Greetings from your new CM - Fluse says "Hello"

Fluse We have had over two years with out any information coming from RC about the future of the game. So we are like travelers in the desert coming upon the first water in days. We are thirsty for information and we want more and we can not stop telling you how much we love this game. So keep on doing what you are doing. Thank you for understanding our impatience.

 

Hey billyjim,

I definitely understand that. You were really patient during the last months and I can imagine how desperately you are longing for some news. I would like to give you some information here during the following days and weeks and I really understand your impatience. I know that you are still here because you really love the game and you are passionate about it. Your loyalty and fidelity is what makes this community so special.

We - the team here in Hamburg - know about the potential of RisingCities and we are believing in the game. This is one first thing that I would like you to know. And even if the process to bring something new to the game is a long and stony way, we are slowly coming to terms with dealing with the problems.

I would like to take this opportunity to send a short "Bonjour" to our French community. The French board team sent me some greetings and they asked what exactly my nickname "Fluse" means to me.

Hmmm... some years ago, my friends started to call me "Fluse" because I'm not the tallest person on earth. Small but nice - I liked this name and I used it for my forum presentation during the last years here at Bigpoint.

I hope you all have a nice evening and I am looking forward to your questions.

Cheers

Fluse

 

Will there be a new Christmas event?
Please make a new one, with new collectable things and add / change the rewards. I think Christmas is a big holiday, so there should be some nice rewards for it

 

Hello it's me again

I will try to continue to answer your questions and I would like to answer some of the questions from Arsuru (some postings above in this thread).

Like you described, there has been a lack of communication for the last months. The last community letter already hinted at the changes that had been made within the development team at that point. The original development team was split and it wasn't very easy for the rest of the team to keep the high frequency of events and updates you were used to. At the same time, some new team members joined the crew and it always takes a while until you learn the ropes.

The community team as well as the dev team kept you busy with returning events during the period of getting new employees up to speed. And all those efforts show that RC is not suffering from resources - it's only that our staff really needs time to get into the code. It's not "an undocumented mess" (like you called it in your post). It's only a very very complex project and this is why it takes so long.

Anyway, like you mentioned, suddenly we started "implementing fixes nonchalantly" - just because we needed to test some live syncs to see if everything works smoothly even when we change something in the code and go live with it. And it worked. Some little bug fixes went live and we were very happy about this success.

We went into a state of euphoria and we were very happy at the sight of all the improvements and new stuff we already saw on the horizon. Our game designer created a cool event for halloween and we were really excited. Then, suddenly, a little setback: We were ready to go live with the event when unexpected technical problems appeared and we decided to cancel it.

We just didn't want to risk to break the game. And we recognized that our crew still needs some time to investigate why those problems appeared and how we can manage to bring something new into the game without risking any inexpected surprises. This is why we are still asking you for your patience. I just want to explain to you that all those efforts we do for RisingCities show that we are really caring about the game. And we are believing in a high potential of this great game.

But we cannot promise that we can go live with a fancy event for Christmas. We already saw for the Halloween event that the new stuff was way too complex for the moment. We know that it's already shortly before Christmas and there is not so much time left. The only thing that I can tell you at the moment is that we are trying our very best.

Let's keep our fingers crossed

Cheers

Fluse

 

Many thanks for your candid explanation, Fluse.
Such openness is very refreshing, and has been something that has been lacking from your previous (?) colleagues in the past.

 

Fluse, thank you for the open and honest explanations. This is what we wanted and you are delivering. We do not need to have "big" announcements. Just simple honest explanations. Thank you once again.

 

wow this is amazing @Fluse and I play rising cities too im so glade to know the manager of rising cities

 

I agree. Just happy to know what's going on.

 

Thanks, Fluse. That's pretty much what I had thought, it's just that 'restructuring' was so vague that people began to wonder. If it would have been explained as above from the beginning, I think it would have been more effective. It's not even much different, but it's certainty clearer.

I would like to clarify that not all of the questions posed represent my opinion; they were a summary of everything I've seen. So I wasn't personally calling it an undocumented mess. I couldn't know that, though I did wonder. That things broke easily only added fuel to that idea, and I know that not everyone writes efficient, documented code, unfortunately, and that certainly wouldn't help the new guys get into it.

Only being able to guess at the chain of command and liberty of the devs, I'd generally not say it's all their fault. Many of us have had some fun at the expense of the situation here, but I'd noticed some small improvements here and there even before the more obvious fixes announced recently. Maybe it was only Flash updates, but despite it all I've usually had faith in the game.

So tell the devs to keep up the good work. If there will be a future for the game, at least some of us will stick around. And thanks again for the communication; it certainly eases the wait.

 

Well said Arsuru.

 

Definitely well said Arsuru and I believe that a lot of us have felt the same way.

 

Hello everybody

*Phew*, our Christmas event is finally online and running and some of you might have noticed that we had a quite "bumpy" start with it. We also wanted to fix a couple of translation errors but unfortunately, the technical problems of the language files are still influencing our work. And so suddenly the whole ingame text material was gone... Fortunately, the whole team created a special taskforce and so we could repair this quite quickly.

And now we found a way to seperate the version with the text issues from the event branch and we are finally live with the Christmas event. This incident showed once again that the complexity of the game shouldn't be underestimated. Our devs still have a lot of work to do to deal with the code before we can implement something new.

But now for something completely different: Your questions!

I use the opportunity to send a friendly "Hallo" to our German community . I would like to answer to a special question that a German player raised and that was also already mentioned by Arsuru in the thread above: Flash doesn't seem to be one of the latest technologies. Will RisingCities be rewritten in HTML5?

The answer is very short and clear: No ! RisingCities is an online game based on flash and this won't be changed. RisingCities is a very beautiful game with a lot of different game mechanics and a deep game play and also in the future, it will be playable as a flash game. There are trillions of other web pages still using flash so that we aren't worrying about new technologies.

Another concern of a lot of players from other communities: Don't we get important information anymore because the whole communication takes place in the English speaking forum?

No, you will still get all information like usual. We are posting official announcements for all languages when there are changes, updates or events in the game. This chat here is only to get in contact with the dev team in Hamburg. Some of you might know this from other big games, where the players can talk to producers, game designers or devs directly and ask questions. Those "devblogs" aren't translated into all languages. I am the representative of the dev team here in this chat and I am answering your questions on their behalf. Our company language is English and so this chat is in English only.

On behalf of the whole development team in Hamburg, we would like to send you our greetings and all the best for the holiday season. Thanks a lot for your trust and loyalty and have a great Christmas time and a happy new year 2016!

Merry Christmas!

Fluse and the whole dev team from Hamburg

 

Fluse thank you again for the great explanations and information. We greatly appreciate it.

I am sadden by the information that Rising Cities will not be upgraded to HTML5, especially after last weeks Adobe's announcement that Flash will still be supported but not upgraded in the future. But as you say with a game as complex and issues with the code as RC apparently has, I would imagine that upgrading the game would be a nightmare.

I wish you and all of the persons involved in the game around the world have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

 

This means, in 2016 we will not get any new content new either?

 

Is there going to be a xmas2016 bonus code. it is around dec 9th.

sorry 2015

 

I guess i am not the only one who ist disappointed that there is no xmas 2015 bonus code. May i ask you why there is no xmas bonus code?

 

it's already 18 days ago since we heard something.
I don't know if that is a bad thing.
But all the old bugs are coming back.
The cinema doesn't work.
The connection is bad, you have to start each time over
It makes me all very sad

 

Eighteen days with two holidays included. I think that is not too long. We waited almost two years before Fluse wrote us. She does have work to do also. A litlle premature I think.

 

Hey guys

Happy new year to all of you from the Dev team in Hamburg. We had a short break during the holiday season and the whole team will be back next week. Since some of you asked about news, I will give you some answers even if there's not so much to report at the moment due to the team being on holidays.

To answer Birgi75's question first: We didn't say that there won't be anything new in 2016. We are constantly working on improving the game so let's see what 2016 brings.

Some of you are disappointed because there hasn't been a bonus code for Christmas. Well, sometimes Christmas brings nice presents but this doesn't mean that this is to be a given and that it happens every time.

anoukjouris complains about the old bugs in the game: Please check again the explanations in my last postings. I tried to give you some insight into the actual situation and how the devs are working. Like we said several times already, we still need some patience to continue our work. Of course we know that waiting is hard - so thank you very much for your patience! It means a lot to us that you all are still around.

Concerning the complaint that the cinema isn't working: If you are facing problems with some movies in the cinema, you can always contact our support team or report the problems in the threads that are provided for such issues in your language forums. It may happen sometimes that a movie isn't working correctly. Our moderator teams send us those problems with all necessary data so that we can react on it.

anoukjoris also mentioned that there wasn't a posting from my side for a little while: Well, I will try to give you some updates here and then and try to answer to your questions. But I won't post here frequently, please take this into account. Sometimes I also need some time to check your questions together with the team and to gather information for you.

We hope that you enjoyed the holiday season and that 2016 will bring us a lot of joy and fun in our game.

Cheers

Fluse

 

Fluse,
Thank You for your response. It is greatly appreciated.