every game i join only has the option of playing one character type (medival), although in the proving grounds we my choose demonic aswell, why is it that the campaings only have one type to choose from?

I think this is a planned change for WOK

Requiem allowed Barbarians and Demons in the Proving Grounds games to see how they would work before letting them loose in regular ranked games.

In War of Kings there will (most likely) be four separate "factions" to choose from, Life, Death, Order, Chaos. Each should have some special abilities, all will include some flying troops. From what I've seen of WoK there will be similarities to the current version of Wol, plus some things that are more like very early Wol, and a whole lot of new and different ideas too. Wol isn't likely to ever change again and will most likely be superceded by WoK. He's busy with a contract job currently but in a couple of months expects to be able to put time into getting Wok going.

I've been very straightforward in asking him to NOT release Wok to the public until it WORKS. More than any consideration of gameplay or balance, new players confronted with even a minor bug will very often leave permanently. He agreed that there will be some sort of private test group to iron out the inevitable bugs and balance issues. After that I pray that there will be only small and infrequent changes as necessary.

One cool thing is that the job he is working on is building a portal site for a game company. With his new knowledge he wants to vastly improve the forums with more categories, much better administration tools and a much more modern look and operation.

We must be patient!

Can I be in the test group? ;D

i want to be in the test group too!!!

I'd suggest going to IRC chat and asking Requiem. He is there often enough that you will run into him. If that doesn't work, try emailing him.

It would also be nice if Req had some help maintaining Wol and Wok.With his busy schedule,it would sure take a load off his back.

Maintaining the game is not an easy proposition. For one thing, it is a huge amount of code, much of which even Requiem has to study carefully to understand what has been done and how those things affect gameplay. He has his own server at home he works out changes with, then implements them here, generally. Allowing others access to his code is something I doubt he'll ever allow.

Some parts of the game are amenable to maintenance, for instance, moderating the forums like Crazy Li and I do, or being an administrator, like me. He built a site specifically for administration which allows someone other than the game creator to change certain aspects of the game such as assigning new passwords to players, disabling abusive players, adding days to membership and changing the statistics for troops. (I would never even contemplate doing that on my own!) (Well, contemplate, perhaps, but not activate )

He has mentioned to me that in War of Kings (WoK) there will be further abilities for moderators in the forums, and he has mentioned adding further powers to the administrators.

However, I don't expect that there will come a time when a current bug is fixed by a player with access to the code of the game. I think it is just too complicated and personal for him to allow anyone to monkey with the code. That's one of the costs of a single creator designed game. With games that are made by committee there are multiple code bashers. Bugs can be swatted by more than one person. However, as you can see by the way Microsoft's operating systems work (?) having many people work on vast software projects almost gaurantees that there will be imcompatible areas of code that must be fixed as problems occur.

I'm all for easing Requiem's load but don't look to code fixes by others as a remedy.

Last Edited : Wednesday, 1 April 2009 - 18:54