To Munich we go.

ELE · Mar 1st 2018

Dear community,

TG will run an event in May in Munich and I am excited to announce I was officially invited to represent the com domain.

As far as I know, 10 people were invited from several most active domains. Based on the draft of the agenda we received, significant part of the workshop is some PR action, but there is a room to bring in our agenda how to preserve and improve the game we all love. There are meetings, formal and informal, with TG team, travian developers and community managers. In this topic I would like to discuss questions, concerns and suggestions that should be raised on these meetings.

Before you start typing, please understand that most likely we will have 2-4 hours maximum with each team and that the invited group has never met before, leave alone worked together. This is very short time, there will be no room to discuss details or at least i don't want to spend my time telling developers how to improve market place. Additionally, there are several fresh topics on the forums how to improve the game and I follow them and will try my best to deliver these suggestions to right people. It would be appreciated if you add your suggestions to any of them without opening new one.

I believe there is a huge gap between game makers (developers, marketing team, community managers, designers - you name them) and the community and my goal for the event is to close the gap, to make TG understand how we think, what we like and what we don't, what would make us leave and what would make us bring friends in etc. Below are a couple of examples that I have in mind, as an illustration.

To management team: How do you see the game in one, three, five years? Are you trying just keep it alive? Expect growth? Or maybe you honestly see it dead in a couple of years.
To developers: The main issue for me is the time required to play on competitive level. Every changed should be reviewed from this angle - does it save majority of the players a few minutes. Second, travian is team game. However, nothing in game support leadership of a team. All tools are third party. That should be fixed.
To CMs: well..... how exactly do you see your typical player? where idea what we would like the show coming from? and how long do you plan to keep that delusional image alive?
I have more, those just example, I don't want to spoil your thought with too much input from myself.

I do believe that this is the best opportunity we had in long time to get on the same page with game development and support. Help me make it real please.

Trickster · Mar 1st 2018

My main questions will go for Developers team:

1) Will they ever re-create a 3.6 server?
There's a large piece of users that prefers to go on a private server because of this lack. Do they mean to not ever re-create the format that gave them so much succes or there will be an opportunity about this?

2) Will they ever reduce the size of the map?
Even in this, many players keep asking a cut on the size of the map since, excepted for TT finals, there's no really need of a 400x400. Even in the most populated servers a 250x250 is enough and many, if they want to, can still have space to grow in peace without having nobody in their 50x50.
But still, why not to take a look about this? Travian is way funnier when there's a fight between players

3) Why not to make proxys bannable?
Still in 2018 the main problem of Travian are multi-accounts. We keep asking in Italy to make proxys bannable to reduce a huge number of multis. But still, no one listen to us. Or, if you really don't want to disappoint the big piece (that keeps and keeps growing) of your users that wants to play with more accounts, create a server when it's allowed to use any account you want.

To management team: There's a growing and constant drop of players that keeps forcing them reducing the number of servers which, anyway, doesn't help a lot since the players are less even now. (To make an example, just 2 years ago there were 7 normal servers in Italy, now we count only 4) What do they plan to do about this?

To CMs: My dears, have you ever considered that many of the players complain about the fact that travian became 10 times Pay4Win more than before?

I KNOW that this carries you a lot of profits in the short period, but it won't in the long one. You can see it yourselves, there are many reason why players keep leaving but the main one is that, if you can't shop, you have not a chance against shopper players.
Even a noob now, if he's richer than you, can stole a 150% near to you that have spent time and time behind the game.
Golds have to be a push, not a weapon. As cages, armored hero, helms, gladiator helm and bandages are meant to.

This is what the players I talked to keep asking. I hope to be a voice for them, and i hope you to be a voice for us.
Thank you for reading ELE, hoping you'll carry these questions to Munich.

Mazza Pazza_IT · Mar 1st 2018

Trickster wrote:

My main questions will go for Developers team:

1) Will they ever re-create a 3.6 server?
There's a large piece of users that prefers to go on a private server because of this lack. Do they mean to not ever re-create the format that gave them so much succes or there will be an opportunity about this?

2) Will they ever reduce the size of the map?
Even in this, many players keep asking a cut on the size of the map since, excepted for TT finals, there's no really need of a 400x400. Even in the most populated servers a 250x250 is enough and many, if they want to, can still have space to grow in peace without having nobody in their 50x50.
But still, why not to take a look about this? Travian is way funnier when there's a fight between players

3) Why not to make proxys bannable?
Still in 2018 the main problem of Travian are multi-accounts. We keep asking in Italy to make proxys bannable to reduce a huge number of multis. But still, no one listen to us. Or, if you really don't want to disappoint the big piece (that keeps and keeps growing) of your users that wants to play with more accounts, create a server when it's allowed to use any account you want.

To management team: There's a growing and constant drop of players that keeps forcing them reducing the number of servers which, anyway, doesn't help a lot since the players are less even now. (To make an example, just 2 years ago there were 7 normal servers in Italy, now we count only 4) What do they plan to do about this?

To CMs: My dears, have you ever considered that many of the players complain about the fact that travian became 10 times Pay4Win more than before?

I KNOW that this carries you a lot of profits in the short period, but it won't in the long one. You can see it yourselves, there are many reason why players keep leaving but the main one is that, if you can't shop, you have not a chance against shopper players.
Even a noob now, if he's richer than you, can stole a 150% near to you that have spent time and time behind the game.
Golds have to be a push, not a weapon. As cages, armored hero, helms, gladiator helm and bandages are meant to.

This is what the players I talked to keep asking. I hope to be a voice for them, and i hope you to be a voice for us.
Thank you for reading ELE, hoping you'll carry these questions to Munich.

Show All

1)no. They made a 3.6 but it had few players...so forget travian 3.6 .

Trickster · Mar 1st 2018

Mazza Pazza_IT wrote:

1)no. They made a 3.6 but it had few players...so forget travian 3.6 .

Last 3.6 happened years ago and was avaible only in english version.
Allowing every country to have its own language (but joining the same server) would make the server more populated than before.

And most important, if this would be combined with a good advertisement, this would carry back many of the players that wanted to leave.

Pignouf_COM · Mar 1st 2018

Mazza Pazza_IT wrote:

Probably they didn't advertise much for it. I know a few players who are even whining, remembering how cool it was to play T2.5 and would love to recreate one of them.

Not much gold, no hero, no oasis... Mostly skill

scale · Mar 1st 2018

ELE wrote:

am exited to announce I was officially invited to represent the com domain

congratulations Ele , good choice in yourself imo

I'd like to see TG spend a little more effort in ridding the game of silver/resource merchants.
seems to me the only weapon against the sale of resources is being reported.
TG have done well with systems to beat bots & multies but there is glaring inadequacies when it comes to removing this aspect from the game.
anyone been around a while will have witnessed accs skyrocket through the rankings with no real effort,,,, legit accs are behind the eightball when the silver merchants turn up to a server.

Not Dark · Mar 1st 2018

Trickster wrote:

Last 3.6 happened years ago and was avaible only in english version.Allowing every country to have its own language (but joining the same server) would make the server more populated than before.

And most important, if this would be combined with a good advertisement, this would carry back many of the players that wanted to leave.

wrong, there was a 3.6 in different countries(italia compresa, nel 2014 eh), and there was not a lot of people to play with it

Arausium · Mar 1st 2018

Dark God wrote:

wrong, there was a 3.6 in different countries(italia compresa, nel 2014 eh), and there was not a lot of people to play with it

He's right Trickster, last 3.6 com 3, 2014/ marzo 2015 won by InfinITA .

Trickster · Mar 1st 2018

Dark God wrote:

wrong, there was a 3.6 in different countries(italia compresa, nel 2014 eh), and there was not a lot of people to play with it

4 Years passed, we're not talking about yesterday
7700 deleted, 800 players active until the end.
If the server concerns all the domains (each one has its own language but all of them join the same server) it could collect a good bunch of players.

In my opinion it's worth a try

Excat · Mar 2nd 2018

TG just released last year a even more p2w server, with the daily artefacts and the troop merging option. I figure they are taking that path.

I would love a Travian game where the gap between the top acc that use multiacc and every cheat possible and the rest of medium players were not that gigantic. Those acc spamming gold and skyrocketing pop. Just balance it, sure there is a way to do it.

Ruffian · Mar 2nd 2018

Language is an issue which is being taken care of in regional servers where servers are in the native language of the concerned domain

It's time to give players the option to use their native language on all servers

Rather that making useless cosmetic changes like snow, weather and ally page graphics, this would be a meaningful change in UI

**BlackBlade** · Mar 2nd 2018

Trickster wrote:

My main questions will go for Developers team:

1) Will they ever re-create a 3.6 server?
There's a large piece of users that prefers to go on a private server because of this lack. Do they mean to not ever re-create the format that gave them so much succes or there will be an opportunity about this?

2) Will they ever reduce the size of the map?
Even in this, many players keep asking a cut on the size of the map since, excepted for TT finals, there's no really need of a 400x400. Even in the most populated servers a 250x250 is enough and many, if they want to, can still have space to grow in peace without having nobody in their 50x50.
But still, why not to take a look about this? Travian is way funnier when there's a fight between players

3) Why not to make proxys bannable?
Still in 2018 the main problem of Travian are multi-accounts. We keep asking in Italy to make proxys bannable to reduce a huge number of multis. But still, no one listen to us. Or, if you really don't want to disappoint the big piece (that keeps and keeps growing) of your users that wants to play with more accounts, create a server when it's allowed to use any account you want.

To management team: There's a growing and constant drop of players that keeps forcing them reducing the number of servers which, anyway, doesn't help a lot since the players are less even now. (To make an example, just 2 years ago there were 7 normal servers in Italy, now we count only 4) What do they plan to do about this?

To CMs: My dears, have you ever considered that many of the players complain about the fact that travian became 10 times Pay4Win more than before?

I KNOW that this carries you a lot of profits in the short period, but it won't in the long one. You can see it yourselves, there are many reason why players keep leaving but the main one is that, if you can't shop, you have not a chance against shopper players.
Even a noob now, if he's richer than you, can stole a 150% near to you that have spent time and time behind the game.
Golds have to be a push, not a weapon. As cages, armored hero, helms, gladiator helm and bandages are meant to.

This is what the players I talked to keep asking. I hope to be a voice for them, and i hope you to be a voice for us.
Thank you for reading ELE, hoping you'll carry these questions to Munich.

Show All

1. I personally do not long for the days of T3.6. I am not surprised that some do but I also understand the impediments to doing so. It has been routinely cited that the code isn't up to snuff for modern use, both in terms of security and comparability. Is it possible they could work on it and make it workable? Sure. But I also don't think that is an efficient use of the already limited resources devoted to Legends. The team as of the last Ask Travian video constituted only the following:

1 Game Designer
1 Artist
2 UX Designer
1 UI Designer
7 Developers
3 QA Testers

This represents 8.3% of the company staff. There are other positions like social media manager, community communications manager and game director but those are management / support positions and aren't directly tied to game development and maintenance. They do liaise with other departments but those aren't dedicated to Legends.That is an entirely too small of a team to keep the game going properly as it is, let alone moving it forward AND making older versions usable.

So my biggest question to TG is this: Will more resources (people) be added to the Legends team?

Without a proper level of investment (people = $), this game will slowly die off. It remains more popular than the T5 spinoff of Kingdoms by a pretty large margin when I last looked at player numbers. But the company is doing the game a disservice. It is suffering from lack of investment and has trouble keeping the lights on with the skeleton staff. Almost everyone I talk to thinks the game needs changes and that requires staff. We can send them all the proposals and suggestions in the world but if there isn't anyone there to implement them, it won't do any good.

I would personally triple the Game Designer and Artist number. Add an additional UX designers, 2 more UI designers, 8 more developers and 5 more QA testers. That would more than double the current staffing figures.

Obviously this could have changed since the last Ask Travian video. But Travian is not at all transparent about how they operate so we can't know. If it wasn't for the immense number of volunteer staff, I expect the game would have fell apart ages ago. There needs to be investment in front-line and development staff.

2. The map size reduction should be implemented on all servers. A 501x501 is being used on the NYS servers. I personally think that is a good figure and it is only 40% (roughly 640k tiles vs 250k tiles) the size of the current map. Anything smaller would be too small. . (FYI the current size is technically 801x801)

3. While multi accounting is an issue, I think banning proxy's is not the answer. Some simply use a proxy every day, regardless of in game considerations. Travian should not discriminate against privacy conscious players.

Ruffian wrote:

Language is an issue which is being taken care of in regional servers where servers are in the native language of the concerned domain

It's time to give players the option to use their native language on all servers

Rather that making useless cosmetic changes like snow, weather and ally page graphics, this would be a meaningful change in UI

Using native language on any server would be a big step forward. This seems to be accomplished in the Tournament, why not on all servers? This sort of UI change would also present an opportunity to demo the current domain system. Instead a set number of servers that are "primarily" or "representative" of a country / language could be set up on one single domain.

Example:

COM1-10 = English, "international" servers set on UTC-0
COM11-14 = Spanish "servers" set on ?
Com 15-16 = Russian "servers" set on Moscow time

And so forth. This would make the majority of servers accessible by everyone through the adaptable UI but would allow players who only want to play with players who speak a certain language to do so. It would also help preserve "communities" that fear the merging of domains for one reason or another.

Integrating google translate (or another translator) might also be possible to ease communications between players.

Safiren · Mar 2nd 2018

Ruffian wrote:

Language is an issue which is being taken care of in regional servers where servers are in the native language of the concerned domain

It's time to give players the option to use their native language on all servers

Rather that making useless cosmetic changes like snow, weather and ally page graphics, this would be a meaningful change in UI

That all could play in their own language was a great improvement when Travian started and also an explanation for the success the game made. But maybe if it was possible to use your own language on all servers it would make the smaller servers to lose even more players? Still I think it would be a great idea because I think it's inevitable that domains will be merged in the future.

Only Travian knows how many players they need to profit on a server - and they need to gain money to keep our beloved game alive.

Ruffian : You may think snow is a useless cosmetic change, but I like it =)

GyWhoJustCantLetItGo · Mar 3rd 2018

The things that come to the top of my mind:

1. The community aspect of the game needs attention. Everything else remaining same, I could have a great game or one that totally sucks, depending on the kind of team and opponents I'm with. For example, provide a facility for team-forums that survive the life of a specific server. All good teams I've played with had third party forums but these were done at the personal expense and initiative of players. Why not provide one from TG? You can charge money if you want to (anyway third-party hosting will cost money too). This idea could be extended in many ways, with social media integration etc. Have your UX team spend some brain on it. Depending on how you do it, this could turn out to be a success or dud. (By the way, this was just an example, don't fixate on forums. TG, please talk to the people coming over there and understand more about what's missing in the team/community aspect of the game)
2. The game should provide adequate tools for communication and game coordination. All good teams depend on third party tools and sites to do everything from basic communication to coordination of operations. I don't even mind there being a bit of Pay2Win concerning tools (third party defense tools are already making money).
3. Provide analysis tools. For example, I personally would like to have a page where an hourly (or maybe even shorter) top 10 change in hero/defense rank is shown (To spot the annoying farm spikers. The best raiding players spend hours updating farm lists and it's preposterous that any noob with a pulse can sabotage that with no effort at all). If this can't be done at least provide a data dump similar to map.sql so that people with programming skills can use it.
4. There must be an in-game mechanism to send same-second waves (the Firefox method is no longer reliable). I know this is more of a feature request than "what's killing the game" topic but we can't have an important aspect of the game be totally dependent on a quirk of a specific browser.

P.S: I'm not pining for 3.6. What I remember is a lot of Tuetons with bots, cranny-dipping farms 24/7 and am certainly not missing that. Those days were fun because there were more players and the game was alive. Not because of the game version.

tintin · Mar 4th 2018

ELE wrote:

As far as I know, 10 people were invited from several most active domains.

may I ask which domains?

Trickster · Mar 4th 2018

tintin wrote:

may I ask which domains?

Italy became one of these.
Italy - UK - com for what i know are for sure

Safiren · Mar 4th 2018

TG, you know how they are ^^, they wants to keep it a secret until they do the official announcement.

ELE · Apr 8th 2018

With less than a month to go I want to bump this thread up.

We read and collect all suggestions, but as I said earlier there will not be much time to discuss detailed improvement. I would like to hear more toughs on the major topics.

The main concern is declining number of players. So what can be done
- to bring more players in (mobile app, advertising, guides, what else?)
- to keep current players (better usability, less time consuming, less cheating, less bugs, good customer service, what else?)

On the other had we all understand that 2007 is long gone and we will never see 10s of thousands of players on regular server/ I, personally, don't share common obsession with big numbers, in my experience server with 400 players on it can be quite challenging in interesting if there are several teams with matching abilities. TG can help teams to find each other starting with knowing team that play their game and working with these team leadership to a point of creating special invitations only servers for example.I think smaller map is a step in right direction as well. Think outside of the box please

Ruffian · Apr 9th 2018

Preregistration brought back
Server schedule released regularly a month before server starts so that teams can be formed
Interface to be in native language across all servers.
Animal and natar spawn rates to be reduced to allow for farming oasis and natars
Banned accounts to be given 2 weeks period before accounts is converted to natars.
Inactive accounts to be left alone without deleting if they don't have cropper capitals

My suggestions

Wulfr101 · Apr 9th 2018

ELE wrote:

With less than a month to go I want to bump this thread up.

We read and collect all suggestions, but as I said earlier there will not be much time to discuss detailed improvement. I would like to hear more toughs on the major topics.

The main concern is declining number of players. So what can be done
- to bring more players in (mobile app, advertising, guides, what else?)
- to keep current players (better usability, less time consuming, less cheating, less bugs, good customer service, what else?)

On the other had we all understand that 2007 is long gone and we will never see 10s of thousands of players on regular server/ I, personally, don't share common obsession with big numbers, in my experience server with 400 players on it can be quite challenging in interesting if there are several teams with matching abilities. TG can help teams to find each other starting with knowing team that play their game and working with these team leadership to a point of creating special invitations only servers for example.I think smaller map is a step in right direction as well. Think outside of the box please

Show All

Yes, 2007 is long gone but but does it matter? Absolutely not in my opinion. What can TG do to improve the game and community? Looking at other successful games with similar "playing mechanics" can give valuable lessons.

Let's have a look at OSRS, old school runescape, another nostalgia game from 2007 based on upgrading your account by hours and hours of grinding. Their player base has been growing steadily over past few years and the community is thriving. What is done differently there? In my opinion, there's two main factors:

(1) New players are more welcome to the game
(2) Long-time players can vote on changes to the game

Now what is the difference to travian? By saying new players are more welcome I mean that they can play the game with their full potential a lot easier and the gap between noobs and good players/accounts is smaller. In travian all players are playing in the same world against each other, while in runescape there's separate worlds for members and non-paying players. So what one could say, but the difference is huge and blocks new travian players from enjoying the game. A new player wont buy gold when he is just learning the game and when he is in a very weak position compared to his gold buying opponents, the game is not enjoyable. Biggest problem in my opinion is the 25%-production bonus. One could think it gives you a 25% stronger account, but in fact, the effect is exponential. In runescape, membership costs you 8,49€/month and even less if you buy a whole year's membership. In runescape, paying affects your own gameplay but not your opponent's, unlike in travian. One can tolerate this "unfair advantage" to a certain point, but when the difference between non-golder's potential to a paying user is too big, it's too big.

This being said, Gold, as it affects the game now, has too big impact on travian.

What about the second point I had there? At least the forum is well aware of it. When we say TG has to listen to it's customers, what does it mean? What is the real issue we are dealing with here and what can be done about it? Now again, Let's have a look on OSRS.

In OSRS there will be a poll on changes to the game every month or so. The polls include ideas coming from the developers themselves as well as idea from the community. Now how do these ideas go up to the "top"? By listening to the players in all possible platforms! (youtube, twitter, facebook and forums ofc.) I'm not saying that travian should (nor could) create a similiar community active in youtube and twitter, but what I am saying is that the players should be there, in the meeting room with the developers deciding on where the game should be in the future. One of the biggest changes that has brought in a huge number of positive feedback in OSRS is the quality of life updates (reduce unnecessary clicking). These kind of updates woulc be welcome to travian which is waaaaay too click intensive, especially when you get to late game and have 30 or so villages.

I do have more ideas to share but let's go with these for now
PS. The com80 is a good idea to test new features, but why the hell do you have to pay for gold there... Testers should not have to pay for giving you (TG) valuable information!

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