Mine Changes

Its' completely fucked here in Chonnacht. I can't even fix the gold mine. We're going to have to shut it down for a few weeks.

It's game breaking doom!

Shall I cue the chorus for the doom song? lol

Please do! (adding nachos)

I've been ranting all over the place haha. Once I've simmered down I'll help with ideas lol, I promise!

http://forum.renaissancekingdoms.com/viewtopic.php?p=84770587#84770587

Laighean is keeping 3 of our 4 gold mines closed and I'm going to check numbers on production and use of iron and stone. I have a bad feeling when it says 0 maintenance cost, it's not 0 at all. I got tricked into maintaining closed gold mines, supposedly at 0 cost, figuring I was going to reopen them, but then the TM checked our iron and stone levels and they are way down. So the gold mines aren't getting maintained, and staying closed (except the Cork one, because the new Sheriff there is not opening the iron mine at all).

This whole change is a complete disaster, from every way I look at it. We usually have 70-120 miners on any given day, yesterday we had 16.

They really fucked this up...I have to wonder if they was fucking high when they thought up this idea? Its either that or they want to piss off as many people as they can?

I think every Sheriff in RK should close their mines and tell the players the are upset to go to the Help desk if they want mines open again, as with the new system we can't afford to keep them open.

Agreed Spring!! I didn't see your post till after I posted over in babel, this is just crazy! Someone had even posted asking if there was a way we could picket? LOL

Let's do this! Close'em down! All of us start a trend!

We're not gonna take it!!

Donnor wrote:

Shall I cue the chorus for the doom song? lol

Sure, every titanic needs an orchestra.

lol...I am addicted to posting this...

Is there any county anywhere that can work with this?

Mick wrote:

Is there any county anywhere that can work with this?

Not that I've come across yet. Have been looking around in between ranting...lol

Mostly all I see is from players posting how much they're losing money, stone, etc. There's no real ideas how to stop it from continuing in a downward spiral as of yet. That I know of.

Nice Donnor!

lol - we're all...

Dee!!

Mick wrote:

Is there any county anywhere that can work with this?

Not unless they can maintain peak mine attendance forever. As soon as attendance drops in any major way the mines will eat up all of the iron and stone. Adding the 2 new features together (net effect) I doubt any county will be able to keep their mines open, unless they are the ones that get free maintenance due to lack of other mines.

It may take a while for other Sheriffs and MS's to understand and accept it, because the game isn't showing actual mine maintenance costs (a third factor making this even worse), but eventually every mine system will collapse or have to close. I seriously doubt any county has sufficient stone and iron reserves to cover 20-30 days of major losses. Plus they would lose 10's of thousands of pounds in assets, Laighean would lose at least 40K if we tried to keep the mines open now, so we are closing them.

Our irons mines, if left open, have a net loss of iron, our stone mines if left open have a net loss of stone (counting only the output and maintenance of their own mine type, and not counting the use of the other resources they consume). This is due to the drastic drop in attendance caused by the switch to hourly mine work. We can't let our soldiers work the mines, because we need them able to defend and rally the next day. And even if they could still rally (cancelling the mine work), we can't have that either because then they still count for maintenance costs in the new month we are trying to reset to.

As soon as any county has a drastic drop in mine attendance (like for a war operation), this exact same thing will happen, even if we get past this, and after 30 days get the mine attendance values down to sustainable levels for peace time mine operations. In other words, no, this will never work long term. It's like an electric company charging a factory based on an average of peak usage per day (top 10 days in the last 30), even if some days they only use 1 KWH, and the average use for the factory is 1500 KWH. The factory would soon be out of business, and I fear that's what our mine systems are now. They are out of business most of the time. I don't know what Celcius was thinking with these changes, but actually it's better they collapsed mine attendance now, rather than letting this limp on until some county went to war and had their mines collapse then.

This change has made the mines pretty much useless, for the counties and for the players.

From the dashboard:

Quote :

N.B.: Lévan is the creator of the Renaissance Kingdoms, Native Kingdoms and Shogun Kingdoms games and the Celsius online manager.

Hello.
This week on Renaissance Kingdoms, Native Kingdoms and Shogun Kingdoms we implemented a functionality change which enables characters working in the mines to break down their work so they can do 1h, 2h, 6h, 12h or 24h time slots instead of making that a compulsory “daily action”, in other words, an action which lasts a whole day from 4 am one day to 4 am the next day (this example is for Renaissance Kingdoms and with Paris GMT time).
In-house, we call this modification “desynchronization” of the mines. Actually, the goal here is to make sure not everything works around this fateful and arbitrary time of 4:00 in the morning.
This change has generated a lot of reactions and I think these reactions deserve a response and some adjustments.

1. Reaction of the council members responsible for the mines and economy

First of all a concern from the sheriffs and the mine superintendents: Isn't this improvement likely to decrease the resources of the provinces?

The answer is no. For reference:

- This update was carried out with constant returns, in other words, whatever the time slots worked by the players the profits and the maintenance costs are always affected by the same multiplying coefficient.

– In addition, I think that once this update is adjusted and settled, the resources produced by the miners will be a little more important than they were before: the income as well as the costs will increase and so will the net earnings.

I am not talking about the new mechanism of smoothing the maintenance costs over a month, which has many aspects that can be discussed but which interests very few players directly.

In short, the current situation of the provinces will not change or only by a little (and in the good sense).

We are all also working on two other things:

- To improve the statistics of the mines for the sheriffs and the mine superintendents because they are a bit complicated.

To fix a bug and behead the people responsible – but we now have a new system implemented within Celsius: every code done by a developer has to be approved by two other developers (they even have to sign a document, oh yes!). Therefore, if there is a bug there will be three people responsible to behead.

2. "Click to win"?

A second type of reaction was noted on the forum: some moan that those players who are in the game more often can earn more coins. It’s true that not everyone can login 4 times a day and those who can are able to earn a bit more in the mines. A player even coined the expression “click to win” (quote).

Honestly speaking, I am not convinced by these reactions. On the one hand, regarding the players who login more often and have an advantage in the game – I say it clearly – that does not pose a particular philosophical problem to me. Anyway at the end of the day: can someone be constable of a province and log in only every second day? I doubt it.

It is also worth mentioning that the benefit given by these short actions is very very moderate anyway. If a player connects 24 times (!) per day, which appears humanly impossible to me, they will earn on average… 7.5 more coins (thus +50%) than a player who logs in only once. This is very little for 24 logins! If we take a more sensible approach of about 4 logins over a whole day, which is not bad anyway, they will earn an extra 3 coins… It seems difficult to me nevertheless to imagine that this can change the game balance so radically. Some time ago we gave a couple of coins to players when they clicked on certain links (some of our “partner sites”). We are talking along the same lines here.

Plus, let us be frank: I kept saying this to my team all the time that I think this maximum (theoretical) profit of only +50% is honestly not enough.

As I’m writing I will make a short side note now. Some among you perhaps flinched while reading about the 24 logins per days being “humanly impossible”. So that crafty people don't consider trying to create bots to work in the mines without having to click: we will detect this, we will find your physical address, we will come to your house, we will hurt your close relatives and we will eat your pets. End of side note.

3. Organizational problem: the case of those who don’t login regularly

A third series of reactions seem very important to me and we looked at them very carefully. They concern the players who basically say that “given the way that I play the game this update will penalise me / complicate my life.” It is a problem which we can describe as a problem of organization (it becomes more difficult for the player to organize their game).
Let us consider a case where a player logins in usually in evening about 19:30 after coming back from work IRL. Let us assume that they work in the mines. Let us assume they chose to work for 24 hrs. It appears nothing changes for that player: they earn the same amount for that 24h period.
Except that, the following day, they come back earlier from their work at 18:30. They must wait an hour before being able to do an action. Let us imagine that, as a result, they will do something else (RP on the forum, washing-up, homework). They return at 20:00 and can click to work 24 hrs. As a result, the next day, after coming back from work at 19:30, they realise… that they must still wait 30 minutes to be able to work again in the mine. In short, it is a great deal less practical.

To counter this problem the solution is simple: instead of lasting 24hrs, the longest action (which corresponds to the usual daily amount) will last 22hrs (even 20hrs, we’re thinking about it). Thus, these consequences of moving from one day to the next will disappear.

4. Organizational problem 2: interaction with other economy-based actions

Other problems of organization have been reported by players who pointed out the interaction between working in the mine (desynchronized action) and the other actions of the game (synchronized actions). So I think that a clarification should be made.

Indeed, players point out that the time overlap of various types of actions makes the game complicated: if someone works in the mine between 1h and 7h in the morning then they cannot carry out any more daily actions like working in a field or moving with an army.

Let us speak about these single “economy-based” actions (working in the fields, in the church, in its workshop, etc.) other than the travel actions. These actions will all be desynchronized in the near future. That will bring much more flexibility to players. For example, someone will be able to work in the mine between 1 and 7, then fish from 7 to 8, then work in their workshop for 24 hrs.

Side note: Desynchronized action does not necessarily equate to fragmented action. It will not be possible (at least in the near future) to work only 6 hrs in a villager's field. On the other hand, I don’t see a problem with a blacksmith making only one bucket if they want it.
In short, on this point: we will work quickly on the overall desynchronization as it was planned.

5. Organizational problem 3: interaction with travel actions

Now, what of the interaction between the desynchronized actions and the travel actions? Indeed, contrary to the economy-based actions, we don’t really see them being desynchronized (they affect many players).

The answer is simple: as soon as all the economy-based actions are desynchronized (so that there won’t be any shortfalls), I do not see any problem with players freely carrying out, under certain conditions, travel actions. Therefore, a player could work in the mine until 23h, and at 23h decide to travel to the town next door.

6. Why are we doing this?
There are still many questions: at the end of the day, why change this, where does this take us? This is a key question, and perhaps we should have started with that.

Let us quickly address the players who have moaned under the general theme “All of this is motivated by the intention of displaying more advertisements to earn more money. It is for short-term profit, which is really bad”. For starters, we never implemented this update with the goal of displaying more and more ads. But even if it were the case, we would not have a big problem in saying it – Celsius Online is a company which must pay its wages every month.

But especially, and all those who know a little about the Web know this, what determines the advertising revenues, on a site like Renaissance Kingdoms, is not the number of pages accessed per user (which is already too important for the overseers) but the number of users. If the players login twice per day and each see 5 pages more, our gain will be exactly €0.

If we implement this update (desynchronization of all the actions except for travel and some other special actions), it is because we firmly think that, on the one hand, after a period of adaptation, current players will find an interest there (or, in the worst case, for some who only login once per day, will not be put at any disadvantage) and, on the other hand, new players will be more interested in the game. Indeed, nowadays, the population of Gloria Regni has been stable overall for 2 years now and new players point out as a main theme – and I must say that I understand them perfectly – that in this game there are not enough actions per day. With this system, the old style of the game will be preserved yet those who want to earn a bit more will be able to do so. In addition, the synchronization of the basic actions at 4h in the morning requires players to think about moving from one day to the next and this is not natural or intuitive, especially when 4h in the morning, Paris GMT time, falls in the middle of the day as it is the case for many players outside Europe.

Don't set in opposition, as some will, old players, experienced and good in all things, against future players who will be illiterate fools good only at “clicking buttons”. Remember that you were new players one day and your game experience was conditioned by the experience which you had in other games, just as new players are now gaining their own experience. Nowadays, this experience has changed and what the competition provides has changed as well. Nowadays, in these kind of games on the Web or Facebook, one can play for a longer time (one is also more guided at the beginning, etc). It is a fact. Actually, I put myself recently in the shoes of a new player, and I was indeed forced to admit that the new-game experience seems to have aged since the creation of Renaissance Kingdoms in 2004.

If you look at other web gaming companies, in France or abroad, you will see that all choose one of these two strategies:

- They exploit one or two games, on which nothing changes for many years. After all, why change a game which works well? These are the companies which “make a short-term profit”. These games die one after the other or disappear.

- They launch one game after another, not worrying about the previous game when they launch the next one.

At Celsius online, we have a different approach. We develop new games (one of which we will speak about again very soon), and we hope to extend and improve Renaissance Kingdoms, Native Kingdoms and Shogun Kingdoms, and grow our player numbers.
For a year now we have employed more people. The pace of our updates was never previously this quick, as shown by the development of medicine and the diseases, the RP rank colours and many other things. All this will evolve even faster, with the addition of new incredible features, some never seen on a web game before. The whole will be done by scrupulously respecting the original spirit of the game while renewing and clearing up those things that need it. In 2014, Renaissance Kingdoms will celebrate its 10th anniversary. Our goal is to set out again on an adventure for 10 more years!

Not for the first time he's completely missing the point.

I agree there. I guess all we can do is wait and see.

Quote :

We develop new games (one of which we will speak about again very soon)

Space Kingdoms. Milk your robot, overthrow darth veider and spend the night drunk in the gutter.

WhiteSnow wrote:

Quote :

We develop new games (one of which we will speak about again very soon)

Space Kingdoms. Milk your robot, overthrow darth veider and spend the night drunk in the gutter.

No doubt LOL

Quote :

It is also worth mentioning that the benefit given by these short actions is very very moderate anyway. If a player connects 24 times (!) per day, which appears humanly impossible to me, they will earn on average… 7.5 more coins (thus +50%) than a player who logs in only once.

I cant check how the mines do pay, because they're closed in An Gort at the moment, but I noticed this:

IMW

the task proposed to you
for today is:
Stone breaking (with a hammer)

1h - 0.68p
22h - 5.00p

24X0.68=16.32 << thats not 50% more, but actually even more than 300% If the mines works the same way, then it would be possible to get ~50p per day.

Not sure if anyone else seen this in Babel, thought I'd share before it possibly gets snagged, dunno who the fella is, but this is hilarious lol.

Kami wrote:

*A revolution against the French... Hmm..*

.....................................The French Revolution


........................... Twas a dreary day when the admins came,
..........................Took the mines away, said we were to blame.
....................................Lying, they swore,
.................................We would profit more,
..............................But in truth, we lost a ton,
...........................Not just money, but a lot of fun.
.....................The new mines system is really stupid,
...................But the admins seemed to be struck by Cupid,
.......................It seems they love it more, than a whore,
......................Who looks like a bore, inside a shoe store.
....................“You must deal with it, we will not bring it back.”
.................They said as their hands met our faces with a SMACK.
............................So off they went, walking away,
......................Not giving a darn, they will regret this day.
...............................Standing up, tall and proud,
............................We the players, started off as a crowd,
.........................................But with time,
..............................And a small little rhyme,
..................We grew our numbers, and showed them our might,
.........As we thought to ourselves ‘we will not be beaten tonight.’
......................“Bring back our mines!!!” said the hoard,
....................The admins yawned, they seemed to be so bored.
........................So the players decided twas enough.
.......................Tonight is the night, we will get rough.
...................Burning down posts, signatures, and banners,
..................It was time to show the admins, some manners.
.....................The rest of the story will have to come later,
..............Cause its time for all of us, to show them a true hater.
..............................Let us all ban together,
...............Fight this night, we shall this remember forever!

~Kami


LOL.. Im bored today.

Also, new post update:

Brennos wrote:

Levan wrote:

Hello,

A small addendum to the previous message.

On the one hand, the work duration in the mines has been reviewed. Now it will be enough to work 22hrs to receive the usual daily wages; for each miner working 22hrs this will therefore equate to the work of a full day, according to the old system, for the province.

On the other hand, some sheriffs are having some problems with the current situation and we want to help them. There are three reasons for their problems:

1º/ Modifying the mine maintenance cost (based on the ten days of the last thirty days with the greatest number of miners) was probably done too quickly.
2°/ Likewise, the implementation of the new work time slots in the mines in the evening on Tuesday, 26th, led to a forcibly blank Wednesday, 27th (it's logical, the system basically moved forward the miners' pay, including the anticipated pay for a Sunday, and shifted the production by about 24hrs). Some sheriffs therefore decided to close their mines for the next day, even the ones which were very profitable, though this was just a transition blip.
3°/ And finally, there was a small bug that affected the rounding up of the maintenance costs for the mines.


As a result, we have implemented a small script to compensate the provinces for this bug 3°/. There are no more bugs. We have also decided, on a temporary basis, to reduce the normal maintenance costs, the urgent maintenance costs and improvement costs for all mines by 40%. This is a measure which will provide some breathing space fo the provinces and even more. Take advantage of it!

(We will inform you in advance about the staggered removal of this bonus).

Seriously, this game.

Make an update, piss off the natives (all of them, finally uniting them in a move that could never be done IC!) then release "fixes" for the minor "bugs" that really don't improve the shitpile of a mess they made in the first place.

So. They've hiked up the 1h wage for miners.

A mine paying 17,00 "daily" wage, now pays 2,31 for the 1h option.

Riiiight... that's what, about 50 pounds per day?



"Because clicking the same tired old button over and over again every single fucking day till the end of time = fun."

~ Levan