500,000 Evony Players

Dear Evony Players,

When Evony was released, the demand for the game far exceeded our expectations. Our servers and network were designed with a moderate size player base in mind, and the number of Evony players now exceeds 500,000. While we were thrilled with the response to the game, we were also overwhelmed.

We were basically left with two options: scale up our infrastructure to meet demand, or forgo the "Free Forever" theme and convert to a subscription system, which would reduce the number of users.

We decided that because "Free Forever" is what inspired players to come to Evony in the first place, we would stick with it and do our best to support all our paid and unpaid players, rather than changing the business model to subscription-based. Since that time, our team has been getting very little sleep, often working 20 hours per day on Evony to make the game better, more stable and error-free. We believe that while the game is far from perfect,our efforts have yielded results. Evony servers are more stable than ever before. In addition, we have ramped up our capacity, including adding a new server, and we will continue to increase our capacity to keep up with demand.

We're also working on bug fixes, based on feedback from all of you. Many bugs have been fixed, but we realize more still exist. We are doing our best to stay on top of them.

A major point of controversy came when we attempted to fix the "Scout spam" medal exploit issue. Our goal was to fix the exploit, but in doing so we had the unintended side effect of dramatically lowering the medal drop rate.

We initially tried to fix this by artificially increasing the drop rate, but we eventually decided to redesign the medal system entirely. Now medals drop based on the level of the barbarian city or valley attacked. Higher level valleys drop higher level medals, and the drop rate is much more predictable and even.

Our intention was never to force players to buy Evony Cents to get medals through purchased medal boxes. We are committed to a real Free Forever approach. We want players to be able to gain promotion and have success in the game without ever paying any money. Evony Cent items are designed to help players do things faster and easier, and are supposed to be completely optional.

However, much of the time these goals were not communicated, both because we are on a different continent and because we are so busy with efforts to correct issues and increase capacity. That was a mistake on our part and certainly conveyed the wrong message to you, the player. For this reason, we have now hired an English Liaison to help aid in communication with the community and are in the process of hiring additional liaisons, moderators and customer service representatives to help address player concerns and keep the lines of communication open.

After all of this, we want to let the players know that we are still enthusiastically committed to continuing to improve Evony. The new medal system will reward players according to the difficulty of their battles. Tougher battles are more likely to yield better medals. As Evony moves forward, we are working on some exciting developments. We're going to continue to fix bugs and exploits as they crop up. We're going to listen to the voice of our community through our liaisons and customer service team. We're in the process of building and strengthening our customer service team. We'll balance combat and the game economy by hiring game data specialists and economists. We're building better graphics, animations and in-game videos and adding music and sound into Evony. We're continuing to increase server capacity and performance, increasing server stability and reliability. We're adding new moderators in-game and on the forums.

And we are still developing Age Two, which will add a historical perspective and new combat mechanics to the game, among many other things. Players have responded in huge numbers to our employment postings.

We're excited to have so many of the people working on Evony also be players of Evony. In this way, we can continue to mold the game to be what players want.

We are all very excited about the future of Evony, and we hope you are too!

The heart of Evony is our community and we are honored and thrilled to have such an involved, thoughtful and enthusiastic player base. Thank you for your continued support of Evony.

Sincerely,
The Evony Team

(For more Evony announcements, see http://evonypress.blogspot.com/)