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?!
Evony has upset us a lot here at EvonyNet pretty much ever since we decided to create supporting websites to a promising up-and-coming Civilization style game rather than the hugely popular World-of-Warcraft. The list of reasons include the ones that may upset you and additional ones like branding us scammers, endorsing competitor sites with much less value and without talking to us about endorsing us, and generally treating this company as if we were a bunch of Groupies that will always stick around no matter what. I guess the fact we call ourselves EvonyNet ties us to the game, but it’s only a working company title, we have no problem changing it anytime.
You sat through that short rant, great, I apologize for wasting your time with it. Here is the part the you should care about: yesterday evony announced in-game (snipped):
We wanted to thank all of our players for making the iEvony Open Beta such a success so far! Keep up the good work!
Evony continues to grow primarily thanks to word of mouth recommendations from our fantastic players! Thanks to you, Evony has grown to over 5 million registered players from every part of the world!
We’ve lifted cap of 50 credits per day for invitations, and players may now earn a maximum of 1500 credits total just by sending invitations, so you can earn credits as much as 30 times more! Each invitation earns 1 credit.
Now, we also improve the iEvony client to ensure that you can receive all credits when you use it to invite friends.
Remember my previous post about iEvony and how they support spamming the net? Of course you do, it was very funny, especially when that tsenseless guy spammed my comments. He’s been busy around the net, it’s not personal. And Evony banned his account. Well, as a thank you to all your wonderful work, now you get paid for each invite 1 credit! Go ahead, find e-mail addresses on the web, spam them, Evony pays you, yay. 1500 spam messages per player. Sure, you could have done so before, but it would have taken you a month.
Some may think, wow what an amazing advertising strategy, instead of paying for more ads (as if there was anywhere left to advertise) they give money to word-of-mouth. Well, spamming is wrong, and it’s damn wrong if it’s your friends you’re spamming. It’s okay to send collective generic email about stuff you care about, though I hate those in general, it’s much different when getting paid for it. Imagine one of your friends getting a job with an ad agency and emailing you all their different offers. Hope you’d ban him, if you know how to do it that is.
Did Evony just remove the cap in gratitude to a program that worked far better than expected? Would you pay more money if something that cost less was such a success? Are there really 5 million Evony players? Is that why there are new Evony servers everyday or is it for user retention cause the game offers little for experienced players who are not millionaires? Feel free to check quantcast for Evony.com traffic. About 250K users a month from the US alone. Is showing breasts on website ads a good way to attract future Evony players? Sure, the people who would click on it are willing to pay, but will we, in the near future, see x-rated videos when upgrading a town-hall to level 10? Will a surprise MPEG be in a bonus package for buying in-game cents? And what’s the deal with that last sentence in the quote? You didn’t receive all your credits before? Well, now for sure you can trust them!
Without commenting on the quality of The Guardian, I leave you with an article of theirs - has evony become the most despised game on the web? That and saying that Evony is a great game that you should not be afraid to play just because the company’s policies suck. Just treat it like a casino and set a budget if you want to beat other people. Oh, and you won’t be getting any money back even if you win.
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.
You might have got an Evony Security reminder on Monday June, 29th. I am going to address all that and tell you that we are responsible for it, and that they lied to you, but in fairness to you, it’s going to be a longer post than usual, so grab yourself some iced drink and get comfy - this is good advice - don’t stop reading just because I said it’s long - it has juicy stuff in it, not just another rant. As always this is my opinion only, not that of EvonyNet’s. If you are interested in what others say, please visit their sites at guildielocks, nynaeve, amolk, and beginner.
The text of the Evony system mail is:
Attention Players,
We’ve recently seen a rise in the number of sites attempting to compromise players’ account information. Because of this, we wanted to take this time to remind our players that you should never enter your account information in any website except the official evony.com website. Evony has no affiliate websites and any website which asks for your Evony login information is trying to steal that information.
It is against the Terms of use to use cheats, automation software (bots), hacks, mods or any other unauthorized third-party software, macros or scripts designed to modify the Evony experience. Use of such items will result in your Evony account being banned.
Evony staff will never ask for your account information and that your account information should only be entered when logging in to the game with the official client. Never give your password to anyone! This will keep your account secure and your hard work safe.
Remember, your hard work on Evony has taken a long time. Don’t let others take advantage by handing over your account details.
Thanks,
Evony Team
Evony do their business in a somewhat different way than what we’re accustomed to, perhaps due to being a Chinese company. It has been hard for us to establish contact with them and tell them what we’re doing, and we were trying using multiple channels. Here is what EvonyNet were doing:
EvonySocial - This is a social network exclusive for Evony players! You had to enter your Evony game login here and it will fetch your data from the server to display for yourself and your friends. You could set your security level appropriately. Chat securely with your Evony verified alliance members. Add and invite your friends to join you.
EvonyPress - The Evony blogs. You can start your own blog here, but you should know that since this is where I’m blogging and you’re reading.
EvonyMap - A google maps style Evony world map. It would have all the Evony maps for all the servers, and you can put your alliance flag down for all to see, or just your friends.
EvonyAnswers - So far, not a very useful site, but in the future it will be a place where you can post a question and rate the answer just like Yahoo Answers, except only Evony related, so that you can search other answers as well.
EvonyAlerts - At the moment, it’s only an email notifier to alert you to when a new Evony server launches. It’s your chance to finally beat our editor, he’s always the number 3 on a new server because he put himself at the front of the notification list. Well I say let’s teach him a lesson. Get notified of a new server, join as soon as you can, and ally with everyone except for the person asking how everyone knew about the server, and beat up on that person. BTW, I ask that too, so make sure you’re not beating up on Merkavah.
We were planning some other services, like real-time map, queue notifications, and such. Tools you’d love, which are nixed for the moment.
The day before that security statement was sent, one of our team members who shall remain anonymous, in desperation, decided to send Evony a letter claiming they have a security hole that we are exploiting and that they should contact us to help them solve the problem. I’m just being honest here, lets not get all hot headed and do something rush like fire the blogger who should be doing development instead.
Evony has no security holes. They don’t. They have a web-based game, flash actually, written in flex, which was easy enough to decompile to see the communication protocols so that we can communicate with their servers. We notified them immediately we are using their protocols (got no reply to that) and we had a very strict policy not to write anything to the Evony servers. There was one unforeseen security breach for Evony. We needed Evony users names and passwords to access their account information to make our social network easier to use. Some people really didn’t trust us, for example this thread (cached by google). About 800 other people did trust us, and really enjoyed their experience. The trouble is that we needed plaintext passwords to login into Evony. It’s communication is browser encrypted, but the passwords are not encrypted again. That meant that we could see users passwords. So the first thing we did was encrypt it in our database. No longer could any of us see any of your passwords unless we wrote special code to do so.
Let’s face it, if you give us your password, even if Evony fixed their protocols and accepted hashed passwords, we could still use your password whenever we want. And no matter what encryption they use, we’d always be able to communicate with their servers, since their clients will decompile easily and run on our computers. That is the nature of web-based games. The only difference is that we would never know what your password is in plaintext. Significant? Maybe. Here’s why it’s good you’ve read so far, because you obviously don’t listen to other sites, but you will listen to me. Create different passwords for different sites, and don’t share passwords on sites that can track you to another site, even banks! Yes, your online security is up to you! If you did listen to all the other sites, then my apologies for blaming you, but really why do you listen to everything every website tells you? My point - come here, and listen to me.
The next day, we actually got to talk to another contact in Evony who listed a list of infractions, some of them seem rather bogus like claiming terms of use violation regarding using Evony protocols. To clarify, this contact is unconnected to the security scare email mentioned before. He agreed to connect us to his bosses so that we can enter an agreement with them, but the next day they said they are not interested in any agreements with anyone, at least until they plug-in their fictional security holes. And then they sent all of us that Evony security reminder.
The security reminder lies to you because it says: "any website which asks for your Evony login information is trying to steal that information." We have over 800 users and we never stole anyone’s information. We discontinued all use of Evony protocols immediately after they asked us to. A hacker would have ignored them, and if they’d try to shut him down, he’d distribute the code for free on the Internet, so that there would be hundreds of sites that try to phish your information with some credibility. Sites that can build automatic queues. Sites that can play the game for you. We will never do that without Evony’s explicit approval, and that is why you can trust us.
Their next statement is: "It is against the Terms of use to use cheats, automation software (bots), hacks, mods or any other unauthorized third-party software, macros or scripts designed to modify the Evony experience. Use of such items will result in your Evony account being banned. "
We do not write to the server, so there are no automation software, cheats, hacks, mods, or macros. We do use programming scripts but so does every other website, like theevonywiki or Evony’s own forums. Are you not supposed to go and read about improving your Evony gameplay on any website because it will modify your game experience? That is stupid. Are you not allowed to use a PDA and input in it an alert for your construction end time so that you can build something else as soon as possible? It is running an unauthorized 3rd party software which will modify your Evony experience. We do nothing to modify your in-game experience and have no plans to do so, except, again, with Evony’s explicit approval.
Well, thanks for reading this long post, and I hope I explained our story to you and reassured you about your security at EvonyNet. Feel free to ask me questions, or disagree with me, though I’m always right, so just save your time. And if you want my gratitude, write to Evony, and tell them to allow other sites to talk to their servers to simplify your life. And when we do simplify your life, we’d be even.
Evony has a concept called city gates. You can read about it in a little more detail at our Evonypedia site. OR I can save you some time and tell you right now that in the rally spot dialogue box there is a check box asking you if you want your gates open. If you open them then your troops get to fight when an army invades them. Otherwise, well, take a guess. Nope, if you said they are protected, you’re wrong. They are just sitting ducks for attacking archers. I haven’t seen proof of it myself, nor read anything authoritative about it, yet I have it from a good source, sort of our guild leader in BOOM on server 14. So, there seems to be almost no point in keeping your gates closed. Ever. Well unless you know you are attacked by an army of sword carrying dwarfs (they need the elves to shoot arrows).
Another concept in evony is alliances. If you’re not a member then join one, there’s no membership fee, and you will get some reward from the quests button. I know, I know, what about the quitting fee… None either! Free. You can talk to your allies for free which makes the game more interesting and they can help you with resources or questions you have, after, of course, you’ve checked our evonypedia. Oh, a little tip, if you don’t find the article you want on evonypedia, but do find it on another wiki, like theevonywiki, or were told about it, do me a favour and copy it, and paste it into an email, and fire it off to contribute@evonypedia.com. It will appear on the site in like 5 minutes, because as I keep telling you our editor never sleeps. If it’s not there in 5 minutes, post a comment here and I’ll reply with his phone number. Don’t worry, you won’t wake him up.
The main benefit of an alliance, as in the real world, is your military power. You would therefore think that you can coordinate an attack in your alliance against a target and completely annihilate it with 100x the troops it has. Well, you can coordinate all you like, but you can’t attack all together. So an attack has to come in waves. The first attacker will be the strongest force to weaken the defences as much as possible for the next guy, and similarly for subsequent attackers.
The problem is that if you’ve got a much larger force than your enemy the evony battle simulation gives you a decided edge. You overwhelm the other side and almost take no losses at all. If you are in an alliance and know your city is about to be attacked you can ask them to reinforce your city with their army. Open your gates and make sure you can host many armies (your diplomacy centre has to have a high level). As the defensive side, you have an overwhelming edge over the attacking alliance. If you assemble a truly large enough army in your city that it takes no losses even against the best army of your enemy (which will be fought first) then no matter how large the attack force or alliance is, you’re safe, and you will take almost no losses.
If that really is the case, then the only way you can get attacked successfully is if your own alliance turns on you. So you better be very nice to them.
Hey, I ended up a blog post without any self-serving statements, yay! (I believe I’ve already made those statements at the beginning of the post)
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.
We have exciting news! The Evonynet social network will go into preview beta tomorrow!
Here’s what you could do right away:
Set up your profile with pictures and Evony servers you play on.
Add friends.
See all your Evony character stats on all the servers you like all at once!
The very next feature to be added will be Aliiance support, so that members of an alliance can have a private messaging system, and can see each other easily. It will also be integrated with Evonynet maps.
The kicker is that you will actually sign in with your Evony user name and password. Don’t worry, we will not modify any game data. Besides, you trust me don’t you? You’ve been reading my blog for a few days already so you must feel like you know me well enough. It’s not like I’m going to take your gold for helping you advance in the game. Or hold it hostage until you click some random ad links on our site, because my editor drives me crazy with his fear of dropping revenue (which is under $1 in any case).
Hmm, that gives me an idea. What about making it so that if you click on my city instead of attack you will have an ad pop-up? It’s a win-win situation, for me at least.
You can embed flash movies in your blog, here, by using a similar syntax to the one for embedding you-tube videos:
[kml_flashembed movie=”/files/$yyyy/$mm/$swf” height=”$x” width=”$y” /]
Substitute the right values for the $ed values. Good luck and enjoy blogging.
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