Posts by Salix

  • What determines a server restart day?

    Heyho.
    The simple answer is "It's complicated". Not a very useful answer though^^
    The more elaborate answer is that there are quite a lot of factors that play into this decision. For example, many years in the past, we had game worlds where the endgame happened on Easter, Christmas or other holidays that are important to many of our players. We learned from that and try to avoid server starts where the endgame happens on holidays.
    Another "rule" is that we need a certain timeframe between the end of a game round and it's restart. First of all because the duration of the endgame can vary and secondly because we need some time to process the data from the finished game round. But everything beyond a week can become a problem, because that's when players start complaining, because their home game world is offline for too long.
    Then there are workflow related reasons/rules. For example it's a problem if we have too many server starts on one day. Every server gets tested before it goes live and that simply requires time. Not that much time, but it piles up if there are too many server starts at the same days. When everything is alright this is usually fine, but in the rare cases where we DO find problems, multiple game worlds at once can become a bigger problem.
    Often, multiple server starts at the same day are unavoidable, but we try to limit that wherever possible.
    Additionally, we try to spread out server starts more or less evenly, because especially for new players it's best to have "young" game worlds available at all time.
    Another rule we have is that we try to keep "work week" game worlds in the work week (i.e. starting somewhere between Monday and Friday) and weekend game worlds on the weekends.
    And in a perfect world we would of course also prefer game worlds to always start at the same day of the week (although we also occasionally have players who are asking for the opposite, because they like the game world but the start date is inconvenient for them).

    In reality, many of these rules tend to be in conflict with each other and there is no perfect solution, so we need to compromise. And that is very likely what happened to your game world.


    edit: For the sake of clarity I should add that the reasons/rules above are just examples and not necessarily complete. I'm not personally in charge of creating the server start plan, so I am sure I forgot a few things.

  • Feedback Mega Thread

    Quote from Klabbauter

    Salix often could not answer quickly, cause he had so many internal tasks to do. So the question is: on your position between customers and company ... where are you looking at most of your time?

    I wont steal the other questions from Nikki, but this one:
    Nikki won't be in the same situation as me. For a long time, I was essentially doing two jobs at the same time, which greatly limited my available time. Nikki will not be in that situation.
    But it's also important to say that the job as CCM is a strategic job, not on operational one, so, at least in theory, a CCM should act through the CMs instead of doing everything herself (which wouldn't be possible anyway).
    So don't expect Nikki to be there all the time, she still has a lot of strategic tasks to take care of. But, like I said: She will most definitely have more time available than I did and I'm already really excited about her plans.

  • The Game Rules have been updated

    Quote from Beth Harmon

    WHY THE RULES doesn't apply for players who pay to travian for gold?

    They do apply. We make absolutely no difference between someone who pays, no matter how much, and someone who doesn't.
    Supporters don't even have access to the overall spendings of a player, they couldn't even consider this factor if they wanted to.

    In case you don't believe this and think "No, Travian/BF is greedy, you only care about money", let me tell you this: Toxic players are one of the most important factors that cause "churn" (i.e. players leaving the game for good). The damage one toxic player can do by driving away multiple other (potentially paying) customers easily exceeds what he pays himself. So even if we would only care about money, it would not be wise to let payer wreck havoc without consequences.


    Toxic players often like to boast how they can't get banned for some nonsensical reason like "I payed money" or "I know the CEO". Don't believe their nonsense. The same rules apply to everyone.

  • RN Team members and responsibilities

    Well, not the same, no. Contrary to before, I am not involved in Community Management and Marketing anymore.
    But yes, I will continue doing things I already did before in my "hybrid role", but essentially more of it and in addition I will help our Game Director with things I didn't have the time for before.

  • RN Team members and responsibilities

    Product Manager (PM) is a very general term with a variety of definitions that mostly got in common that the PM is responsible for a product. In our case, that product is Rail Nation.
    That is of course not very helpful; every team member is responsible for Rail Nation.

    Generally speaking I am responsible for planning, strategy and analysis of whats going in Rail Nation, mostly in terms of KPIs (key performance indicator, i.e. numbers like player numbers or revenue). So I am for example involved in creating the content plan (and evaluating it afterwards) or setting goals for events, for example things like "How many players are we aiming for for our next round of Origin Journey".


    So my everyday work involves a lot of internal numbers and business stuff, which of course isn't really an area I can share much about.
    However, my role also includes to sit right in the middle of all our departments and talking to all of them, so I am a little bit involved in everything. That part is actually pretty similar to my previous role as CCM, so that won't change much.

  • New employees in the Rail Nation team

    Dear players,

    I am excited to announce that we made some changes to the team and can welcome some new employees in the Rail Nation team.

    • First of all, we had a change in our QA team. Mollymauk left us a while ago, so we have been looking for a new member of the QA team. And we found her: Sabrina!
      Sabrina is from Cologne and worked for a TV station before joining us. We are sure she will be a great addition to the team.
    • Additionally, we’ve also been looking for an additional developer and we found just the right person. Sadly, due to the global Covid situation, he is still stuck in his home country and will join us early next year. So, we’ll delay his proper introduction until he can finally join us.
    • Not only has the dev team got some new members, but also our Community Management team is going through some changes.
      Our CM Team Lead Loekie sadly left the team and she will be replaced by Scyllo. Some of you might already know Scyllo. He is a Travian Games veteran and started out 7 years ago as a volunteer and then joined us as an employee, working in both Community Management and Customer Support. He managed French and German communities in Rail Nation and Travian Legends and will now lead the team of CMs for Rail Nation.
    • The second change to the Community team concerns myself: I will be leaving my position as Community Communications Manager. In the last two years I got more and more involved in a variety of tasks concerning the vision, planning & strategy of the game, working a lot with our numbers and analytical tasks. Over time we noticed that it’s not feasible to handle both these roles at the same time, so I am switching to the newly created role of Product Manager for Rail Nation to allow me to fully focus on these tasks.
    • But of course, my seat won’t stay empty! We’ve been looking for a successor to allow my switch for quite a while and I’m happy to say that we found the perfect match: Everyone, please welcome DippyNikki to the team! Nikki is British, has 10 years of experience under her belt and, as a special bonus, is a huge train fan!
      For a while, Nikki and I will work together until she can take over completely. Given her experience and enthusiasm, I have no doubt she will be a fantastic successor!
    • And, last but not least, we also recruited a few additional members to the support team who will focus on rule violations specifically, in order to help us dealing with reports about rule breakers more efficiently.


    Best,

    Salix

  • Association tiers need a rework

    Quote from Baron Mikel 50

    Just being curious here, does anyone know the age demographic of the players of RN?

    I suspect that it is high. The majority of the people that I seem to play with are all older than me, like 50+

    That is correct. While we do have players from all age groups, the RN community is older (on average) than most gaming communities and we have plenty of players who are older than 50.

  • How far will RN let it go

    Quote from Veridion

    but nothing stops a rogue player from using multiple to report real players.

    That's why the amount of reports doesn't really matter for the verdict. Whether a players is guilty of breaking the rules or not is decided with actual evidence, not with number of reports he receives.

  • Are game rules really enforced?

    Just for the record: This is not a hack or a cheat. If you start late in a game world, you get some ressources to allow you to get started. This is important for new players to be able to start the game properly instead of being stuck with catching up forever.
    This bonus is being used by those players to get $.

    We are looking into the players who abuse this.

  • About transferring gold

    If you participated in the public test and the survey connected to it and provided all the necessary data there correctly, the gold is automatically assigned to your live account. This has not happened yet, so no worries you haven't received anything yet, that's normal.

  • Cookie Popup

    That depends. If your browser is set to delete cookies frequently, you need to confirm them every time and that is not a bug. The consent is deleted with the cookie, so to speak, and that is intended.