest that attacks people!
Here are some very compelling reasons that you should use the Evony quick-start to start a new city in Evony:
Our guide looks better. You will be looking at it, won’t you?
Our editor knows his stuff! He’s very analytical. He will tell you to build an academy early on so that you can parallelize your construction and training soldiers with researching and save time! Other guides don’t seem to care about saving you time… sad sad sad.
We were here first! Thousands of users already read it, and liked it, maybe, I don’t know really, I just know many come back. Either way, I liked it, except for the parts about how much resources cost at the market and not having more insight into the game. Yes, I am trying to promote that guide. He promised he’ll fix it.
Did I mention out editor doesn’t sleep nights? That means if you get stuck somewhere and the guide doesn’t help you then you can just post a message here and complain, and he’ll fix it right away.
Actually, if you offer him good advice, corrections, etc.. and click on some of his awfully ugly and irrelevant google ads (or just tell him you did - although he probably counts them between Evony constructions) he’ll pay you with money!
Actually, he won’t give you real money, but he’ll give you real game money, even though I didn’t talk to him about it at all! Because I know him, and he loves it when others try to help him out, and he goes out of his way to help others. We are just friends.
Did I say leave a comment here for improvements? Certainly do that, but for other stuff, like bugging our editor, why don’t you do it yourself. His character name is nynaeve on all Evony servers, and he’d usually be one of the first few players on a new server thanks to our notifier. He actually was the 3rd new player on world server 10 and now has the largest alliance by far (Aiel). He also has a blog, so feel free to file all complaints directly to him there.
Replace the URL above after “youtube=” to the one for your desired video. The URL is shown on the left pane besides the video on YouTube. You can add it in the visual tab if you’re using the Wordpress web editor, the YouTube plugin will automatically convert it! Which means you’ll have problems if you want to write something like the text on top! (use [ for starting bracket at html and DO NOT CLICK Visual or it will convert it back to a square bracket!) Wordpress screws up way too much with our HTML. The things we are willing to put up with for an out-of-the-box off-the-shelf solution.
You can also get Microsoft Live Writer to help you blog faster.
Our team is working diligently on a wiki-style information source for everything Evony. Visit it at evonypedia.com. It is updated daily with dozens of artcles, pictures and videos. There are quite a few video guides as well generously made by other game players than the writers of the wiki.
This wiki will be nothing without your contribution, so please go there and add articles or whatever knowledge you have so that other players can benefit from your wisdom! Don’t worry about saying something wrong, our editor is obssessed with checking everything instead of sleeping at nights. It’s true ! If you doubt it, I can post video logs with time stamps. I will call him day and night on skype, and he’ll always be there to answer, fully awake, not even drinking coffee. Though it’s a sure bet he’ll be munching on something like toast and Nuttela.
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