Dear Community,
Time flies! Here are all the community news for calendar weeks 33 and 34!
Player Council update & in-game voting
On August 17th we started the in-game voting for all language versions with enough eligible candidates for their local council elections. We were happy to count a total of 102 candidates across 15 different language versions. Thanks to all candidates for showing their interest in this project and good luck to everyone in the elections!
Are you curious as to which version had the most eligible candidates? Here is an overview:
| Language version(s) | # of eligible candidates |
| Spain & Argentina | 19 |
| English/International | 13 |
| Romania | 13 |
| Netherlands | 11 |
| France | 9 |
| Germany | 7 |
| Russia | 7 |
| Portugal & Brazil | 6 |
| United States | 5 |
| Greece | 5 |
| Turkey | 4 |
| Hungary | 3 |
| Poland | 2 |
The ballot will be open until September 3rd and we are already curious to see which candidates are being elected/confirmed for a position in the local council. If you have not cast your vote yet, make sure to not miss your chance to elect your favorite candidates!
v2.145
This week, we updated to version 2.145 for browser and submitted the mobile version for approval.
After presenting our ideas for early game changes in regards to colonization back in March, this update finally brought the changes to all game worlds. From now on it is a lot easier to obtain a colony ship as the required Academy level for the research was lowered from level 22 to level 13 and the required harbor level was also halved from 20 to 10. We believe this will make it a lot more manageable for (new) players to found a second city to prevent the complete loss of all cities after being conquered for the first time.
Additionally we introduced new functionality for the Agora, making it easier to return supporting units. The button “Return all units” will save you a lot of clicking if you wish to return all stationed units at once from either the “Outside” or “Defense” tab in the Agora.
Have you played version 2.145 yet? Make sure to share your feedback! We’re looking forward to it!
Next version preview
The sprint for version 2.146 ended this week.
In this sprint, we again focused on a lot of “invisible” changes in preparation for upcoming technical upgrades and events in the second half of the year. However, there is still a change that is worth mentioning: We implemented another recent community request to improve the colonization progress. When prepararing for a colonization you may now use the same travel time simulator that is already available in normal attack preparation screens.
The current update schedule for v2.146 is as follows:
Tuesday, September 5th: NL, SE and SK market
Wednesday, September 6th: international roll-out
All the changes mentioned above can be tested in advance on our public beta worlds (zz.grepolis.com). Share your thoughts on the beta forums or let us know what you think in the comments below!
Weekly stats
The following statistics represent activity between August 10th and August 22nd:
| New tickets | Answered tickets | Av. resp. time | Rated tickets | Av. rating | |
| Week #33 | 2084 | 1944 | 3.17 | 476 | 4.12 |
| Week #34 | 2201 | 2030 | 3.66 | 508 | 3.86 |
Bugs
| Status | Browser | Mobile | All |
| Open | 6 | 1 | 7 |
| Reported | 14 | 1 | 15 |
| Solved | 14 | 2 | 16 |
See you in two weeks!
As Lead Community Manager and passionate gamer, Steffi knows of the importance of transparent information sharing while keeping an eye on the needs of both players & development team. She takes community feedback and makes your voice heard at InnoGames!
RE: Player Council candidates and elections
Since we have been asked about details for reasons as to why some language versions did not proceed with the elections, although they did have more than 2 candidates to start with, I would like to shed some more light on the decisionmaking process.
First of all I would like to point out that the decisions for or against moving forward with the elections were made in close cooperation of the Community teams of the respective language version and the Grepolis team here in Hamburg. Between August 13th and August 15th we reviewed all applications and looked into all listed criteria for eligible candidates until we made a final decision on how to proceed.
In a lot of cases, we unfortunately found that candidates were using inactive or new accounts for their applications, making it hard to judge their knowledge of the game and to confirm the account age of their main account.
Unfortunately in some other cases we found that applicants were burrowing forum accounts from other players to avoid a review of their personal accounts altogether, e.g. because they had previously faced infractions with their main accounts.
The player council is a project meant to allow for more transparency and trust between the development team and the community. As such we expect every candidate to make truthful statements about their accounts. Since that was not always the case, I would like to give the following recommendations for the next candidacy period:
– When posting your application on the forums, please use your main game account!
– Don’t lie about your age.
Local Council candidates can be minors, only to proceed onward to the Inner Council we require candidates who have reached the age of maturity due to the privacy policy regulations.
– Avoid very exotic applications.
We had cases in which candidates pretended to play roles of fictional characters or animals. These candidates have been contacted and did not rephrase their applications or show intend to take part in the project in a professional way. We had to consider these as troll applications and rule out their candidacy.
– Stick to the game rules and be a role model.
If recent severe violations of the game rules are found for the account, we unfortunately cannot accept the candidacy. It can help to be upfront about previous violations if they have not been repeated since.
Finally I would like to emphasize that elections being cancelled for a certain market does not necessarily mean that all candidates were ineligible. However, we need to determine at least 2-3 candidates with clean records in order to allow for the elections to take place.
For some versions we had to disqualify some candidates due to the reasons mentioned above. However, there have still been some valid candidates that we would like to see again as applicants for the next term! So keep your records clean and see you again next time around!
Today, I’ve received a special warfare premium offer… I don’t understand why some effects (like Great arming, Heightened senses) are only in the biggest one. Other packages aren’t attractive for me at all. Just a feedback.
I hereby kindly like to inform you that there is no acoustic signal in browser System, if one is attacked by third party.
Did you know what to do about it?
Hey Mim le Fay!
We’ve already been made aware of this issue after recent bug reports from our community. This bug is under investigation and we will do our best to reproduce and fix it in a timely manner.
Thanks for your support!
When should we expect the results of the player council election to be announced?
We are in the process of confirming the final results and have started sending out the data to the respective community teams.
You can expect the announcements to appear soon, latest by the end of the week!
We know you’re all curious about the results but since this was the first time we held these elections we wanted to make sure that all numbers are indeed correct, hence the slight delay. Sorry. 🙂