Making of Realm of Empires

Design Talk - eXperience Points

2012-02-16T06:34:00.000-08:00

IN a NUTSHELL

XP

RoE Experience Indicator

why and how

Today we’ll release a small but significant new feature –Global Experience Points (XP)

We often see players, in new realms, establishing theirfeeding priority by listing their Realm of Empires honors:

“I have played ROE for2 years now”
“I was in Realm 7, 9, 11”
“I am a Divine Emperor in anotherrealm” etc

Well, XP will speak of your previous achievements; it willbe your “Realm of Empires Experience Indicator”

I want to take you for a design ride of this seemingly simplyfeature. I hope you will find it interesting!

Motivation for XP

We all know what XP is, but it took an hour long meeting torealize we just all knew it to be something different. What is it supposed todo? What is the purpose of having global XP. We agreed that our main motivation of XP is to be your “Realm of Empires game experience indicator”

Realm 4

XP = Village Points?

We already have “village points” that speak of yourexperience. Titles are based on village points but titles are not game wide.Starting in a new realm, you are a “Peasant” like everyone else even if youhave Divinity in your resume.

So perhaps XP should simply be your village points, totaled acrossall realms? Sounds good but that would result in huge XP (in millions), not ideal.

XP = Village Points / factor?

We could just scale the points down : 1000 village points =1 XP, but there is also another problem - is a person who reached the level ofDeity in just one realm equal in experience to a person who achieved a title ofEmperor in 10 realms? Village point wise, yes they are equal, but Game-Experiencewise? I could argue both ways.

Realm 5

Is 100 points = 10X10 points?
Also, is it harder to get your first 10 villages, than it isto get 110^th village? On some realms, going from 100 to 200 villagesis trivial – just take rebels, abandoned, inactive – until you are left withhard core of bad-asses and getting one more village is roughly analogous tohaving your 10^th shot of tequila – you really want it, you’re notsure why, and it could result in losing it all - all the hard work flushed downthe toilet; I may be speaking from experience.

Realm 7

So what is that tipping point? 100 villages? 200? 500? Well,it depends on the realm. The larger the realm, the more casual the realm,theeasier it is to get more villages, so really, the XP should depend on therealm. But we don’t know this until the realm opens and runs for a while, socan’t do that well.

XP Only Village Points?

What about other things – is a player running a clan equalin experience to a person who has not? What about a player who organizescampaigns, helps new players via forum, chat, achieves top spot in tournamentrealm etc? Certainly these are things worthy of a bit of XP. Because of this,we give out a lot of XP per title to give us room to give out less XP for otheractions in the game (and also a reason why we cannot simply scale 1000 village pointsto 1XP).

XP Levels

But giving a lot of XP results in a very big number that is inconvenientto display therefore we decided to introduce XP Levels – a collapsed version ofyour XP.

Final Decisions

Oh btw, I am an AD&D fan. [Established feeding order now]Been a dungeon master for many years, have a lot of great campaigns behind mybelt, killed off many great characters, managed to put a friend to sleep once whilehe was talking – that was before twitter but now I would SOOO tweet aboutthis! Anyway! The point is, XP design was loosely inspired by D&D.

XP loosely based on village points, with diminishing return
For now, you get XP for accepting titles which is based on points but not linearly - there is a diminishing return as you advance intitles. We did this for many reasons, one being that we did not want to make itpractically impossible for a determined new player to catch up to veterans.

More realm = more XP
We went with the assumption that a person getting fewer totalvillages in many realms, is more experienced than a player with more villagesin one realm – reason: the former player has seen more types of game play, hasseen more diplomatic situations, has probably participated in many more clans, dealt with more player etc

XP Levels - a linear function of XP

Unlike D&D, XP levels are a linear function of your XP.
Wantto know what it is?
Get ready for it!
It is Level = XP / 1000 wooho! My mathematicsdegree finally paid off!

XP already nonlinear function of village points

Since XP is already a nonlinear function of village points,we figured it makes no sense to have XP level to be an nonlinear function of XP– its like double taxation; not sure exactly what it is, but we all know it’sreally bad.

XP Realm specific so adaptable

At the end, XP is tied to a title and it is realm specific.Meaning we can tweek the algorithm by adjusting the XP per title in futurerealms based on your feedback. You will able to see this flexibilityin action in tournament realms where we’ll give out fewer XP.

We look forward to your feedback!

We have not had a chance to get much on your feedback onthis, partly because we screwed up… we did not foresee so many questions popup upand we must release this code before RX2 reopens tomorrow. However, because thealgorithm is adaptable, we hope that once you guys get a chance to experiencethe experience points (pun intended), your feedback will be that much morevaluable.

Thanks goes to my daughter for waking me up at 5:15 am and givingme a chance to write this.

Q & A - based on player's questions

Q: How were the starting points calculated, today?

The points were calculated based on your title in all your current realms as of today

Q: Will I loose XP points/level if I stop playing a realm?

No, like titles your XP points, will never go down. Unlike titles, your XP will not go down even if you stop playing on a realm

Future of online gaming - sad world of gambling

2012-01-23T05:21:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer - I wrote this post a while ago but never published it however with the recently announcement that Zynga is entering the real-world-gambling, I thought it was fitting.

Why is Online Poker effectively outlawed in the USA?

Poker is an addictive (and fun!) game where a player is able to loose a lot of money very quickly. Online Casinos have caps on the amount of credits you can buy daily but that does not work. First of all, a $750 daily limit (typical amount in my experience) is a no limit at all - it might as well be a billion dollars - for the vast majority of people, its not reachable. Secondly, one may play on many websites cranking that limit to $7,500/day or more.

So, (1) you can loose a lot of money in poker, (2) and its addictive, (3) and we need to protect people from themselves, (for their good, or common good) therefore (=>) no online-poker. That's the reasoning regardless if you agree with it or not. This extends to all kinds of gambling, addictive substances etc.

So what does this have to do with the future of online gaming Greg?!?
Well I am glad you asked! Video gaming is a huge industry. Do-it-quick Video Game collage programs are pooping up everywhere, Triple-A title sales are beating Hollywood records.

But Facebook, MobWars and recently Zynga proved that online gaming is the way to go. MobWars proved that people will spend millions of dollars JUST to have a higher score than their friends. Everyone wants to be on the bandwagon.

Online-games are not games, they are virtual slot machines. Parents beware!

Online-games, at least the vast majority of the recent titles, especially on facebook, are not "video games made available online". They are online slot machines that addict players, then allow them to spend lots of money to continue getting their fix.

Employing slot machine-like sounds, silly rewards like score or levels (compared to your friends), they entice players to spend more money to allow them to perform more, usually totally mindless clicks that offer more silly rewards.

Don't believe me? Look at many of the Zynga games, turn on the sounds, perhaps close your eyes for a moment and ask yourself where you are? Las Vegas perhaps?

Free-to-play damaging game industry?

2012-01-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

Yes.... at least according to this Inside Mobile Apps article:

Gamespot is reporting that Olivier Comte, Namco Bandai’s SVP for Europe has come out swinging against the free-to-play model, saying games that follow the model aren’t high quality, and that low-cost games lower the perceived value of games, ultimately harming publishers.

I am not sure I agree with this completely, however, I would agree with a stronger statement : pay-to-advance games are the real problem (like most of the games on Facebook now are)

There are fun games coming out on Facebook but most do not offer a price-to-buy-full-version or even a subscription model. I tried Hidden Chronicles recently, and although I could see it as a game I could play with my kids, I know, or suspect, I will need to spend enormous amounts of money (or spam friends) in order to continue playing as long as I would like to. THANKS, NOT FOR ME!

If I could BUY the "full" game, or even pay a monthly subscriptions to to use the game, I would continue playing.

I guess developers prefer to have a few players spending a lot of money, than offer other options allowing more players to play for less.

Lucrative business model? It is a relatively new model and it certainly worked well for some developers recently but maybe there are signs that players are smartening up?

I certainly hope this will change because I do want to play SimCity online, I do want to a strategy game without having to spend hundreds of dollars like at Kingdom of Camelot or other games Kabam is now pumping out.

This is why we, at Realm Of Empires continue to offer a subscription model - play indefinitely, enjoying the full game for less then a price of coffee at Starbucks per month.

Unfortunately Realm Of Empires is now the last game of its kind that offers a subscription, no-benefit-to-paying-players model, at least that I know of.

Thru not Through, those Americans got it right!

2011-06-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen the US highway signs saying "Thru Traffic" or something to this effect?

Isn't THRU better than THROUGH? So why is there a red squiggly line under the former spelling as I type this? Prejudice I tell you!

I never learned to spell and refuse to do so till they fix it!

Honestly, why waste precious brain power remembering stupid facts like spelling of weird words?

I am polish, and the polish language, although a phonetic, also has stupid rules - similar to English spelling. For example, in one word you use one type of "u", in another a different one. Same exact sound, yet different letter. Probably a relic from hundreds of years ago. Stupid...

As a kid I HATED this, with all my passion and soul. I suck at remembering such useless facts and find it so hard to force my self to waste time memorizing it them. Am I alone in this?!

So I will not (learn to spell)! I am making a petition to fix English... Who is with me? ... or you will soon read this blog in Esperanto, which incidentally was created by ophthalmologist from Bialystok, a city in Poland... weird.

Man, I am inviting a lot of embarrassing, and probably well founded criticism with this post! ;)

How you know you have a social game

2011-03-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

Today's release brought the much enticipated "NEXT EMAIL" button (ability to quickly go to the next internal email)

It puzzled me that this feature got over 70 votes. I mean come on! isn't some super-duper attack improvement more important?... apparently not.

And then I realized something... this is how you know Realm of Empires is a social game! players are actually taking with each other! Its not about visiting someones farm or island or what not to get points, it is about actually talking with someone, convincing them to work with you.

I think that's really cool!

This is not really a new realization, I write about how Realm of Empires has a significant educational aspect a lot but this was an interesting ... twist.

DNS and other problems - some more detail for those interested

2010-11-13T08:54:00.000-08:00

Last 4 days, especially the last 24 hours have been extremely frustrating to us here at Realm of Empires, and even more so for the players being effected by the problems we are experiencing!

Summary of Problems

For the last few days, facebook reports problem with session keys and some players are unable to login. No updates from facebook for the last 3 days...

To add to the fun, Friday morning, our DNS provider, Register.com has been experiencing intermittent issues with DNS - Domain Name System/Server. This morning (Saturday) they officially confirmed what was speculated by many on twitter and else where, that register.com got hit with distributed denial of service attack (DDOS).

Purpose of this post - more detail

At the end, players don't care what and who is to blame, at the end, everyone just want so to play the game. All we can do is stay on top of the situation as it develops.

My purpose in writing this is to give you guys some more background if you are interested.

Facebook session problems
Basically facebook send us a key that says that you are you. Ie, the reason you don't need to register with an email, username and password to player Realm Of Empires, is because facebook handles the authentication.

You try to acces the game, we ask facebook who you are, and facebook authoritatively confirms your identify. This is part that is currently broken. We can't find out who you are, so we can't log you in.

DNS Issues
Domain Name System/Server is what allows you to type in 'www.RealmOfEmpires.com' in your browser address bar and access the game. The browser asks a Domain Name Server for the IP number for the name you entered, the server returns it, and your browser then makes a connection to us. Sort of like phone book - you have a name 'Bill Smith', look up his number in the phone book, then dial the number on your phone and off you go.

Our provider, the main server that all other servers ask for information is under a hacker attack. Basically, when your browsers ask 'What is the number to http://www.realmofempires.com'/, it gets a 'I don't know this name' response

It is the second time in the last 2 years that register.com was hit with a distributed denial of service attack...

What are we doing about this?There is not much we can do about the facebook session issue but hope they will fix it soon.

DNS issue we got temporarily resolved, partly... we still have issues such as images not loading, stories not posting, and stewardship account access.

Realm of Empires Official Blog: The Realm of Empires Roadmap

2010-10-07T09:36:00.000-07:00

Realm of Empires Official Blog: 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 featur..."

Just recently, we've post the above blog laying out the roadmap for Realm of Empires for the balance of the year.

I just wanted to add a couple of personal comments.

First of all, I will do my very best, as a certified slave driver ;), to whip my team into completing the ROE and ROE' separation as quick as possible

By the way, ROE' stands for ROE PRIME ( See for more geeky info! )... I am not the coolest member of the ROE team! :)

I want to get back to improving Realm of Empires as soon as possible. Its a great feeling to release a long awaited improvment that is well received. Love the debates I have with you guys on the board - after a release, I always find a bit more time to participate in discussions.

For the specific features for Realm of Empires, I will try to keep the focus on features that will make running a clan, fighting a big war and managing a large kingdom easier. We got lots of feedback from you guys, and althought we've made significant improments with mass recruit and alike, we got a lot of opportunities to cut out more mindless tasks still.

We are looking for a tool that would allow you guys to vote on suggested features to help us plan future work - suggestions for such a tool are most welcome! Please post in comments.

Also a note about ROE and ROE' - some of you may worry that we will give one game more attention then the other. Note that this will be the same code base. So changes and additions we make in one application will be made in both at the same time - there will be no need to port the changes from one app to another - both of the apps are essentially the same application.

Hope to wow you guys with new features shortly!!

Realm of Empires Official Blog: Interview Series - Greg (Part 1)

2010-10-05T07:28:00.000-07:00

Realm of Empires Official Blog: Interview Series - Greg (Part 1): "With the re-launch of the official Realm of Empires blog, we thought it’d be a great idea to give our readers, an inside look at the member..."

Inviting players to realms close to new players

2010-10-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

The recent release of Realm 9 and 10 prompted us to close Realm 6, 7 and 8 to new players.

We've also reminded everyone that you can still invite a NEW Realm of Empires player to any of the close realms.

We got a number of questions related to do that so let me take a moment to explain what is the reason behind this, which will helpfully address your questions.

When you invite a new Facebook friend, they automatically start as close to you as possible, in the realm from which you invited them from. Reason being is to allow you to play close with your friends, and make it easier for you to mentor and guide them.

This is why we allow new players to start even in realms close to new players if invited. An existing player already understands the game play does not quality for this offer.

Do you find this 'start close to your friend when invited' a useful feature? Have you taken advantage of this? Would love to hear from you guys!

Realm of Empires reaches 10 realms!

2010-09-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

We've just released realm 10 in Realm of Empires! Wow, who would think!
Rewind back 2.5 years. June 13th 2008, Realm of Empires launched Realm 1 Beta. At that time, we were not ready nor even thinking about Realm 2; Realm 10 was fantasy! But even Realm 1 was a great success ... or perhaps a lucky turn of events!

Rewind another 6 months. Christmas 2007 - An unproven strategy game, designed on and off for a year, then quickly put together in about 3 weeks of intense design, almost did not make it into development. Estimates showed a much longer development cycle then originally anticipated, and the future of Realm of Empires seemed far from certain. But fortunately, some believed I made inaccurate estimates or was being overly pessimistic and we got the go ahead to move forward. Good that no one trusted me then! :) I was not being pessimistic but I was wrong - I was being optimistic... after all, I, more than anyone, wanted to get my baby project off the ground!

We launched our first realm in June 13th 2008 and it was a great success! 50 players had a heck of a lot of fun for the first couple of weeks! :)

Sometime later 350 players were picked on by the original 50 in the fast moving realm :) Every entrepreneur dream indeed!

But as soon as we've felt that the game will not crash past 100 players, we let the game grow faster and soon thousands of players were settling their differences with hordes of Knights and battling rams!

We are very proud to say that many of those players from 2 years back are still with us.

Salute to both vets and new players alike! It is YOU who make Realm of Empires what it is today. Thank you for making Realm of Empires such an awesome project! In the near months to come, Realm of Empires will continue to grow and evolve.

Welcome to Bubaribaman on realms!

2010-09-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

Welcome Realm of Empires fans!

Since my old blog was turned into an official Realm of Empires blog, I have decided to start a new blog where I can share some of my more personal experiences making Realm of Empires.

See ya soon amigos!

PS, when I told some of my colleagues about this blog, I got a "oh, so this is a ROE developer went rogue blog'... I liked that!