Producer's Dialogue (March 2015)

Hello Space Pilots,

The frost is melting and the sun finally feels a little closer to our orbit, but as you’ve seen with KrisKelvin’s updates, the DarkOrbit team hasn’t been hibernating through the winter. We’ve continued on the long-term plans I mentioned previously, and are busily looking to our roadmap for the year.

It’s been a while since my last update, but expect my communication to increase as we continue to thaw out and head into summer.

Future updates will get into more roadmap specifics, but for now, please keep an eye out for KrisKelvin’s Developer Blog update. It contains the latest details on the current state of change and coming events!

For now, I’d like to address a few topics that are actively being discussed on the team, and relate to specific topics of interest within the community:

Technical Issues and Stability

The quality of your play experience is of critical importance to us, and is something we constantly monitor and discuss. As problems appear, our team works hard to identify their origin and the quickest and best way to resolve them. I say “team” in the literal sense, since this work often involves Community, Tech, Design, Quality Assurance, Operations, and other members communicating and working together.

Whether it’s late in the work day, or on a weekend, I’ve seen the response, and all I can say is that the team takes these matters seriously.

Many times, these issues are beyond our immediate control. Like most companies, we rely on external service providers for some aspects of what we do, and ultimately, we must coordinate, communicate, and work with them to identify and resolve issues. Moving forward, we’ll continue to look at ways to improve our response time, improve our communication with you, and find better contingencies for when these issues occur.

As you’ve likely seen, we’ll also continue to compensate, as needed, for disrupted service and events. If required, we’ll also reschedule certain events (such as last month’s Jackpot Arena), in an effort to ensure that the event plays out in as stable and fair of an environment as possible.

Continued Efforts Against Hacking and Cheating

Fairness in DarkOrbit is another topic that our Technical Producer, team, and I speak about every day. We understand its importance to the community, and our Community Managers communicate with us on this topic regularly. This is an area that we will continue to treat as a key component to our providing a quality service.

Please understand, if there’s an opportunity to fix exploits, address bots, or ban violators, we do it. It is something I see actively being worked on every single day. If we haven’t addressed an issue, there’s likely a reason. And often, it’s not a matter of “if” – but “when.”

We appreciate your continued support, communication, and patience in this area. We honestly believe that efforts in this area are a necessary ongoing challenge for us to tackle, as we are a competition-focused game.

Looking at the Competitive Nature of DarkOrbit

Speaking of competition – we know that it’s an important part of DarkOrbit, and we hope to find ways to not only ensure fairness, balance, and stability on this front, but also improve and evolve the competitive aspects of the game.

With this in mind, we’d like to gather feedback from you, the community, on concepts like Jackpot Arena, and get opinions on where to take competitive aspects of the game moving forward, so I ask:

Are more tournaments and tournament varieties desired?

Are changes, like providing Second Place and Semi-Final prizes for tournaments like Jackpot Arena, something that’s desired?

What would you like to see included in competitive aspects of our game, moving forward?

In closing, when I look at our community, I see a large, dedicated, and passionate crowd of players from all over the world. As a team, we’re excited about harnessing the passion, and making 2015 a memorable year – on both sides of the screen.

Thank you for the continued support.

See you In Space!

Yours,
RickDekard

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