HiRezStew Talks About Oceanic/Late-Night AvA

Tags: ava, oceania, stew chisam

Since the schedule for the initial AvA zones was posted a few days ago, there's been some concerned expressed from Oceanic and other "odd time of day" players about the gap in coverage of AvA zone openings. HiRezStew has posted on the forums to offer an explanation for the current schedule and a look at how things are going to progress from there. The full content of the post is after the jump.

We will add the new zones as soon as we can, while ensuring that it's done right and well.

A few things to note:


1) Covering 24 hours means at least 8 zones live, assuming each zone open 2.5 hours with 30 minutes in between.


2) These 8 zones have been planned out. Three zones during times we deemed "US Primetime", three zones during times we deemed "European" primetime, and two zones we deemed "Oceania" primetime.


3) We made the decision to launch with 5 of the 8 zones, for a slew of reasons, but they really boil down to:

• With the Oceania zones, we thought it would cause less long-term friction to wait until we could put the zones on servers targeted specifically for the region, versus putting them on our Atlanta-based servers and then moving them later, changing the experience for players accustomed to fighting on those zones.
  
• Conquest depends on there being just the right amount of territory available to fight over. Too little, and everyone doesn't get a chance. Too much, and there's not enough reason to fight or conflict in the world. We thought that, at launch, restricting the zones some could help us concentrate populations and ensure we had constant conflict.
  
• As a follow up to the second bullet, it's REALLY important to size the zones correctly, as we don't really get an opportunity to re-size a zone until it reaches its win condition. To be perfectly honest, coming out of the last week or two of beta, we felt less certain around what the "right" size was going to be for these three zones at launch -- based on a number of factors -- and thought it would help to see the population sizes at launch from these regions and at these times of days, as well as to observe the "launch" patterns in the other zones (which will always be different from the "beta" patterns).
  
• Running the zones 24-hours a day right at the day and date of launch also gave us less flexibility to respond to issues we see and find in the game during the first couple weeks (as it's easier and less impactful to make changes to the system during the times when zones are off).

In retrospect, perhaps we should have of opened all 8 right away -- or perhaps our initial decision was correct, or perhaps we should have done something in between. It will really probably be a little before that judgement can be definitively made. We knew when we made this decision that there were strong arguments in all directions and certainly don't claim that all decisions we make are perfect.


It does take some effort to add new zones (maybe more than you would anticipate and, for various reasons just based on where we are in our development cycle, more than it will be later).


I certainly do appreciate your concerns and we are listening and working hard to address some of the concerns raised here. Just know that when make these decisions, we are trying to do what we think is best for the game -- not plotting how to screw specific persons over .


Thanks again. Not sure if the longer explanation helps or hurts --> but hopefully you at least now have some context.


HiRezStew
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Global Agenda Community Management