Hey everyone,
It’s that time again. Welcome back to our bi-weekly community update!
Player Council event – March 8
On March 8, the final player council call for this term is taking place. In this call, we will summarize both the results of the first term, as well as statistics and improvement ideas for this project.
We’re looking forward to meeting with 5 Inner Council members for the last time in their current term and to get hands-on feedback regarding their experience. 🙂
v2.158
This week, we released version 2.158 for browser. The mobile version is still pending approval and will be released once both Android and iOS versions can be published in the respective stores.
For the browser version, we removed the chat from the main user interface, after it had been deactivated for several months due to technical problems with Flash components in the outdated implementation of the chat. Seen as less than 5% of our active players have tried to access the Chat in the meantime, we have decided to use the development time for more pressing matters than reworking this unpopular feature from scratch.
For the second part of this update on browser side, we reworked notification items to make them more understandable and added information on the destination city of supporting units arriving in one of your cities.
On mobile side, we took the next step to finishing all prerequisites to enable our mobile players to share their live conquest reports: Parsing of the BBCodes associated to those live reports so that other players’ reports can be viewed in the app. Once that is out and running, all that is still required will be the report visibility management and the implementation of the actual sharing function in the app, so stay tuned for the next updates!
Next version preview
The sprint work for version 2.159 will be completed this week.
In this version, we finished the preparations for our next upcoming event. Furthermore, we implemented an “invisible anchor” for some interface elements and changed some CSS rules in order to attempt to keep the potential interface issues while using third party scripts lower after a change of positioning of select UI elements. Of course this will not help for any interface change, as we do not offer official support for these scripts, but it should at least lower the inconveniences introduced with recent minor UI changes.
Last but not least, we followed a suggestion brought up in the community a while back and changed the background of island names in the farming village overview. This should make it easier on the eyes to navigate to select islands and find the cities located there.
For the app, we implemented BBCode handling, as well as a list of all live conquest reports that are set to be shared and functionality to add these to messages and forums.
The current update schedule for v2.159 is as follows:
Tuesday, March 20: NL, SE and SK market
Wednesday, March 21: international roll-out
To test these features early, please visit our beta servers. The daily changelogs will inform you once every single feature becomes available for testing. See you there!
Weekly stats
The following statistics represent activity between February 22 and March 7:
| New tickets | Answered tickets | Av. resp. time | Rated tickets | Av. rating | |
| Week #09 | Â 2335 | Â 2075 | Â 3.92 | Â 501 | Â 3.72 |
| Week #10 | Â 2167 | Â 2022 | Â 3.2 | 517 | 4 |
 Bugs
| Status | Browser | Mobile | All |
| Open | Â 8 | 2 | 10 |
| Reported | Â 20 | 1 | 21 |
| Resolved | Â 26 | 2 | 28 |
Rock on!
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!
What will happen to the player council when the lead community manager changes?
Someone is actively checking our job openings. Nice. 😉
It’s true that we are currently looking for a new Lead Community Manager for Grepolis. However, not a lot will change in the next couple months to come as the personell change will only happen towards summer. Therefore, we will definitely have a second term for which the requirements and changes are currently being prepared.
As soon as the LCM starts, they will get briefed on the concept, the goals, requirements and procedures and it will eventually be up to them to decide on how to proceed after the second term, depending on the results and the feedback we get in cooperation with the player council members.
However, both the Grepolis development team and InnoGames’ management are very interested in a close collaboration with the players and therefore I’m fairly certain that we will maintain the project in one form or another.