A little preview of things to come...

Hey!

There are quite a few things to talk about today, so let’s get down to it. First of all, hello! I’m the Red Herald, your new community liaison. My job is to help you – the RoE community – to communicate your ideas, concerns, hopes and frustrations to the development team. I’m also here to help the development team communicate their vision and goals for Realm of Empires to you guys.

Over the next few weeks you’ll see more and more of me on the forums and Facebook. (Someone has to give Greg a break so he can actually code the game, right?) Go ahead and say hi. I’m friendly. :-P Moving along....

New Realms!

We have two new realms coming up in the very near future. First up will be a 90-day RX3 tournament realm.  If you like action, you’re probably going to want to give this realm a try.

• No spells. You asked for a classic realm at RX speeds – you got it!
• Age of Cities. 60 days in, villages consolidate into cities. Just like RX2, this will enable a truly winnable scenario. Unlike RX2, cities will actually be different from villages. I can’t tip all the cards here (and no, they won’t be six times as big as villages), but we’ll post more about those as we get closer to the consolidation date. One more big difference from last time… no map contraction – you’ll have your cities exactly where you want them to be. Check here for all the details.

OK, so that sounds great, but you’re more of a long-haul, epic empire building kind of player? No problem. We’ve got you covered. Realm24 is coming up right after we launch RX3. This one is going to be very interesting. From what I’ve seen, things are going to get flat out awesome in the late-game; I don’t know about you, but that’s friggin’ exciting to me!

Do note that all the new stuff is fairly experimental. Sometimes you just have to try new things though, right? We hope you guys like it!

• Age of Cities. No more stagnant late-game. (You guys in the older realms know exactly what I'm talking about) This will work a little differently than the RXs, but the core concept is the same. Villages become a much smaller number of more powerful cities... so you don't have to take 100 enemy villages to feel like you even made a dent.
• Specialized Empires. This is cool. Research has been completely revamped. Once upon a time you raced through a capped research tree and ended up at the exact same place as everyone else. Now you have the chance to set your empire apart.
  
  Want to be your clan’s banker? Specialize in silver and trading post tech. Want to be constantly on the attack? Keep researching stables and siege workshop technologies! Want to rebuild your poor, broken walls at astonishing speeds? HQ tech is for you. No one can get it all, so what you choose actually matters.

Keep checking back - I'll post more details as soon as I can.

-The Red Herald
Your friendly neighborhood lance-wielding maniac community liaison

Tournament Realm X2 just a day away!

As announced on our forum, we are reincarnating Tournament Realm X2

But since RX2 was good in its previous life, it is getting a better form this time around!

We will be introducing probably our biggest game play change since the game first launched.

For details please see our forum post but in a nut shell, after 2 months, the realm will enter a new technological age where villages will be consolidated to cities (at a rate of 10 villages to 1 city) and a true end game will once again become possible!

We hope that a lot of player will give the realm a try as we are hoping for lots of feedback on the change.

For detailed parameters, please see here. You will have 1 week to enter the realm before it closes.

ENJOY!

Blog for Servants II, The Resurrection

Since we have first launched our offer to earn servant for writing about us close to 3 years ago, we have given out 22,550 servants resulting in some really cool articles!

This offer is still active.

Our intention is to encourage those of you who  like the game, to take the time to write about us.

Our ultimate goal, is to get written about in a known gaming blog or magazine. Can you make it happen?

We are actively looking for ways for our players to earn servants; this is one of the way we want to do that.

IN a NUTSHELL

Write about us = Get Servants

simple.

Have an existing blog?
Know someone with a blog?
How about a magazine?
If you can either write a favorable blog, publish an article about us, or influence someone to do so, then we would like to reward you handsomely! You do not actually have to write the article, but at least influence someone to write one. If the author will confirm you as the reason for writing the publication you will be rewarded!

Rules

1. The article / blog must be favorable towards realm of empires and must include a link to http://www.realmofempires.com/ or https://apps.facebook.com/realmofempires/
2. One offer per person unless you clear it with us first
3. No Spam! Anything that could be considered as spam is not allowed.

THE REWARD


We decide if the article/blog is acceptable for this offer and every article that is accepted will earn a minimum of 50 servants. We will then decide how much more is the publication worth based on the following:

1. Popularity of the blog / magazine
2. Quality of the publication (is it engaging, is it well written, proper grammar and spelling, length, presentation, how favorable it is to Realm Of Empires etc)
3. Relevance of the blog / magazine to the game (an online strategy game magazine/website will be considered more relevant than a food magazine :)
4. Presentation of the publication - does it include nice screen shots of the game? Does it include nice images?

How much can I expect to get?

A paragraph length blog entry on a personal blog with an active following will earn you 50-100 servants. Article on a relatively popular gaming website will easily earn you 10,000 servants. Get us into wired magazine, and there will be servants coming out of your … ears! :)

However, a new blog, created just for this offer, with no readers, will not be accepted.

Maximize your reward - Include nice images!
Feel free to use any of the game images you choose. We also creted a few nice images for you to use here: http://s650.photobucket.com/albums/uu225/RealmofEmpires/

How to claim your reward

Email us subject “blog for servants offer”, include a link to the article with any explanation, or metrics on the blog/website/magazine that you feel are relevant. Send using the email that identifies you are the author of the publication. If you are not the author, include the author on the email and he will have to verify you are the reason for this blog/article.

Remember to help us out in determining the popularity of the blog, website or magazine. Help us get the proper information, or offer us the matrics if you have them.

We will review your entry and will get back to you as soon as possible ( we aim for a 5 day turn around)

Yeah, yeah, you will just not 'accept' my article won’t you!?
No, we plan to accept every entry unless it is very poorly done/trivial, does not promote us at all, or even worse, damages us. We want to encourage you to use your talents to help us grow accepting articles will help us accomplish this goal.

Can I get an estimate before going to the trouble of writing?

Definitely! If you are thinking of taking advantage of this offer, but not sure if it will be acceptable, or what the reward amount will be, submit your idea to rewards@realmofempires.com and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Include as much relevant information as possible.



Examples of what will NOT be accepted
Remember that the idea behind this offer is to reward you for helping to promote Realm Of Empires.
Creating a brand new personal blog just for the purpose of this offer, a blog that has no readers of any kind, does not promote us and will not be acceptable. This offer is for exising blogs, website or articles with at least some popualrity /reader base.

Bubribaman on realms: Free-to-play damaging game industry?

Do you agree with Greg's opinion?

Bubribaman on realms: Free-to-play damaging game industry?: Yes.... at least according to this Inside Mobile Apps article : Gamespot is reporting that Olivier Comte, Namco Bandai’s SVP for Europ...

Bubribaman on realms: How you know you have a social game

Greg Bala's self pat on the back:

Bubribaman on realms: How you know you have a social game: "Today's release brought the much enticipated 'NEXT EMAIL' button (ability to quickly go to the next internal email) It puzzled me that..."

The RoE MMO User Experience

Realm of Empires (RoE) is a MMO that currently caters to thousands of players. We recently read an article from Gamasutra on MMOs and found that we agreed with a lot of the points that were mentioned.

Summarized briefly, the article mentioned the importance of satisfying your core audience. Engagement was touted as one of the key drivers for a game’s success, and the best way to keep engagement high was to have really good content.

At RoE, we are proud of our core player base and we are always listening even if we don’t have time to respond. RoE’ came after a lot of thought on how we could keep our main core player base engaged. This move lets us focus on the needs of our players, while still allowing the game to grow with new players.

One of our top priorities has always been to provide quality updates that will enhance the game play experience. We’re constantly releasing gameplay functionality improvements such as recent changes to the battle simulator, as well as the mail report interface. We release new ‘competition’ tournament realms every so often, so that our players can try different variations of the game, and we’ve found that these tournaments really help to keep engagement high.

At the end of the day RoE is all about the players, and the user experience.  We have a free-to-play model for our game, and we will ALWAYS keep it that way. However with the subscription of a nobility package, you get some additional features, and we want to give you the absolute best possible MMO war simulation game experience that you’ll find anywhere on or off facebook.

The Realm of Empires Roadmap

Many times we’ve been asked by our players to tell them what is going on at Realm of Empires, what direction RoE is going in and what features we’re currently working on.

As a small studio, it’s often hard to give an accurate picture of where we are headed. Because we are small, we have to have a lot of flexibility in our plans. For example changes in facebook frequently require an immediate response, and we often have to either pause or re-evaluate what we’re currently focusing on.

With that in mind, we usually plan in such a way as to give ourselves a time line for the next release, and then decide on a set of features we want to implement. Once development starts, we sometimes have to abandon certain features because they turn out to be too risky, complicated, time consuming or we simply can’t get to them. As a result, we often don’t plan further than the next one or two releases, since the feedback we get from the current release influences what we do for our next one.

With all that said, we would still very much like to give you a general idea of where we are headed.

RoE and RoE’

Since we’ve released realm 6, and then realm 8, and now realm 10, we’ve offered a different type of game play in the form of gifts, powerups and more. Based on your feedback, it’s been clear that players tend to really like one style of game play and not the other. This has resulted in two distinct groups of players who have come to expect very different things out of Realm of Empires. We’ve tried to cater to that by offering 2 different realm types side by side, however it is getting difficult to manage. We’ve found that there is no good way of asking a new player to choose which style they would prefer, since a new player would not understand the differences until they’ve fully experienced the game.

For this and many other reasons, we’ve decided to separate the 2 different game styles, into two sister games. Realm of Empires will continue as it has from the beginning (offering the Realm 9 game style) while RoE’ (name TBD!) will continue with the realm 10 style game play. Both products will be similar, and new features will be released to both games at the same time (both games will evolve and grow together). We are just starting to work on this now!

Facebook and Beyond

Because Realm of Empires is a rather serious game, we understand that uptime is extremely important. With the recent events that have occurred during the past few weeks, we are investigating the possibility of allowing you to login and play outside of facebook if and when you choose.

Tournament Realm

We’re planning on offering tournament realms that would occur on a regular basis, such as weekly, or even more often. Each tournament realm will offer different rules and parameters, a different start time, different duration, and everything will be constantly changing. Regular tournament realms will probably have to wait till end of 2010 or very early 2011 but we plan to squeeze in a few adhock tournaments this year as well.

New features in Realm Of Empires

Unfortunately, we can't promise any significant new features in the next 1-2 months. The task of separating ROE and ROE' will keep us busy for the next while, and we'll be booked for at least a month of development time.

However, once the separation is complete, we'll move full steam on implementing new features! We are planning on: doing significant improvements to the UI to speed up the page loads, eliminate a lot of page refreshes, easier filtering and organizing information in tables, more interactive map, more clan colaboration features and lots more to give you a much richer experience.We also hope to offer some cool new game play changes and additions in the new realms such as improvements to handicap system, special village types etc.

With all that's going on, we're extremely excited with the direction that RoE is headed, and we hope you are too! What do you think about RoE and RoE'? Your thoughts on playing outside of facebook?

... And Stay Tuned! Next week I'll be revealing a bit more about what it's like at RoE as I sit down for my second blog interview.


Have a comment about RoE direction? Leave one below!