Dear community,
First of all, we would like to wish you all a happy new year!
We’re happy to see you back with us in 2018 and are already looking forward to providing you with all the latest news and updates on Grepolis. Speaking of which, let’s get started:
Peace Time issues during Christmas
Many of you have probably already seen our developer post about the issues we experienced with the Peace Times during Christmas. Contrary to popular belief, this year’s problem was not similar to what we encountered for some worlds in previous years, but rather due to a change we implemented to avoid any of these previous problems.
As you noticed, we did not accomplish the desired improvements for the Christmas Peace time and we would like to apologize again for everything that went wrong while fixing the system to make it work properly on New Year’s eve. All directly affected players were of course compensated, either automatically from the system or manually by our community teams, in case an additional review of all circumstances was required or individual players were missed.
After performing a post mortem to go through all individual steps of development and bugfixing with all members of the Grepolis team again, we are fortunately now very aware of the problematic areas in the code and the weakness in our testing procedure that led to this change being greenlit. This will enable us to prepare any upcoming Peace Times in a much better way.
We would like to thank you again for your understanding and patience during this unfortunate incident.
Next player council event
On a more brighter note, we have the next player Council Event coming up this Friday afternoon.
In a Skype call with Inner Council members, Product Management and Game Design, we will discuss potential changes, improvements or additions for the endgame and look into other topics, such as mobile development possibilities and our approach towards casual worlds.
v2.154
The update to game version 2.154 took part this week on browser and last week for mobile.
In the browser version we worked on some technical updates and improvements, while also fixing some bugs and providing a few missing art assets for Winter Grepolympia.
On mobile side we were not able to fully resolve the app notification issues yet. However, we would still like to highlight the most recent change because it is something that our community has been awaiting quite eagerly for years now: being able to change city names from the app.
Next version preview
The sprint for version 2.155 will end this week.
During the holidays, we worked with less development staff due to vacation. Therefore a lot of focus was put on some topics that required extended preparation, i.e. code research or procedural brainstorming.
The most notable change for the browser version is a change to the way certain bonus effects are stored. When Witch’s Wisdom or Devoted Priests are active, these effects will be restored whenever a player restarts voluntarily or after losing their last city. It will no longer be required to contact support to have the effect restored on these occurances. Furthermore we now save all running effects on a city during a siege and restore then once the siege has been fended off successfully.
For the mobile version, we’re planning to release the new bandit screens also in the Grepolis app. At the same time, our mobile developers are working on fixing the custom app notification sounds as fast as possible.
The current update schedule for v2.153 is as follows:
Tuesday, January 23: NL, SE and SK market
Wednesday, January 24: international roll-out
You can already experience some of the new features on our beta servers. Keep following our daily changelogs for all the details on what is already available.
Weekly stats
The following statistics represent activity between December 28 and January 10:
| New tickets | Answered tickets | Av. resp. time | Rated tickets | Av. rating | |
| Week #01 | 2081 | 1920 | 4.84 | 559 | 3.73 |
| Week #02 | 2391 | 2206 | 3.62 | 511 | 4.1 |
Bugs
| Status | Browser | Mobile | All |
| Open | 17 | 6 | 23 |
| Reported | 11 | 1 | 12 |
| Resolved | 6 | 2 | 8 |
Take care!
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!