First before I answer some questions sent to us let me say a few
things.
Medievia development recently has taken a great leap forward. My work
at my other company, iDayo Investor, is finally starting to wind down
and I am getting more coding done than at any time in our distinguished
history. This is great news! I apologize to everyone about the long time
between major new features. It has been a rough few years for me with
iDayo and I have not gotten much done regarding new modules. We have
made tons of changes during this time and we have truly amazing coders,
but it has always been up to me to make the truly big changes to the
game's core code. I want to thank all of the people who have sent me
letters of thanks and appreciation during this time. With luck our upcoming
features will win Medievia praise from the gaming industry and allow us
to break out into the mainstream. If our player base goes up just 50%
we should be able to afford for me to work on Medievia full time. This
is something I have looked forward to for over a decade and now it is
within sight! Please tell your friends and family about Medievia and help
Medievia grow. I promise I will not disappoint you. We have some ground
breaking things coming soon so stick around!
Q: Will you ever implement Dragon Points and Autoquest Points into the
clanrank? I know a lot of clans who lost a lot of clanranks simply
because they had people running like 3 DLs a day. Autoquests seem to be
along the lines of trade running in requirements, setup, etc, and I think
they will become popular, but clans will lose clanranks quickly while
they do AQs or DLs.
A: We need to do this, but its not on our priority list right now. These
things will eventually be part of the clanrank along with production
from things like mines and farms near the town which we are working on
now as part of the new trading module.
Q: I know you probably spend most of your time working on development
and don't get to play a mortal character much. However, when you do
play, how good of a player do you consider yourself? Can you run many
zones, trade or PK?
A: I would have to say that I suck overall. If I spend time playing to
be a better player the whole mud suffers and development comes to a
halt. Someday I will be able to sit back and enjoy the game right? Maybe?
I doubt it.
Q: If Medievia so desperately needs coders, why not recruit them from
the player base, as we do with other god positions? Or why not teach
some of the existing gods to code.
A: We do. In fact we just hired two new coders. We require coders to be
Heroes with fairly clean records. They must be a professional coder
with experience in C++ and Unix. Ideally they would have worked on other
games.
Q: Medievia V: The big one... how will you see off the end of Med IV?
World wide destruction? Rebirth of the Goddess? Shattering the
barrier on the Protected Land? Breaking the land asunder once more? How
much of a change will this be? What will come afterwards?
A: It will be a slow progression towards fulfilling our goals for Med
V. The actual change will simply be calling it Medievia V. We have
already fulfilled some of the goals. The big fanfare will be when we add
features like Adversary, then Clantown Games, New trading module,
MobFactions, and finally the DungeonMaster. There will be a fanfare for all of
these things as they are released to our production server, and then
eventually we will just call it Medievia V
Q: Wilderness and HoloSections: What other plans for the wilderness do
you have? What other kind of holosections will you be adding? I
always thought it would be kind of cool to have "Holo Dungeons"... sort of
like random temples or ruins or caves that you can find in your travels
and explore. (Filled with challenging creatures and good booty of
course.)
A: There are many such things coming soon. Some will be HoloSections
and some from my new 3dZoneMaker module I am 3/4 done, which is being
built with its first use for Adversary. Many of these will be for the new
Trading Module. Soon all existing tradeshops will be GONE! I bet that
just made some people wonder what's going on!
Q: I hear a lot about balance in the game and how items are made to
make it so one class does not have an advantage over another. Is there a
formula that is used to ensure this and what is it?
A: It's basically from experience we have gained over the past decade.
All gods are also serious players and when you combine that with the
tons of feedback we get it makes for a pretty damn good gut opinion on
stuff.
Q: Why haven't we seen more trade shops since trading is a Multi Level
Requirement on the game? It just stands to reason that with more
people trading equals more places to trade goods.
A: We are currently re-designing trading. All current tradeshops will
be gone. The clantown farms, mines, etc, will be where you trade along
with other places. The new trading module will be a huge leap over the
current one. This is in development now.
Q: Is Medievia running at the fastest level possible with today's
Internet technology?
A: Sure is. There is just one way I know to make it faster and that is
to pay Internap or some other prioritized traffic knowing IP for our
Internet Line, but the cost is very high so we don't. Not many
organizations do. Our current server is almost always over 50% idle, but we do
have plans for a new server in the fourth quarter which can process 4
billion instructions per second. Our current server does 450 million
instructions per second. The new server also has memory on a bus four times
faster then our current server. What will the new server mean for
Medievia players? Not much. The game will load faster but basically still run
the same as it does now. It will allow us to compile and load test
games much faster though.
Q: What are the quality standards Medievia has that makes it better
than other muds? Examples mobs, room descriptions, different aspects of
the game and so on.
A: I do not know much about how other muds are run, but I cannot imagine
any of them having our attention to detail or our god training. Our
standards are basically as high as we can strive for. As an example, we
just purchased and sent all of our proof readers a book called "Elements
of Style" by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.
Q: Have you seen anyone paying homage to Medievia by copying different
aspects or parts of the game?
A: I hear about other games copying our ideas all of the time. I have
no problems with that at all. When we started Medievia, the first thing
I did was copy every damn good idea other games had. Overall amazingly
most muds do not copy our stuff. It amazes me that every mud does not
have Breath and the Wilderness.
Q: Everyone says that ever since wilderness was installed Med became a
true world. Is this true though? For example, if you started from the
City of Medievia and fly East and kept going could you ever go all the
way around the world and end up on the west side of the city? Weird
question I know, but I'm curious :)
A: Our existing continents are just a small part of the world. Future
versions will have multiple continents using multiple servers. We will
do this when we can no longer support our player base on one server.
Right now you cannot fly around the world, you are blocked by magic at the
ends of our ocean mapping in the game.
Q: Are there any plans for making a bloodline where or bloodline who
command? To tell who is on in your bloodline, or where they are? If so
when can we expect it?
A: No, we do not want this. We do have a cool bloodline command that
shows the bloodline tree though.
Have you any searching questions about the future, or even present, of
Medievia? This is your chance to ask the main man himself. Send any
queries to Excrucior (excrucior@medievia.com) and he'll collate them for
the next batch. Unfortunately Vryce's time is limited and, as such, we
cannot guarantee when he will be able to reply.
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