Hi everyone,
Thanks for joining us at today’s ATA! It’s been an interesting week to say the least (that’s what I get for going on vacation).
I know there are going to be a lot of questions about zOMG today, so I wanted to address a few of them right up front, for better or for worse.
What’s up with zOMG?
zOMG is a fun game, and we want to keep it available for Gaians to play. However, we can’t commit to doing major new development on it for now. We’ll do bug fixes and maintenance as we can, and we may still be able to do things like reopening old events, providing new rings/quests, etc. when we have time. Unfortunately, it’s just not financially viable for us to dedicate resources to it at the moment. But I do want to stress that it is not going away at all.
What’s going on with Buccaneer Boardwalk?
We are working on a few ways we can come to a solution for Buccaneer Boardwalk that is good for everyone, and will let you know more when we have a better idea of what that means. Basically, we want to make sure no one feels like they wasted their money.
Should I keep playing zOMG?
Like anything, you should play and/or support zOMG to the extent that it’s fun for you to do so. Even if we never do anything with it again, it’s still a fun game, and if you’re enjoying it, then we’re happy. And if you’re not and never play it again, we totally understand.
You really botched your communication on this one.
Gaia has never been accused of being a great communicator, and this is a prime example. We completely acknowledge there are a bunch of things we could’ve done better, both in this case and in others over the years. This is something we’re trying to address this year – by being more open and communicative than we have in the past. We won’t always get it right, but hopefully you can see some positive results (such as more presence in the forums, more Dev notices, etc.).
Why are you taking staff off of Gaia to build Facebook stuff? Does this mean you don’t care about Gaia anymore?
Actually, this couldn’t be further from the truth. At the end of last year we made a structural change at the company to address this. Before, everyone pretty much worked on both Gaia and our social games, which made it hard to get anything done. It’s tough to prioritize projects for two totally separate platforms, and people constantly had to switch back and forth, which isn’t efficient. In December we split the company into two groups: the Gaia Online team, and the social games team. This was expressly designed to make sure that everyone knew exactly what they were working on and would be dedicated to that team (i.e. no “stealing” resources from one side or the other). Plus there are other benefits to Gaia, such as giving us the ability to migrate games back into Gaia (such as MoGa) and sharing a common infrastructure, so that any improvements made by one side will be enjoyed by the other too. You can read a little more in my
journal post from a month or so ago.
<Now we’re out of FAQ format and back to me talking>
To avoid this type of communication problem, I want to be clear about a few other features that we get asked about a lot.
Alchemy– If you’ve followed the Alchemy threads, you’ve seen that we’re making tweaks to it to do a better job of balancing it out. I know this isn’t going fast enough for some of you, but Alchemy is very complex, and making big changes can have a ton of unintended consequences. We think the feature has far too much potential to risk that, so we’ll keep making tweaks and measuring the effect.
Housing /Towns – This is something else we’ve long promised would be updated, and we’re finally doing it. Most of you have seen the improvements to Houses already, and we’re working actively on Towns as well. Because we plan to leverage our Flash spaces for future efforts (sponsorships, events, etc), we need the framework we have in place to also be as flexible and maintainable as possible. We need to therefore do some refactoring and we get a new Towns as a benefit.
Guilds – Guilds is definitely on our list of features we could look at (largely thanks to the passionate community around them), but right now we don’t have any plans to make any major changes. We’ll let you guys know if that changes.
Flash Games – Same here. We’ve spent a good amount of time fixing bugs and exploits in several of our games, but while we are talking about their future, we don’t have any changes planned for them in the immediate future.
Spring Cleaning - We love all the suggestions, although we of course can't do all of them. We've done a handful, and are going to wrap that up soon. We'll post a message in there explaining all of this soon as well.
Ok, I’m sure I’ve forgotten some stuff here, but this is a good start for the ATA. Now, please ask away.
Biglanky14