I've got a lot of people asking me about the Swamp server being down, so I felt like checking in and sharing a bit. While new weapons is the big wish everyone hopes the down-time is for, the actual reason is to clean out the record files.
For a long time in Swamp's history I had simply ignored people's old accounts. Someone would make a new name and just never go back to play the old ones. Once we passed 2000 accounts, I started cleaning out old accounts that hadn't been played in 6 months, just to remove ones that were clearly abandoned. Then I started getting rid of ones 5 months old, and now I'm making the leap to 3 months! I realized that the smaller jumps weren't going to last very long. Because I expect the trend to continue, I wanted to let everyone know that any accounts that have not been played in 2 months are subject to deletion, to make room for new players. I have not actually deleted them yet, but they are flagged to be deleted automatically as new characters are created by people. >From time to time I've had people ask me how many Swamp players there are, and >each time I've given them the number of current accounts. Of course this >doesn't really answer the question because people can have more than 1 >character/account. I always assumed that the 2000 accounts probably only >represented 500 or 600 real people, but that was purely a guess. Today while >cleaning, I finally put together some code to count the number of actual human >players who are playing Swamp! As of 7/1/2012 at 6:00pm we appear to have 1269 unique players and 1921 characters! This is after cleaning of course. Technically the number of characters is 2000 but 79 of them have been flagged for deletion. 1269 is a far bigger number than I expected, so I am very honored to be sharing my game with so many people. :) The number of non-english speaking players has grown so much that I do believe the english speaking players are either the second or third largest demographic. This makes me very happy because it means I'm able to reach out over a lot more of the Earth. My conspiracy to wear out computer mice has expanded to engulf the entire planet! Muhahahahaha! :) I'd like to apologize to the many players who have been experiencing dropped connections more and more often. The great distances between most players and my Swamp server causes plenty of problems and can make the connection a bit unstable, especially for players who already have weaker connections. The traffic on the server isn't always super high, but it regularly spikes to 70 or 80 players. To those who don't already know, Swamp updates have slowed down a lot because I ended up getting a second job. Free time that I used to spend on Swamp just doesn't exist for me right now, but I do plan to get back as soon as I can. I can't imagine myself ever really leaving the audio game scene in the future... I'm hooked. As things change I'll be more or less active, but count on me still hanging around even when you haven't heard from me in a while. I always find time to read posts to keep myself up to speed on the community, but I don't always have the time to write back and participate. Before today, I had been moving forward under the assumption that Swamp only had 500 or 600 players. That's a very large number of course, but not even half of what it turns out to be. I think it's fair for me to finally refer to Swamp as a juggernaught in the world of audio games, Yay! I feel justified in saying that, but I will also balance things by sharing my belief that Swamp's days are numbered. The community is stepping up its game and new developers are already hard at work building games that will rival or overthrow Swamp. Am I worried about this? Absolutely not! I don't mean to imply that these people can't overthrow Swamp, what I mean is that I'm not worried if they do. The community needs to push forward and build bigger, so the eventual death of Swamp is not only inevitable, it's necessary. When the new audio game Titans finally steal away the last Swamp player, a part of me will celebrate the fact that I need to start over with something even grander if I want to climb to the top again. I wish God speed and the greatest of luck to those other developers. I had a whole bunch of stuff I was going to eventually write, about my perspective on Swamp as the sighted designer. I can't remember anything I had wanted to say, LOL. After such a long post, this does seem like the perfect excuse to include those thoughts, so I might wing it for a few sentences and see if anything comes to me. While eating lunch yesterday, I found myself simply sitting at my laptop and watching the people play Swamp. To those who don't know, the server lets me read the chat channels and view everyone from a top-down bird like perspective. I watch people running around the map collecting loot and shooting zombies, I watch people race around gathering crates in missions, and I watch groups of players huddle together in the safe zones while they chatter away with each other. It is quite hypnotic and I almost always watch for much longer than I plan to. Time simply races by and I always end with a feeling of amazement! Amazement? Actually yeah, that's probably the best way I know how to describe it. There is a certain amount of pride that comes because this is a world of my own creation. The buildings, roads, and bridges all came from my own mind. If you've ever had pet mice or lizards, you might be able to relate to this if you spent time carefully designing a neat little place for them to play in. A maze of plastic tunnels for hamsters, shredded paper for mice to hide under, or foam "rock" cliffs for lizards to climb on. Building the little world is very cool. Now the little world is neat, but by itself it wouldn't be any cooler than an empty tank. You need critters to enjoy the place you set up, and in my case I usually have between 50 and 80 running around. I get to see all of these little critters moving around and interacting with the world I put together for them. The critters I watch aren't ants, or mice, or fish, or lizards... the critters I am watching are real life human beings! This realization usually takes a few minutes to sink in each time, because it is just so humbling. Each little person I'm watching is an actual person, and not just a person, but a person who is likely sitting on the other side of the Earth! Talk about cool! The amazement doesn't end there though, and I'm not entirely sure how to say this so that nobody gets offended, but I get even more impressed when it then sinks in that everyone is blind! As someone who is sighted, I'm hopelessly dependent upon my eyes for almost everything. I'm sure you've all figured out that us poor sighted folk can't survive 5 minutes if we can't see, HAHA! It blows us away when we see tasks being done without sight, when using sight is the only way we can imagine ourselves doing it. When I watch 80 blind players running around a complex set of buildings with ease, I don't even know how to really understand it. Amazed is still the only word I have for it. I would struggle to get around my house if I suddenly went blind, and yet here I'm watching huge swarms of players navigating through miles of terrain, without running into things, without getting lost, and while battling zombies the entire time. Just, Wow. I know that not every player is blind, but most are. I feel like a million bucks when I get emails telling me that Swamp is the first game that someone has gotten their sighted friends to play with them, or the first game they can really play with family members. I guess it can be hard to find games and activities that put blind and sighted players in an fairly even playing field. I'm glad that some people found Swamp to be that bridge for them. I didn't mean for this part to sound sappy, but it's worth mentioning in the off chance that it helps inspire other developers to keep it in mind. If at all possible, design a game so that both sighted and blind players will have a similar playing experience. Things will never be truly equal, but try to keep them even. Remember that taking the visuals away won't make it equal since the sighted players would be at a terrible disadvantage. And also remember that giving the blind players visuals won't help them either. Hehe, just kidding. :) Swamp is a huge social scene so that is also something for other developers to keep in mind. Whenever Swamp is down, a big thing I hear from people is that they miss talking to their friends. Apparently a lot of friendships have developed in Swamp, and many people don't have any other way to contact those people. They could of course, but not everyone hands out skype info or email addresses when they can just chat again in the game. Any future large-scale online games should probably put a lot of focus on player chat. I'll be keeping this in mind for my own future projects. Well I think that's all I will write. This has turned into a huge post already, so I will stop here. :) --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
