Evony community info

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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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:

1. There are many new users.
2. 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?

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