Hello everyone!

We have a list for you to register your interest in the Alpha, at last! It is time to entertain a wider audience of Glitchen.

First, you MUST have an account on our website.  Without it, game access cannot be granted, and your request will be deprioritized until we can reach out to you for more information. We will work on making this more efficient, but it just hasn’t been able to be a priority.

Signing up does not guarantee immediate access; but the plan is to add a batch (10-15?) of folks every few days so we can generate some regular activity in the game.  This will allow us to estimate our hardware needs to accommodate a large population of players.

Any questions, concerns, and general enthusiasm can be posted on our forum!

Without further ado, click this link to register your interest!

Hello, madamsirs, LadyCeres here.

I’d like to take the opportunity to clear up some concerns I’ve heard since we made our announcement. If any of the points below appear blunt, know that it is so there is as little confusion as possible.

Ur is for Everyone

First and foremost, the game that is currently Children of Ur will remain open while we work together to open up the Eleven world. This was a vital discussion point when we spoke of coming together. It was important to all parties that there is a version of Ur accessible to everyone. There is not, and never has been, an intention to exclude people from Eleven’s Ur, which brings me to the next point.

Eleven’s Alpha has had to limit its community size for really boring, but irritatingly valid, reasons.

If we’ve never explained our reasoning in this manner before, allow me to do so now: when we started up, no one had the experience of large-scale community management. We were dealing with some really janky stuff, in terms of things going wrong in the first few versions of the alpha. Initially we picked people that we knew personally who would be patient with the super-crapness, had a good knowledge of the game, and would be able to get along with others in a very small (albeit virtual) space. It hasn’t been all sunshine and roses, but the work done by the Alphas as the staff has learned to scale up community management efforts (alongside bug tracking and your expected Glitch-y mayhem) has been invaluable.

We grew the community via personal recommendations, forum contests, Facebook contests, Kaiyon’s Dragon*Con contests, contrived SQL queries to figure out who was visiting the forum but not necessarily posting (hello fellow introverts!)…with each group added, the support load on myself and one other dedicated staff member increased. You’re all tired of the schtick about volunteer projects, real lives, and jobs, so I won’t repeat it. I can’t emphasize enough how true it all is. There are approximately 300 members in our testing community. Recent code changes have meant that the support load has become extremely minimal, which is fantastic news! It means we are able to add more people without fear of a hundred tiny disasters waiting to happen. I dearly hope that puts paid to any notions that we were being intentionally exclusionary or that less than 20 people had access. Neither are true, and the continued insinuations that they were have been pretty hurtful.

The world is a beautifully incomplete thing.

Eleven’s initial goal was to have the world exactly as it was at the shutdown. We were all high on purple when we thought that was a good idea! There are many locations that were not released back in 2013. I have had it personally confirmed from the-team-formerly-known-as-Tiny-Speck that these locations are lost forever…at least in their original form. Aside from pursuing server stability, we were also plodding along with this idea that we had SO MUCH MORE work to do before we could be ready…and thankfully, we realized that was just silly. The world is absolutely playable, along with the skills and maybe 90% of the quests (missing locations, tsk!)…so we’re taking perfection off the table in pursuit of a more open world. Locations will be rebuilt and added in as they are ready. Game hardware will have to be increased to support more people. We’re plotting how best to achieve it all.

The game will still be called Eleven.

I’ve seen people debate about what we should be called. There are some tech reasons to keep the game’s name Eleven. One is the following image, which was achievable with the existing art assets:

We may rebrand ourselves with a different team name. Laura from Children of Ur has played with blending our teal and purple identities into the existing logo, which was courtesy of Kukubee himself. We’re not trying to erase Children of Ur’s name or memory, so we’re going to come up with other ways to honor it.

But six f*@$)%g years?!

We know, we can’t believe it either. The merger has given us new vigor to get the problems figured out, my hand to Tii.

So that’s the gist.

We are human. We are Glitchen. We are doing everything we can to prevent this game from dying completely. The blending of the two teams will only make us stronger. When the doors open, they will be open to all. Thank you for sticking with us. If you’d rather not, well, we’ll still be here with open arms anyway.

Please join us on the forum for any questions you might have.

LadyC

A message from one of our alpha testers, Eris Lord Freedom:

As Eleven Alpha has moved along, it’s gotten complete enough that many of us are chasing down achievements and exploring parts of Ur we never had time for in Glitch. For that, we needed info: What door opens with this key I got in the Ancestral Lands? How many cherries for a Rainbow Potion? I’ve been to all the places in Groddle Heights; why haven’t I gotten the Completist badge? (Answer: Martleby Hare.) What’s the recipe for Awesome Stew, and when can I make it? Where can I find a wood tree?

We had Eleven’s port of glitchthegame.com at http://pedia.elevengiants.com, and the Wayback Machine’s pages for the Glitch-Strategy wiki, but those aren’t complete. The Encyclopedia doesn’t include recipes, and the Wayback capture was erratic; Glitch ended before you could deliberately save a page at archive.org, and many of the saved pages are from an earlier version of Glitch.

We needed something better.

Eris Lord Freedom, a devoted Lemming and occasional Cosmapolitan, decided we needed a new wiki. With help from Ladyceres and Varaeth, we now have…

The Glitch Forever Wiki.

This is the alpha version. Many pages are still outdated. A lot of details from the end of Glitch – new recipes especially – are missing. The database used to restore it was from early alpha Glitch; most regions and streets aren’t there yet. (Oddly, most of the images referenced in the Wayback Version are there. Weird database issues. Ladyceres had days of fun trying to import a 5-year-old wiki database into modern web software.)

But it’s here, and it’s ours, and we can fill in the gaps and add pages for all the post-Glitch activities and Glitch revival projects. Join us.

Just wanted to remind everyone who might want to sign up for the drawing that there’s still time to do so!

Post in this thread on the forum: —> LINKY <—

Need another reason to do this? Once we draw numbers for this round, I will continue to use the list to pull players for the Alpha.

So pretty please, register your interest on the forum. I am locking comments on this blog post so that there’s no misunderstanding. 🙂

I will update the forum with more details as to when the drawing will be. Monday night is looking good, though.

So remember how we said we’d do something for people who couldn’t attend Dragon*Con?

We’re going to do a random drawing. Post in this thread on the forum for your chance to be selected!

Only one entry per person will be counted, and it will be a largeish group. My hope is to do the drawing next Monday September 26th, in the evening (East coast US). Firmer details on the above to come closer to the time.

Hope to see you enter, and good luck!

Update: I just wanted to be clear that you must post on the forum for a chance to enter, since the forum account is tied to your game name. We will also attempt to verify that entrants have played Glitch in the past.

While we certainly owe you a real progress update (and there HAS been progress!) we are honored that MMOGames has put Eleven up for Editor’s Choice for February! I’m pleased that the editor has taken notice of us, especially since we are not yet in an open testing phase. If you’re so inclined, take a moment to click the link below and vote for us. The voting is at the bottom of the page, and no registration of any kind is necessary.

MMOGames Editor’s Choice – February 2015

If you haven’t signed up for the forum yet, please do so here; signing up now will reserve your name for the game!

Short little video for you guys today demonstrating some cooperation, rather than solo gameplay. Varaeth and I wanted to show you a few new two-person things that have begun to work since we’ve been working on the game. We showed you back in March that collaborative mining was working, but quoin sharding was not. Trading, transcendental radiation and even partying also work again. The party space is full of unconfigured spawners and teleport markers.

(Pardon the overall lack of polish in this video…we started to film it, then I had to reset the server for other reasons, which of course meant we both forgot to grab a quoin to get those badges out of the way. The reason it takes Varaeth so long to join me when we dive into the pool is because he was getting his badges and had a little lag on his end…

TL;DR: staging can be harder than you think when you’re still building a gameserver!)