PERSIAN wrote:I'm not really playing this game anymore but when i did, it really pissed me off that no one would give a damn about brilliant ideas brought up and approved by the playerbase (one could be mega's awesome idea).
this kinda went off the topic but just saying maybe it's time to shake your policies a lil bit.

That's very unfair to say.

Right now, in suggestions thread, where you can find ideas in an organized way, there are about 255 topics. Out of them, most worthwhile ideas are under evaluation which means that they are close to an approval. These topics are not many, perhaps 10-15. Perhaps there can be about 10 more worthwhile suggestions there. The rest are discussions mostly or random ideas that are far away from what we would call a suggestion.

The players often come with some good ideas but in most of the cases, when you have a finished product, like Zorg Empire, it is difficult to implement them without at least conducting a case study. You need to know before implementation that what you are going to implement is going to work, keep things balanced and will be worthwhile. The majority of player ideas are without a case study. So, before we can start implementing them, we first need to do our research. This slows things down.

Another thing that makes it difficult is the poor participation in the forums. You might have spotted this with your alliances; not everybody participates in decision making. So, when we had 5 or even 10 people demanding something at the forums (especially when each game world had more than 1000 active accounts) it was difficult for us to determine the exact popularity of every idea. So what appeared like obvious to you was not appealing the same to us.

Even in this environment, we managed to implement many player ideas and many of them are recorded in the forums under implemented thread. If the 48 topic there seem few, then the 1775 posts that these topics have should give an idea of the work that has been put to these ideas. Some of them were big implementations.

Looking further, you will find 31 approved topics (464 posts) and 48 disapproved (609 posts). Add to these numbers the participation in the open suggestion topics and you will see that we have been fairly active in implementing player ideas.

The most clear truth is that our pace is nowhere how good it used to be. I can accept this; development focus is in our new universe and since we are a small team which also runs more projects, things take time.

Still, our game is bug free, we got a 7 year old universe running, our servers have great uptime and our community is one of the largest, even now where the game is its worse condition. Let us not forget that pay2win in Zorg Empire is a joke. No one made it so far and this is very important in this style of games.

We still hope that we will turn the situation around in regards to activity in the game worlds. Remember though how many games have came and gone all this time. We are still here and we will be here for the years to come with a competitive product. Whether players choose to play here or not, this is also your problem. People that are playing this particular style of games are getting fewer and fewer and newer players are not really interested. If the players that remained prefer to be first in a game with few competition than last to a game with competition, then this is not something we can help.

ZE has been since start a place of veterans. Thus why we have not opened so many new universes. To help against the spread of the small playerbase among multiple universes where... everyone wins.

i didn't expect such a detailed response, thanks for the time you put on that.
all which you mentioned are true and i kinda understand your policy , no big sudden changes that risks the very existence of game. that being true i still think there is room to reconsider it, since very slow changes will kill the game as well.


as for participation , i'm sure you can come up with an in-game poll once you're not quite sure of idea's popularity among the whole playerbase.


plus idk if making an app is an option for a game like zorg or not ? it'd fix some of the problem of people not interested in browser games anymore.

I certainly hope that is true....that the inactive accounts v-moded in speed were in fact v-moded by the players responsible for the respective accounts and not that, it was a deliberate act by Zorg.
Okay, fine. Thanks, good one....
But one more thing, that still hives me concern. I don't know able others but when you said, "inactive accounts with less than 50 Zorg rubies will be deleted after some specified period of time." yeah, I don't see that helping anyone either. Who knows, some of our favourite farms may fall within this criterion for deletion, and the short and long term effects of this has been thoroughly discussed.
If you will, I would appreciate if that was stopped. And I'm literally pleading for it.

Zorg wrote:- "ZE has been since start a place of veterans". What? Not me at least, I'd never played any other online game before Zorg, I'm sure I'm not alone in this.



Okay, without delving too much into the rest Zorg's words, for the most part I am in agreement. But, inactives, v moded long termers, those aside. If you must delete, delete the BANNED players.

There is one banned multi account player in Standard, Alphabetcity, Alfabetciti, Alphabetciti, Alfabetciti etc etc etc. All around two or four systems. This person has taken up the best part of four systems and is just taking up space. These worlds are no use to him, he's banned. They are no use to players as we cannot colonise there or even raid him. What's the point in him being there? Delete him pleasssssse. He's been sat there like that for at least four years now.

Just a thought, but again, I'm sure this has been said before, agreed with and then forgotten about, again.

King-Immortal wrote:I certainly hope that is true....that the inactive accounts v-moded in speed were in fact v-moded by the players responsible for the respective accounts and not that, it was a deliberate act by Zorg.
Okay, fine. Thanks, good one....
But one more thing, that still hives me concern. I don't know able others but when you said, "inactive accounts with less than 50 Zorg rubies will be deleted after some specified period of time." yeah, I don't see that helping anyone either. Who knows, some of our favourite farms may fall within this criterion for deletion, and the short and long term effects of this has been thoroughly discussed.
If you will, I would appreciate if that was stopped. And I'm literally pleading for it.

We only vmode inactives in X-TREME. And we vmode the accounts we would otherwise delete but we do not delete because they have 50 rubies.

At the other universes, such accounts, with 50 rubies or more are not deleted (or vmoded).

At the beginning of the game, we said:
EVERY account with 50 zorg rubies or more will not be deleted. Till now, we have kept our word. We do not intend to take back our word.

mightyoz wrote:Zorg wrote:- "ZE has been since start a place of veterans". What? Not me at least, I'd never played any other online game before Zorg, I'm sure I'm not alone in this.



Okay, without delving too much into the rest Zorg's words, for the most part I am in agreement. But, inactives, v moded long termers, those aside. If you must delete, delete the BANNED players.

There is one banned multi account player in Standard, Alphabetcity, Alfabetciti, Alphabetciti, Alfabetciti etc etc etc. All around two or four systems. This person has taken up the best part of four systems and is just taking up space. These worlds are no use to him, he's banned. They are no use to players as we cannot colonise there or even raid him. What's the point in him being there? Delete him pleasssssse. He's been sat there like that for at least four years now.

Just a thought, but again, I'm sure this has been said before, agreed with and then forgotten about, again.

Banned players are deleted eventually. Perhaps if they have more than 50 rubies they are excepted. I will see to this case as they should be deleted indeed.


Regarding veterans, let me present some details:

When we started, we got about a 1000 players. These were all veterans playing other similar games. X-TREME at first year had about 130 players online at any given time and about 1,000 active players in the world. Standard was our 2nd Universe, Speed our 3rd and Massacre our 4th.

The greatest activity peak has been discerned in Massacre where the most players online at any moment reach 270 players (about 350 in today's standards as we use longer time to determine online players) and had thousands of players active in the world.

Till now, about 180,000 players have joined the game. Obviously you need to delete inactive accounts.
Out of the 180,000, I would say that a safe 175,000 had never played a similar game to Zorg Empire.
So yes, it is only reasonable for you to have ZE as your first and only game.

The active veteran base playing Zorg Empire alike games is no more than 1000 players, currently spread to multiple games and universes. As veterans, I refer to players that have been playing for 10+ years. These veterans are not necessarily better than anyone who started a month ago although they tend to be better if you make comparisons at the totals.

If we strictly speak about ZE players, these are certainly more as we have done a good job here in regards to this. There is only 1 more similar game (happens to be the first too) that has been converting newcomers to players and fueling the total people interested in this kind of games. All the rest games are mostly freebies, leeching users from us and this other game. In this sense, ZE has been a leecher only at its first week but still we brought a great deal of new players from other games we own. In the same time never spread ZE users to these other games.

So, if you rate how we have treated players all these years, you will find out that ZE has actually been treating you fairly well.
Namely:
-We never used ads here. In contrary, we used ads everywhere else to bring people here. Even to our other games.

-We never used aggressive rubies policies - the game never was pay to win and to date, no one has managed to win by his purse, no matter how much they spent. Without skill, you are doomed.

-We never favored a specific person or group. We have been called for this a couple of times but in truth, this never happened. We treat every player the same. The rules are the same for everyone.

-We have put longevity of the game above monetary gain. We keep paying very expensive servers to ensure uptime and speed. We always rushed to fix every bug. In the few cases that an unfair situation due to a bug arised, we always fixed it afterwards.

-Development wise, we have implemented many player suggestions although not all were recorded here.

-We have kept dinosaur universes open. We stopped creating new ones because we saw what was coming.

Why I am saying or even repeating these? Because these statements reply every single argument that you might hear. Let me remind that a majority of the players think that they would stand a better chance in conquering the top in a new universe. The Generals tournaments proved this as wrong. No newcomer ever stands a chance in a new universe. Good players certainly stand better chances but they can find their way the same in a developed universe.

Lately, browser games are in decline. Not every browser game is in decline though. For example, we got another browser game that is growing daily. ZE is stagnating. We want to change this and we will try to change this with a new universe, which now seems as the best choice.

At this effort, we are going to need support from the playerbase.

And what is the title of your other browser game that is growing?

Nasty mister sinister !

looking at the original post here, i'm surprised how much good talk followed some guy's selfish ranting lol

No , seriously...what is the name of that game? I might hop in and take a look. See if it's a game that can capture my interest lol

MrSinister wrote:No , seriously...what is the name of that game? I might hop in and take a look. See if it's a game that can capture my interest lol

They have few most are on facebook or links on ads if I remember right the game zorg talking about is a pirate base game