Hey Space Marines,
The transition of World Chat to Squad Chat was an abrupt one. Our apologies there. But it has had a good effect on players engagement and numbers. Across the board, there are more players playing on a daily basis, in pretty much every activity range.
You may not see that as clearly as overall game transparency is obviously hurt, as is finding allies efficiently. Those are definitely the drawbacks. So let me give the update on what else is happening due to the changes.
Wars are a LOT more active. The competition is fierce. That is pretty transparent actually for anyone who clicks the “Squads” tab — the war score is listed beside each squad name. It’s the number after the tiny shield. We know Squad chat is helping with war prep; which is cool to see.
As a company we have been able to take those 4 hours a day we were involved in managing and are using them to build a better ZM. Follow the Zombie Moon Dev Blog here, to get twice weekly updates. It’s a new part of the SHG site, but you’ll see new visual timbits there twice a week (at least).
We’ve also hired on 2 folks starting July 21st, to work on ZM. That’s a huge win by itself. We will feature them later, so stay tuned.
Now, what we’re missing are some more social features. This is especially true for new players. To be fair to ourselves, we’ve added in a prototype of the new player ally and squad matching service. But it’s not enough for new players, although it’s a reasonable bridge for new players…at least for the next few weeks until the new ZM is launched.
We also need to add in more social features for experienced players — Do we create “Squad Families” where the squad chat of 3 different but allied squads are merged into one? Do we enable Level 400 players to start their own chat inviting 20 or so players max, and moderate it as they like (desired by some, but huge red flags to review there)? Do we do a dozen other creative ideas that we have for socialisation?
Well we do know that we’ll be adding much better ways to find allies (auto suggested allies, and more), plus a great new social intro for new players with or without a new player chat. And a lot of other non-social features too…such as squads and entire game vs. Boss NPCs etc.
One interesting outcome of these changes is that the game will be able to be localised in the fall. Without World Chat to regulate, we can actually get ZM into the hands of many more, from many more places.