[ZS] TGIF... This week in Dev 10/08/2012

TGIF! It's not quite as nice as it was last week, although it's still rather pleasant. Last weekend I made the mistake of visiting my home-town, which happened to be a rather spicy 38 degrees Celsius (Google informs me that's ~100 degrees F) so I'm enjoying the milder Victoria weather.

Because of the shorter week, there weren't a ton of updates on the Dev side. There's still some stuff for me to blather on about, so let's take a look:


Updates

• New Limited Items
• New Limited Quantity Items

Player Bans

FB: 39
MS: 3

As always, we are committed to keeping our games fun and fair for everyone, and will continue to ensure that players are playing fairly and within our Terms of Use by swinging the banhammer where it needs to be swung.

FB Group Chat

A few weeks ago Facebook changed how the chat feature worked in Groups. This ended up upsetting a large number of players as it disrupted their established communication channels, which I can understand is frustrating.

Because of the reduced functionality of the Group Chat feature in Facebook Groups, we are looking into improving our in-game chat functionality in order to make it more useful for players. We of course can't promise anything, but we wanted the community to know that we understand your frustration and are looking into possible solutions. We have always been interested in supporting a better in-game chat system, and we look forward to working towards that.

Game Gurus

Last week, we announced an exciting new volunteer opportunity within the community: Game Gurus. Game Gurus are essentially experienced players who will be helping new players by providing knowledge and answering questions in dedicated Guru areas of the forums, as well as other areas. For more information and to apply to be a Guru, check out my post!

Ask Kano

As always, still looking for more questions for Ask Kano. If you don't know what that is, read about it here.

Cache Server Upgrades

As part of our never-ending quest for being awesome, we upgraded our Cache Servers this week in order to be more resistant to outages and down-time. Minimal down-time has always been a priority for us, and these changes should help prevent the kinds of issues we've experienced recently.


Lame-joke-of-the-week time! I thought we'd do a summer-themed one this week.

Lame joke:
Q: What did one snowman say to the other snowman?
A: "Hey, do you smell carrots?" <--Highlight for the answer

If this joke doesn't make sense to you, Google Image search for snowmen. On that note, it looks like it's getting close to beer o'clock. Wonder Bread out!


Play Now!

Facebook Canvas: http://bit.ly/zs_kaforum
Facebook Connect: http://bit.ly/zs_forum_fc

MySpace: http://mysp.ac/zs_ms_forum

 

This really isn't much of a problem, you can still use group chats (it's actually a bit better now), I'm sure many appreciate that you're trying to help, but it's not really a major issue Myspacers have no group chat option and they seem to communicate well with each other.

This number could be a LOT higher

 

for some in another game on FB it seems to be a big problem, they depend on it big time, for me no problem at all in any of the the four games I play

 

I was a bit distraught with the loss of facebook group chats. I think there would have been less of a negative response had facebook notified users that they weren't taking away group chat but rather updating it to give users more options.

Heres my feedback on the existing Kano Chat:

1) World Chat; The fact that it cost credits to get speakers and it cost speakers to speak in world chat restricts the World Chat Option.
(I know we get 1 free speaker each week of consecutive game play)

2) Group Chat; Unless a player has posted in World Chat you can not add them to a Group Kano Chat. I would like to see the option "Add to Group Chat" on a Squaded Slayers profile page, just under the "Send Message" button.
I don't think the "Add to Group Chat" button should be available unless the two slayers are squad however once added to the group unsquaded slayers would be able to receive each others messages. (this should not cost speakers)

3) Faction Chat; This never took off with my faction and I can't speak for others. I was pretty excited about it when it came out myself but others just didn't seem to get into it. Possibly the messages don't post to others fast enough for "chat"

4) How about a new option SQUAD CHAT which would allow us a dedicated place to chat with our full squads without flipping threw our game feed and would be view-able no matter what tab you happened to be on. I know we have the Social Feed / Friend Messages but you have to be on the Home Tab and have the feed set to Friend Messages to use that option. I think a Squad Chat option within Kano Chat would work better.

Okay enough from me... Thanks for your time

 

Lol yeah, I tried getting people to use faction chat before....In the end we used it to see which naughty words we could get through the filter.

Talking about the world chat though...how about letting us use punctuation?

 

May I know the 3 accounts that got banned in Myspace? lol

 

Unfortunatly Kano don't give out that kind of info, though it would be nice to know.