Eternal Lands demographics

Few weeks ago I made a demographics poll on our forum, to see where our players are from, how long are they, and for how long they've been playing.
Here are the results:

Age:
0-17 14.95%
18-25 26.17%
26-35 28.27%
36-49 25.23%
50-60 4.21%
60+ 1.17%

Continent:
North America 44.39%
South and Central America 2.34%
Asia 2.10%
Africa 0.47%
Europe 48.13%
Australia and Oceania 2.57%

Started playing
0-30 Days 0.47%
1-3 Months 1.87%
3-6 Months 6.31%
6-12 Months 10.05%
1-2 Years 23.60%
2-4 Years 43.93%
4+ Years 13.79%

The age results are virtually the same with the poll we had last year, and the conclusion is that most of our player base is 18+
I am little bit surprised that we have more players from Europe than from North America, and I also thought we had more Central and South American players.

One other surprising thing is that very few people that responded to that poll (less than 20%) started playing for less than a year. Of course, many new players do not have forum accounts, but I would assume that someone that's been playing for more than a few months would already get a forum account, so it's strange that we have so few new players.

Partially because of that fact that our population remained constant in the last +1-2 years (just a slight increase in the number of people playing), I made the newbie tutorial easier, and gave new players more attack and less penalties when they die, until level 12 overall.
Not sure if this will make a difference, it is too early to tell.

We are also considering spending some money for advertising some time in June, and since we are doing that I want to change the website a little bit as well. For example, the main page could tell people more about the game, what happes in the game, who is the game for, etc.

We don't really need a lot of new players, but adding 100 or more players online at a time won't affect the server in any way, and there are a lot of resources and spawns in the game for much more players than there are now.
The schools will be over soon, and that is a good time for advertising.

Sky client

Thanks to the work of quite a few people, especially Emajekral and Schmurk, now we have a sky dome, and a much larger viewing distances and viewing angle.
Everyone is very happy with it, and we hope to make it the next official client. There are some more tests to be done, but things are coming up nicely.

People with slower machines might have to use the 'standard' mode, where the camera angle is limited, but they will still benefit from the new light colors, which are much better than what we used so far. For example, the light color changes at dusk and dawn.

It is really amazing to see how much our little game evolved. Here are two screenshots, the first being about 5 years old, and the second is with the new client (pre release).

Reward system

Today I came up with an idea that so far players seem to like:
Every week, there will be some small to medium scale events, for now only invasions, but possibly other things later on.
If the players manage to complete the objective in a certain time frame, they get 3 points. If it will take longer, they get two, 1, or 0 points, depending on the specific event.
At the end of the week, there will be a certain number of points that player can use, by voting, for things such as: Getting a few hours of a positive day, getting new monster spawns, and other things I will think off in the future.

There are many advantage to this system:
1. The whole community can participate (weak players scout to find the monsters, and the stronger players come to finish them off).
2. It promotes more exploration, so now players will want to familiarize themselves with the geography of the game (finding secret places, exploring caves and caverns, and so on).
3. Makes people work together as a team.
4. Gives them an opportunity to vote for the reward, so that there will be no more complaints that a certain group is favored (such as the fighters).

So far, everyone can vote, not only those participating in the invasions, and this might be a problem. If it becomes a problem, maybe I can devise a system so that only those participating can vote, although this will be hard and will require some thinking. One way would be to make all the invading monsters drop an item, then go with that item to a voting NPC and trade it for a vote. By placing weaker monsters along with stronger monsters, even those who just scout can get a kill and make their vote count.

Arrows and the economy

The bows/crossbows are in the game for 2 days now, and from all the gold-sinks ever implemented by me, they are the best.
People love the new archery skill, and it seems that they do not mind spending a lot of gold on it. For example, we have an average of 4.5M gold coins entering the game every day, and about 3.7M exiting. The average gold increase is between 0 and 1M per day (which is normal, since many players are saving money, and many new players start playing for a while, then give up).
On April 5, we had 400875443 gold coins in the game. Now, 2 days later, we have 384574915.
That's an decrease of almost 4% in 2 days. The first day, ~11M went out (after deducting the gold income), and today another ~5M went out (again, after deducting the income).
Not bad at all. Obviously, this trend will not continue for too long, but I expect that the net gold increase in the game will be negative for another 2 weeks or so.

I am really curious if this deflation will affect the inter-player trade, and if so, how will the market react to it.

Update 1.6.0

After more than a month of pre release candidates, we finally rolled the update on Saturday.
Unsurprisingly, because of the extensive tests we've done, there were not many problems, and I would say that 95% of the players were able to update without any modifications to their system, while the rest had to either update their video drivers or modify some EL configuration settings.

The archery is included in this update, but the ranged weapons can not be bough until next weekend. This is because we had some big PK contests a few months ago, where the promissed prize was having bows before everyone else. Schmurk, the developer who wrote most of the ranged skill code also got all the bows and missiles.
One other reason for this delay is that people can test the other features first, without being too distracted by the new skill.

Speaking of new features, it seems that the players are very excited about Leonard the Leopard, a new AI entity that is actually pretty intelligent, and will stalk players, flee from combat when wounded, change maps, and even level up. He even talks in lolcat on the events channel, when he dies or when he kills some player.
There have been quite a few "Leonard hunting parties", where people try to locate and kill him.

Next on our to do list is to release a patch for an experimental client with a sky and 1st person mode. This client is pretty functional, but there are a few problems here and there. It also takes more resources, and the frame rate is a little reduced (since there are more objects to render). We hope to release this patch by the end of April, and it will not require a client update (it will be an optional download).

Update coming soon

Today we released Pre RC 11, which fortunately runs on pretty much any computer our users have, although some people with SiS and S3 video cards need to manually add something in their el.ini file. I hope I might be able to correct this issue automatically, but if it's not posible, people can always do it manually.
We have very few people with such video cards, so that's not a problem.

There are just a few things that need to be done before the update:
1. Change some of the animations duration in order to match the server speed (mostly the archery animations)
2. Test the maps that were changed.
3. Release a final RC.

I am hopping to have the update done in 2 weeks or less, then we can finally move on with the development. We have some big plans for the future, stuff such as 3d terrain, normal maps, better lights, etc. I'll talk more about it soon, so stay tuned.

First archery public testing

The bows and crossbows are in the game for more than a month, even on the main server, but they are not available to the players because they have not been tested enough, and because a client update is needed.
Both the client and the server are 'almost there', although the final client still needs some 'polish', and the server needs some fine tuning.

Until today, the arrows have been tested only by a few people (mainly me and Schmurk) on the test server. There were no known bugs, but as with anything, massive testing will usually reveal new problems.

Well, today I wanted to profile the test server, but in order to do a proper profiling, many players are needed. And just asking the players to come on the test server and walk around usually doesn't work very well, so I 'bribed' them with free bows and arrows :)
That worked quite well, over 45 players logged in on the test server.
After distributing the free bows and arrows, we went to KF (the most used PK map in the game), and played a little.

The testing went much better than expected, with virtually no problems except that some people had bad lag. I am not sure if that's because of a bug in our code, or because they don't have the latest files, so we'll need to look into this issue.
Another small problem was that a few arrows got stuck in mid air, but this can be because the map on the test server is newer than the clients map. One player crashed once, but one crash in 30+ player hours is not significant, so it won't impede the update.

One concern of mine was the possibility of the server being slowed down if there were too many missile fire requests going on at once (we do real time ray tracing, 3 times for each arrow), but after I finished profiling the server, I realized there is absolutely no significant CPU time taken by the ray tracing. Schmurk did a really good job :)

For those of you who missed this test, don't worry, there will be a few more public tests before the update. In fact, I will put a new NPC that will give free bows and arrows to people. I hope I won't forget to change the prices once we are done with the update :)