more transparency from Gameforge`s side

Totally agree with you Asto on this.Game is boring,only goal right now as a active player is collecting res.Vmode players(fleeters mostly) wont go out because there are no targets to hit,if you maybe even try, it could be running a bot and you just lose your time.After that you dont have enough admins on servers,some of them dont even understand game technics or game itself.Or they ban someone for bot using for 14 days and after that you send him that he is cheating again with all screenshots and yet he stays unbanned.I dont know i have a feeling that the game died long time ago and we just dont want to accept or we are here just because of some people ingame.

you said what everyone is thinking

for the first step i suggest we get more info about stuff like inactivity script being disabled, again

smth like, we disabled the sctipt bcs of XYZ reasons, even if we as players can not test t he info, or the info can be sth we should not konow just tell us smth else, the reception of the news would be better

and this behaviour from GF is not oGame limited, since i know them on all platforms i have been in contact they have good games with poor managinig and poor provider - customer communication and relations

Sorry, but this can't stay here. Cass

Asto Vidatu

While you make some valid points- a lot of what you ask isn't known to us.

I am currently on my cell phone, so a long answer has to wait.

Concerning staff: we are well aware about the issues. But, and this is also not really a secret, due to many circumstances people do not apply, and I can hardly simply appoint someone involuntarily. And to my knowledge there are no plans to actually have paid staff - I also don't know if that would help in the boards especially

Song Screenshots can't be proof. Especially in these days, it's way too easy to manipulate such. They are a point of starting to look into a player for sure, but it has to be provable through other means.

My personal issue is that in my opinion the pillory should have stayed. It would be way easier to track why someone got banned.

So lots of good, important and valid questions nicely formulated in 1 post and no specific official response. Wondering how a regular player like myself understands all of the questions while Cassandra Vandales is saying that "a lot of what you ask isn't known to us". The key concern is communication. Or rather complete lack of that. And that I guess is known. If there's an open line of communication and questions from players get answered, that will resolve a lot of issues. For now what I've seen, the most common answer is something like "GF doesn't tell us much". But how about the players? Does that mean that GF basically doesn't care?

Cassandra Vandales

we understand not everyone has a lot of info to share with us, we moust shurely are not pointing fingers at you all that are volunteers, it is more oriented to the ppl that are at decision makeing positions and hopefuly this thread will be read by persons who can forward our stance and concern piink

I'm going to try to answer as much as I can with what we have. Keep in mind many of the things that are questioned here have already been answered in previous conversations and asking multiple times won't change the answer. I wish it did, but it just doesn't. :/

when will the next round of merges come?

There is no date yet for it. If there was it would be announced in the news section already. The inactivity transfer script to create space in older servers keeps failing one way or the other. There is no enough space in older servers for the newer servers. In this case in this specific community we cannot proceed with merge groups till we get the free space in older servers.

when will the merge item come?

It will not come for now. We had it in the shop in the NL community for a bit and it turned out to have a couple of floss, one being that it does prevent an account to end up in the top 20 of other server within the same community, but not within the top 20 of another commuity ( if you buy the item in UK you will not be able to move to another server where your account is top 20, but you can move into the top 20 of US for example). This was reported and is pending to be fixed with no estimation date. Without that it won't come to the shop.

will marketplace be back [and in which format, cuz now, class specific ships are useless to 2/3 of the classes]?

There are no plans to bring the marketplace back. It was one of the best features we brought to the game in my humble opinion, but it did not come with the proper abuse restrictions. It was exploited to its extreme potential and even with a fix ratio can still be abused. It needs to be fully reworked to avoid what happened when it was available and there are no estimations nor plans for that so far so don't expect this feature to show up in 2021 again. If it ever makes it back it will be a newly developed feature, not the marketplace as we know it so far.

does the captcha help with bots and will we finally see them gone?

The captcha the way it was implemented helped for a week. It doesn't fully help anymore unless it is the your first time using bots or you just started to be a cheater and are learning how to work around things, but the work against botting has not stopped, we continue working on bot prevention.

is there a plan for domain merges, or will it be "fixed" with merge item?

We have done it already. Some servers in MX and AR ended up in ES servers and some cross PT BR servers merges happened as well. The harder part is to mix languages so right now we did some smaller countries reducing their servers into 1 or 2 ( JP for example has only 1 server right now I believe). In the future we might offer UK servers as target for other countries, but it will depend on the server capacity. Still to be decided.

what is the 5-10 year plan for oGame?

I wish I could tell. Did we know in 2017 that we would get 2 new ships, a miner "ship", the 3 classes and the marketplace a few years later? Not really. This game is a little challenging. Plans change all the time either cause a feature loses relevance, another feature becomes more relevant, it needs more time to be developed and quite a big amount of reasons. We have seen it's 10th anniversary, its 15th and for sure will see its 20th with its ups and downs.

what happened with newspapers?

The newsletter was a prototipe project happening for a while. We could fill in content when there was, but there are months where most of the development goes into updating code, improving performance or simply investing the time in a feature being developed back and forth so there was no content monthly nor we could see many people active in the raffles we did in these so the project died.

what happened with all the "cool" updates like alliance jumpgates?

I cannot tell about alliances as nothing was set in stone related to it other than WeTeHa talking about different concepts and ideas in the youtube video I did in 2019, but the status of the jumpgate I thought was clear as I answered this question back then already. There is no jumpgate project anymore. How it was being developed did not fit the needs, the gameplay and was going into a spot where things didn't follow the path it originally was designed for (and the feedback wasn't the best ) so it was cancel.

what happened with adjusting the disco DF?

What exactly do you mean by disco DF? XD

is there a plan to involve, and pay more, volunteers?

because the amount of work put on them, is nowhere near the DM they get

We are always looking for more volunteers. The rest of this question is not relevant nor information I can publically talk about.

and basically..what is happening to oGame and why are you "just" milking it

instead of investing more in it, since the profits are there, and i know that

this is the one of most profitable games that gameforge created

This is your opinion of course you are entitled to it and I understand you don't see the work and effort the team puts behind as things come very slowly. You'd think we have a huge team working behind the game but at the end of the day this is people at their work spending X amount of hours daily on X or Y project so things take long, especially when the projects have to go through different departments back and forth to make sure the end result is what we want to release. We now have a game designer that is part of making ideas become concepts. He works closely with the development team so hopefully we don't have more situations like the jumpgate one, that means we are still investing on it.

where are those "old" free ways of getting tiny amounts of DM from surveys like before?

These were part of payment promotions/deals that lare no longer available. There is an idea rescued from Stomt where someone asked to have a mine to produce dark matter. It is similar to what already exists in Ikariam, but this idea has not been turned into a concept as other topics have higher relevance.

Asto Vidatu I was typing already when you did your last post, but there you go. Took me a bit to gather the answers from where I needed them, sorry for the delay.

Quote from piink

We have done it already. Some servers in MX and AR ended up in ES servers and some cross PT BR servers merges happened as well. The harder part is to mix languages so right now we did some smaller countries reducing their servers into 1 or 2 ( JP for example has only 1 server right now I believe). In the future we might offer UK servers as target for other countries, but it will depend on the server capacity. Still to be decided.

. What could be the issue about language/domains merges ? I mean i have a private games in 19 languages where private message are auto translated via google api to end user language on one server and no issues at all. People are more then happy to play with other countries and met new people

So i cant understand what the issue is with GF compagny to do multi lang game (multi lang) is one of the basics of web development even a junior developer can afford this in a few minutes

GF could shut down atleast 3-4 servers (to avoid cost) if they start to merge domains and have more outcome due to more activity in the uni

alot of people are hoping again a day to see 800-1200 if not more players online in a uni, but that could only work out with one domain which should be ogame.com and a language selection in user settings or at registration

You will quickly have to change your small 3-4-5 galaxies at opening to a 20 galaxy

Quote from iiNSickV9

Quote from piink

We have done it already. Some servers in MX and AR ended up in ES servers and some cross PT BR servers merges happened as well. The harder part is to mix languages so right now we did some smaller countries reducing their servers into 1 or 2 ( JP for example has only 1 server right now I believe). In the future we might offer UK servers as target for other countries, but it will depend on the server capacity. Still to be decided.

. What could be the issue about language/domains merges ? I mean i have a private games in 19 languages where private message are auto translated via google api to end user language on one server and no issues at all. People are more then happy to play with other countries and met new people

So i cant understand what the issue is with GF compagny to do multi lang game (multi lang) is one of the basics of web development even a junior developer can afford this in a few minutes

GF could shut down atleast 3-4 servers (to avoid cost) if they start to merge domains and have more outcome due to more activity in the uni

alot of people are hoping again a day to see 800-1200 if not more players online in a uni, but that could only work out with one domain which should be ogame.com and a language selection in user settings or at registration

You will quickly have to change your small 3-4-5 galaxies at opening to a 20 galaxy

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There is no issue merging servers with different languages, the only inconvenience is that the exodus people will take over the target language. I wouldn't like to be playing in Spanish and get told I'm gonna have to play in Japanese so we will consider setting up some optional targets into English for certain countries, but not fully kill the translation. The multi-language option (where you can switch the language you may in no matter where your host is) would be a cool feature and is requested for a very long time, but don't forget this code is 18 years old, was not designed for that and developing that functionality seems to be hard so it is not considered for now.

Quote from Asto Vidatu

since marketplace, most realistically wont be back, is there a way to allow all classes to build all ships?

Not for now, these still belong to a specific class and it is intended to leave it as it is.

id argue that the better way is to get a marketplace, with maybe just those 3 types of ships, with fixed prices in one of 3 resources?

Probably it would be a good idea, but how it works right now the only thing you can add/remove is the items from the sales so it requires more development and investment for a feature that proof to break the balance so it won't happen.

the main benefit of the marketplace [aside from pushing that resulted in its downfall] was letting classes be equal in a way

now with marketplace gone, and discoverer being nerfed [i`ll get to that later] we have 3 unequal classes

so..if everyone was to build ships, and only gain full advantage with the linked class, it would sorta let active miners play as discos

this way theyre forced to go back to collector after loosing crawlers which in essence means less activity

I understand and see that, I still play after all and can tell , but there are no plans to involve the marketplace to change any balance.

the merges..guess they stay the old way, which we are used to so its kinda ok

but what if (as iiNSickV9 said) we expand galaxies? make a new server just for the merges and go for it?

tho, im not in a hurry for a merge, i enjoy the passive gameplay alot more than i maybe should

but i know it would be 10x more fun to play in a full universe

The reason why we always try to do merges in small groups and avoid opening up galaxies is cause sooner or later the server with more than 9 galaxies become less and less competitive. For instance we do have servers in other communities with 12-14 galaxies and when a server srinks into 400 players in such a massive place good luck reaching a player in G11 if you are in G1 so opening a server with 20 galaxies is a non go. Ob top of that, when you do merges your targets have to be equal or higher in galaxies than your exodus for a very simple reason, an exodus with 6g going into a target with 5g will cause colonies in G6 to be in some sort of limbo where they cannot be attacked, the player doesn't have the option to transport there and nobody can colonize there. We have limitations in place to avoid these scenarios. As I said earlier, 18 years old game.

and one thing more id like to mention is the discoverer - df

why wasnt it limited to old values (i cant remember what they were..like 100-200m or something like that)?

a lot of miners, my self included, built only fleet for expos..and when the battle chances were lowered..i scrapped it

most of the miners went to market to sell the ships [again, i know many multied/pushed that way, but a lot of ppl used it for legal stuff too]

now, hunting pirates/aliens is useless unless you went from 0 to lvl 3 weapons, and not many ppl did that

so is there a way to, instead of having 50% less battles, get back to the 100% that collector and general have

and just have a limit of 100/200mil debris?

cuz at this point..its more viable to go collector/general and do battle expos [you get 10% DF, with 100% battles, compared to 20% DF and 50% battle chance]

I'm forwarding this feedback this week, you know changes don't happen in such things from one day to another, they are throughly evaluated, but this is the first forward 'm doing, if more reports come with this request over time the attention to it will grow, take notes!

then again, this would benefit all the regular players, and not those who spend fortune here, so maybe its out of the question

but maybe its worth asking

but anyhow, thanks for taking time to answer the questions that usually remain unanswered to

its a step forward

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Quote from piink

does the captcha help with bots and will we finally see them gone?

The captcha the way it was implemented helped for a week. It doesn't fully help anymore unless it is the your first time using bots or you just started to be a cheater and are learning how to work around things, but the work against botting has not stopped, we continue working on bot prevention.

May I ask what this continued work is? Because my own experience is that nobody gets banned for scripting. No matter how many times they are reported. No matter what evidence is supplied and no matter how obvious it is.

The result of this lack of enforcement is that there is ZERO deterrent and thus a proliferation of scripters.

It is infuriating that the game has apparantly given up on applying the rules.

How hard can it be to identify accounts with 24 hour activity and check to see if that activity is genuine from fleet movemnts etc.?

i play oGame to oso i understand you

and i try to understand that GM's have their hands tied by GF

getting angry and salty about it is not gonna change anything

if you want to understand GM and GF better or if you want to help the community, fill the application and join the team instead of pointing fingers and crying around the forum

if some of you were banned and are not able to become a part of the team i am sorry, i was not aware of that

Not helpful Museko.

My question is entirely relevant to this thread. Gameforge could be a lot more open and honest with us about what it is that prevents the GOs from being able to ban the scripting accounts.

There is clearly something preventing the rules from being enforced and all we need as a community is for the game rules to mean something again, like they used to.

Who cares anymore,game makes me sick playing,so many bots ,lost time and bad features that made this game unplayable.And we should just report a player and admins have a work to do to watch him but looks like we are doing more work then some of them.Btw i m not mentioning anyone but there are some members of admin team that they just dont care.

What many do not know is that game staff has to be really sure when they ban. No game staff likes not to ban cheaters, and I think I can speak for all staff when I say that bot users are the worse.

Of course it is a transparency issue as we cannot tell you anything about the GO tools, about the respective accounts and so on. You only see if one was banned or not. Reporting someone doesn't mean that it is really a bot being used or that there is 100% proof. Why can't we take screenies and the like as proof? Sadly because such can be faked and it has been faked a few times to get people into trouble.

Is this frustrating? Very much so, for everybody involved. It's simply not true staff doesn't care.

General George Game staff can't tell you as in: not allowed to. To really answer your why question we would have to violate our own signed non disclosure agreement. So it circles back to the transparency question.

The thing is: scripters and botters who are caught get banned. I see them getting banned, here and on .de. Do all get caught? Probably not.

Quote from piink

when will the next round of merges come?

There is no date yet for it. If there was it would be announced in the news section already. The inactivity transfer script to create space in older servers keeps failing one way or the other. There is no enough space in older servers for the newer servers. In this case in this specific community we cannot proceed with merge groups till we get the free space in older servers.

Same old same old, something's not working, but the reality is a CS student could fix your issues in one or two days, so its obviously something else that's delaying the merges.

I mean cmon, it has been announced and requested for like 2 years and all your arguments are 'x is not working', after x is fixed 'y is keeping us from merging' blah blah.

Quote

will marketplace be back [and in which format, cuz now, class specific ships are useless to 2/3 of the classes]?

There are no plans to bring the marketplace back. It was one of the best features we brought to the game in my humble opinion, but it did not come with the proper abuse restrictions. It was exploited to its extreme potential and even with a fix ratio can still be abused. It needs to be fully reworked to avoid what happened when it was available and there are no estimations nor plans for that so far so don't expect this feature to show up in 2021 again. If it ever makes it back it will be a newly developed feature, not the marketplace as we know it so far.

Marketplace has been heavily exploited and you shut it down when the damage was already done. You could've shut it down in the first week and/or revert the changes if you wanted to, but no, you let it run for about a year or so to make the above stated conclusion about the marketplace. Are you even aware that you are advertising functionalities for classes which aren't even in the game?

At least fix the text or something, this just look bad, awful and its false advertisement.

Quote

when will the merge item come?

It will not come for now. We had it in the shop in the NL community for a bit and it turned out to have a couple of floss, one being that it does prevent an account to end up in the top 20 of other server within the same community, but not within the top 20 of another commuity ( if you buy the item in UK you will not be able to move to another server where your account is top 20, but you can move into the top 20 of US for example). This was reported and is pending to be fixed with no estimation date. Without that it won't come to the shop.

Again, 'x doesn't work', we have no ETA on this, will take some time? How many developers do you have? One that comes in every month for an hour or two?

Quote

does the captcha help with bots and will we finally see them gone?

The captcha the way it was implemented helped for a week. It doesn't fully help anymore unless it is the your first time using bots or you just started to be a cheater and are learning how to work around things, but the work against botting has not stopped, we continue working on bot prevention.

This one made me laugh. ('helped for a week' - quote of the year) So in a nutshell, captcha was introduced for nothing? If captcha has been circumvented then just remove it, it's bugging normal players and bots can easily go through it.

The other stuff you wrote doesnt interest me as its generic bu.. stuff you say in every thread.

Just my 2 cents.

Peace.