Greetings everyone,

It has been a very busy year and we would like to share the major events for the year that passed.

System reliability
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First on the list, is the improvement in systems reliability and game response time. More specifically, we had a system problem in Speed universe, since the first days of its launch. After some days of persistent work and few hours of sleep, we were able to fix it. This machine is currently the strongest of the many we possess.

Continuing on the same department, we had to face with an X-TREME system trouble in June, which took us longer to heal. More specifically, X-TREME was facing rare and random lag times which were pretty difficult to find and fix. Ultimately, we succeeded here as well. X-TREME has been running without any lag since late August.

We have also faced a datacenter failure due to natural disaster in the area we host our machines. This resulted in the longest downtime ever in our about 3 year history. It happened in August and game was inaccessible for a few hours. We could not do anything and the particular failure has affected millions of other sites. Unfortunately, such things can happen.

From that point afterwards, luckily but also thanks to our constant and hard work, we have not encountered any further issues. Right now, we run well below capacity and we continue to spend a large chunk of rubies income in that department as we value reliability and fast response times as very important parts of our service.


Game Reliability
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Thankfully, we still have people who have sticked with Zorg Empire since the very first day. Zorg Empire is still around and strong partially because of thes people support. We would like to thank each one of them as they have also been a morale boost for us, in keep working for a better game. These people, will be able to see the great improvement in game reliability these few years. Although we never had concerning issues, we had a great number of bugs troubling gameplay which we were able to repel. In 2011, we have fixed many of them. Some, have been crucial, other have been unimportant but still the fix of all them resulted in a more reliable and easy to play game. Zorg Empire is a big, developing world and bugs some time are part of the game. On our end, we are always trying to fix anything as fast as possible. This year is judged extremelly successful as for the past 6 months, we have had few bugs found, especially in compare to other periods. The good news are that Massacre universe, which launched in October 15, has not been affected by any bugs yet and this is considered a big success as it proves with facts our success in providing a reliable game.


Gameplay improvement
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During this year, there have also been a lot of game improvements. We always want to take a small step at a time, in regards with primary game characteristics but in the same time we want to take big steps forward in regards to game navigation and gameplay improvemement. We have tried to filter through the best of player suggestions and implement them into the game for your pleasure and for the game improvement. Our biggest achievement is by far Massacre Universe which uses a bunch of new features in the most seamless gameplay ever. Our plan is to gradually pass all the upgrades Massacre universe has (except universe characteristics) to all universes. The work in Massacre is indeed huge in compare to anything else and this makes the transfer of the game upgrades to the rest universes a hard chore. Still, existing universes have already benefitted a lot from all the work in Massacre and they will benefit more in the future with the full adaptation of new mechanisms (such as profiles, medals, etc).


Here is also a list of the most notorious implementations in the game, in 2011:
-Split second implementation
-Facebook integration for Standard universe
-LG, EC added in all universes
-Bombers, plasma upgraded
-A lot of navigation upgrades
-Defense tweaks
-Top navigation (information) bar
-Sim upgrades
-Chat Upgrades
-Servers status page
-and more...

Let us not forget the Massacre-specific upgrades which included:
-A new battle engine + simulator
-Player Profiles
-Extensive Stats
-Medals
-A lot more

For the new year, our main objective is to increase the stable playerbase of each universe.
Although we have designed 2 new universes and their characteristics (both using a new engine which is partially ready), we have no plans to launch a new universe in 2012. Our priority is to keep current universes healthy and also make them fatter (in terms of more players + more features).

It is going to be a tough year for us, with lots of work in gameplay. Our toughest call is to copy all the new upgrades of Massacre in exiting universes in a seamless way. There are also more plans which will ease your connectivity with Zorg Empire.

What we can promise, is that Zorg Empire is not only going to be around, but also will be around strong.

I wish to every one of you a happy new year and go recycle that enemy fleet !
Panagiotis
ZE Project Manager