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Read this before you make complaints
Polarization
Member Posts: 1,410
Post made by managing director of Duplex Systems yesterday.
Hello everyone,
I'd like to step away from work for a moment to talk about a few things regarding Open Beta.
First of all I'd like to thank you all for joining one of the factions building what we call the Global Dominion. The Dominion has a population of over 16,000 citizens now and it's growing every hour.
The first two weeks will be used for all kinds of stress tests. As you have seen, the cluster size has been greatly increased yesterday, doubled actually. It is now able to support 2400 concurrent users logged into the game. As this caused many changes on the game, certain instabilities or flaws are expected to happen. Please bear with us during that time. Things will run much smoother after these first 2 weeks, and you can expect changes on a daily basis.
We are aware that the game still has a lot of problems. Our current major priority is stability though. Many different game mechanics couldn't be tested with such an amount of players yet. We need to improve, adjust and test many features to make sure they will work well with even 10,000 concurrent players.
You should know a few important things regarding performance. The minimum requirements to run FoM well are a 1 GHz processor with 512 MB RAM. Also a DirectX7 hardware transform and lighting compatible is required.
In certain areas, such as the shopping center in NYC Brooklyn the memory usage can even break the 512 MB border. Please be aware of that if you wonder why your performance is not the best. Brooklyn has the become the major meeting point in the game. Chaos and mayhem are on the agenda there. If your internet connection speed is ISDN or lower, you should avoid this area until things calm down a bit. At times up to 200 players are inside or around the shopping center. But you will receive only 50 player updates at the same time. So don't wonder why some players still disappear or pop up immediately.
We apologise for the lack of in-game help, such as tutorials. We know very well that everything might look very confusing at the beginning. We are working on an in-game tutorial at the moment and hope to release it soon.
I can only suggest to ask one of the closed beta testers or gamemasters for help. They are all eager to help out.
Many of you probably haven't heard anything about Face of Mankind before and questions and doubts just add to the amount of confusion. Nearly everything that you know from other MMORPGs should be forgotten. In Face of Mankind nearly everything is driven by players. The fact that nearly no other other MMORPG uses this system doesn't necessarily mean that it must fail. Things just need a little more time to balance out. This open beta will be used for that as well. Balancing the economy with just a few hundred players wouldn't have made much sense as it is supposed to work with tens of thousands. Balancing will be the second stage of this open beta.
Forget about skills or character development that you know from other MMORPGs. We are trying something new, which might look chaotic at the very beginning, but offers a lot more player freedom later on. As a citizen of the Global Dominion you create and follow the path of 10 factions very different from each other. Each will have advantages and disadvantages. By performing missions and campaigns you will be able to influence the story of your own faction and the others.
My tip is to decide very carefully what faction you join. Take your time to study what they want. Then you should spend a lot of time to find your place in the faction. The bondage to your faction is very important and might save your life some day.
What you see now is only the beginning. All factions need to organize themselves, need to find order and connect relationships to their allies.
Be very careful of random killings. Penalty points will be increased exponentially with every new crime registered. Your first murder just causes 500 penalty points. But if you already accumulated 10,000, the next murder will add 1000 penalty points. If you have 1,000,000, the next murder will add 100,000.
Well, that's all for now. Thank you once again for your patience and understanding through this critical time, and I truly hope you will stick with us and help to make Face of Mankind something revolutionary.
Marko Dieckmann
Managing Director
Duplex Systems
I'd like to step away from work for a moment to talk about a few things regarding Open Beta.
First of all I'd like to thank you all for joining one of the factions building what we call the Global Dominion. The Dominion has a population of over 16,000 citizens now and it's growing every hour.
The first two weeks will be used for all kinds of stress tests. As you have seen, the cluster size has been greatly increased yesterday, doubled actually. It is now able to support 2400 concurrent users logged into the game. As this caused many changes on the game, certain instabilities or flaws are expected to happen. Please bear with us during that time. Things will run much smoother after these first 2 weeks, and you can expect changes on a daily basis.
We are aware that the game still has a lot of problems. Our current major priority is stability though. Many different game mechanics couldn't be tested with such an amount of players yet. We need to improve, adjust and test many features to make sure they will work well with even 10,000 concurrent players.
You should know a few important things regarding performance. The minimum requirements to run FoM well are a 1 GHz processor with 512 MB RAM. Also a DirectX7 hardware transform and lighting compatible is required.
In certain areas, such as the shopping center in NYC Brooklyn the memory usage can even break the 512 MB border. Please be aware of that if you wonder why your performance is not the best. Brooklyn has the become the major meeting point in the game. Chaos and mayhem are on the agenda there. If your internet connection speed is ISDN or lower, you should avoid this area until things calm down a bit. At times up to 200 players are inside or around the shopping center. But you will receive only 50 player updates at the same time. So don't wonder why some players still disappear or pop up immediately.
We apologise for the lack of in-game help, such as tutorials. We know very well that everything might look very confusing at the beginning. We are working on an in-game tutorial at the moment and hope to release it soon.
I can only suggest to ask one of the closed beta testers or gamemasters for help. They are all eager to help out.
Many of you probably haven't heard anything about Face of Mankind before and questions and doubts just add to the amount of confusion. Nearly everything that you know from other MMORPGs should be forgotten. In Face of Mankind nearly everything is driven by players. The fact that nearly no other other MMORPG uses this system doesn't necessarily mean that it must fail. Things just need a little more time to balance out. This open beta will be used for that as well. Balancing the economy with just a few hundred players wouldn't have made much sense as it is supposed to work with tens of thousands. Balancing will be the second stage of this open beta.
Forget about skills or character development that you know from other MMORPGs. We are trying something new, which might look chaotic at the very beginning, but offers a lot more player freedom later on. As a citizen of the Global Dominion you create and follow the path of 10 factions very different from each other. Each will have advantages and disadvantages. By performing missions and campaigns you will be able to influence the story of your own faction and the others.
My tip is to decide very carefully what faction you join. Take your time to study what they want. Then you should spend a lot of time to find your place in the faction. The bondage to your faction is very important and might save your life some day.
What you see now is only the beginning. All factions need to organize themselves, need to find order and connect relationships to their allies.
Be very careful of random killings. Penalty points will be increased exponentially with every new crime registered. Your first murder just causes 500 penalty points. But if you already accumulated 10,000, the next murder will add 1000 penalty points. If you have 1,000,000, the next murder will add 100,000.
Well, that's all for now. Thank you once again for your patience and understanding through this critical time, and I truly hope you will stick with us and help to make Face of Mankind something revolutionary.
Marko Dieckmann
Managing Director
Duplex Systems
Comments
post made today about the server problems by the Managing Director.
I think many of you wonder why there are so many socket errors and connection losses lately. Actually, this started to happen after we increased the cluster size and began to share to load among 30 login server applications.
We have just spotted a major problem that never could have appeared with a lower number of login servers. This could also have affected the mission system dramatically, which worked fine before.
Anyway, we are working on the solution and you may expect a server patch by tonight. I'm looking forward to seeing everything running smooth very soon.