Evony community info

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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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.

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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.

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We have exciting news!  The Evonynet social network will go into preview beta tomorrow! 

Here’s what you could do right away:

1. Set up your profile with pictures and Evony servers you play on.
2. Add friends.
3. 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.  

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