[VC] TGIF...This Week in Dev and Community July 22 - July 26

TGIF folks! What went down this past week in Dev and Community? Read on to find out!

Player Bans July 12 - July 18

As a reminder, the following numbers are permanently frozen accounts, and don't count temporary freezes.

FB: 8
MS: 4

The majority of permanently frozen accounts are frozen for being a shared or alternate account. This is something we actively investigate, and we appreciate players reporting suspicious accounts to us.

If you have any questions or comments about a frozen account, please direct them through Support as the Forums are not the place to discuss account freezes, because of the sensitive account information involved.

New Limited Items!

A new week means new Limited Items! Check out these hot new items:



Kano Apps Player Survey

In case you missed it earlier this week, I posted a Play Survey which you can find right here: Survey

Some of you said that the Summer Newsletter poll was a little vague, so I decided to give you guys the opportunity to just write what you want in there! The developers and I have been pouring over the results we’ve received so far, and we’d like to get even more! If you have a moment, I’d really appreciate you filling it out. Thanks!

Clan Size Restriction

If you have a lot of friends in your Clan (over 2500 to be precise) then you may have noticed a new message today informing you to remove some Clan members.

This is a new cap implemented to alleviate performance issues that occurred when players had an excessive amount of friends in their Clan. If you have any feedback about this change or the limit, please let us know!

Support Report with your favorite burrowing, nocturnal mammal and Answerpreneur, Aardvark!

Hey Players! Not too much going on this week - Support has been working with the development team to improve how information is passed to and from account networks (mostly Facebook) and help prevent errors with actions like sending invites and gifts or logging into Kano Play with Facebook Connect.

Some food for thought: a lot of social information that would normally be obvious if you were speaking verbally is lost when using text-based communication. Comments intended to be friendly jabs have been read as abusive, or jokes about cheating interpreted as careless admissions of rule breaking.

Please try to bear this in mind when you interact with other players on the game. Not everyone communicates the same way, or has the same grasp of the language, native speaker or not. I can think of more than a few instances where a messy feud could have been avoided by simply wording a comment differently or slapping a "jk" on the end.

Cheers,

Aardvark

Terrible Joke of the Week

Hope you payed attention in chemistry class!

Do I know the molecular formula for sodium hydride? NaH.. ← Highlight for hilarity!

That's it for TGIF this week, everybody! Thanks for reading, and have an excellent weekend!

Play Now!

Facebook Canvas: https://apps.facebook.com/vikingclan/?fb_source=appcenter&fb_appcenter=1
Facebook Connect: http://www.kanoplay.com/vikingclan?game_server=server_1

Kano Play Server 2: http://www.kanoplay.com/vikingclan?game_server=server_2

 

I got to agree about the "wording of comments". Sarcasm is hard to pick up, even if you are the most sarcastic person alive. We should all try to take the comments less serious, after all, they are JUST COMMENTS. Do you really care what some Yahoo you don't know, won't meet, thinks or MAKES UP about you? I personally don't care, and find it amusing how creative some people get and how far they will go just to make you mad on a game.

 

I agree with Toker. I am amused by some of the 'conversations' on the World Speaker. Some of it I can read as game chat and harmless game provocation. Some of it I can read as rather childish and pathetic (but who knows how young some players might be) and some of it I am surprised at for what is after all only a game!!! I also agree with Aardvark that depending upon your nationality, mother tongue etc things can very easily be taken the wrong way. If someone is only joking then say so at some point - it does not cost anyone to 'lose face' as we are all pretty anonymous anyway.

 

So, in other words, all long time players that have been generous enough to add newbs just for the sake of helping build up their clan are now discouraged from doing so. Check. Gotcha. Good luck, Newbs. Kano just said you're on your own. LOL!

And if someone has a leveling partner that they like to share bosses with, they might have to delete hundreds of clan just to put that person back in their clan. Check. Gotcha. I guess the boss levelers have gotten another little perk. Makes sense since they spend the most. LOL!

Question for Kano... do you guys have an actual brainstorming session to figure out ways to screw the game up or does it just come naturally?

 

Well, then maybe Kano should give us a way to find and delete banned accounts within our clans faster. We all have banned accounts in our clans, it's simply bound to happen with more than 1000 people added. Deleting people under level 5 is rather easy, I personally see no reason to carry people around in my clan who haven't played in years. I'm just too lazy to actually do it.

 

Yeah even I've been adding some newbs to my PC account and I'm #2 been playing a longtime(Kanoplay formerly theyspace)

Havent hit that cap message YET but it really is a bogus move.

This might actually DISCOURAGE new players as the highers wont be able to clan them.


I gotta wonder if Blood is right and if theres brainstorms to wreck the game(stamina cap,clan cap,daily reward cap,3 stam slider instead of 5 in arena)

 

the part that ticks me off is that we have to use game money to get rid of them. Seems like if you're over this limit it shouldn't cost to get rid of one.

 

That's a valid comment, we will look to remove the cost when you are over the limit.

 

The reason for the addition of the cap is that we are looking to remove the restriction of being actual friends on Facebook to become alliance, which many people will hopefully be happy with (no more, can't send friend requests FB has banned me). We are currently running a test in one of our games giving people the ability to share invite codes.

On Facebook, there has always been a theoretical limit and that is that the max number of your alliance would be equal to the max number of Facebook Friends you could have which itself caps at around 2.5-4k, people have gotten around that from adding and removing friends which causes a whole bunch of issues.

If 2.5k alliance is too small, what is a reasonable amount?

Leaving it open ended is not scalable since it wasn't built to hold an infinite number of alliance members.

 

As mentioned below:

- we are looking to remove the requirement to be friends on FB by allowing players to add through codes
- we have always relied on the social network requirement of being friends which for the most part kept the alliances to a reasonable size (although some players added/removed to gain large alliance)
- not putting a cap on alliances is not scalable, especially now as we remove friend requirements (on MS and FB) to be in alliance, keeping it open ended will start to see huge performance degradation for all players

 

Hi folks, just a couple of updates on the Clan restrictions:

1. Clan size is now 3000 instead of 2500.

2. If you are over the limit you can remove friends from your Clan without a monetary penalty.

3. You can "batch delete" desired Clan members by clicking on the white "Batch Delete" box and then the "Process Batch Delete" button. Please note that Clan members with either that box selected or a red "X" will be deleted when you click the Process button.