Release aftermath

It was nearly a month ago, when I was able to stamp the blog with the the "out of beta" post, foolishly thinking that the blogging on this site has been ended for me. Until recent past happenings, I thought so. Plan A was that we will have a nice blog under the official site. Until plan A succeeds, I thought there's place for a plan B too. :)

It's kinda frustrating feeling, when you say "release time". First thing that gets into your head, is to look at the selling statistic. After the first sold copy you finally can say "somebody thinks that what we did actually worth the cash". And it's an awesome feeling after 4 years of developing. (for the developers who actually started the whole thing. For me, it's just nearly 2 years of poking around, mass bug hunting, working on balancing, zones, missions and so on.)

The second thing that you realize is that you developed an mmorpg. Hurray, we made it to release; let's take a sneak peak at the general chat to make sure everything is all right*. And since, we didn't had one day that would go without a new bug reported. Then you realize that mmos require constant developing; you look around to see that everyone works just to stabilize the situation.
* There's no such thing as all right in mmos. Lesson learned.

Then two weeks go by, and you may* actually say that I have time to work on new things again. At moment my main task is to help the GMs, as I can't do nothing else at the moment. :(
*I'm speaking only in my own name. Everyone around me works on thousands of things.

In the past weeks, we realized a lot's of things: we needed better hardware, more hardware. The longer (1 hour long) downtimes are usually due to some hardware upgrade. As the whole game runs now from 3 servers, we hope that the players would experience less server issues. Our network connection also had it first test: around a week ago, there was an intrusion event with lot's of agents taking part of a pvp battle. 45mb/s upload does sound nice, isn't it? :)

Network issues however, such as lag or full disconnect can't be fixed such easily. Many players noted that our connection may not be as stable as they experienced it with other mmos. Until we can improve on this, I found a nice post from the forums from Kethir, who said that his connection is much better, if he turns on a free VPN software called "AnchorFree". Although I can't really tell too much about it, I have to say that the ping to australia from hungary is lowered by 200ms, if this thing is turned on. This may be a good option for people who try to play far from europe, and a very bad idea for everyone in europe (+200ms here, to the server)

We have been nominated for Best New MMORPG in 2010. It's nice to feel that even if we are just a small company, our product is racing against the big releases.

Oh, and I made some time-lapse thing when I had a bit time; I was amazed that our beautiful garden in the TM starting zone can be so cool.

Alright, I'm out of interesting topics. Don't worry: We already working on our first huge patch, that will include some new tools to play with. Of course, it still requires lot's of work, so I'm going to stay silent about everything... for now.