In pursuit of clarity…

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

25 thoughts on “In pursuit of clarity…”

  1. Thank you so much for this LadyC. I remain a true and faithful alpha tester, do what I can to help the project along!!

  2. Thank you so much for all that you do! I will wait as long as it takes, and will rejoice the day I can play this beautiful, glorious, and weird game again. <3

  3. Thank you for restoring the (11) dream(s). As a once-and-future-glitchen, I’m so excited at both projects, and the maturity around the decision to integrate. It’s rather remarkable.

  4. It all sounds good to me. I think that both teams have done some wonderful work and it is obvious to me that you all are working hard not only to provide the features of the original game that we all love but to also add new content. It has been a few years but there is so much to do and I know that you all have lives outside of the game. Kudos and Many Thanks to all involved on both teams!

  5. Glitch was the best place ever. I miss it so much. I was glad to be able to experience some of it through Children of Ur. I can wait to play in Eleven!

  6. I’m sorry you’ve been taking flak for the closed testing. I’ve felt frustrated at not being able to join in – but I’d make a lousy tester! And I understand the need to limit things until you’re ready to deal with a huge surge of people joining in.

    I’m glad that the time has come for you and the Children of Ur to come together. A bit sad about the name (I had a fondness for Children of Ur) but you can’t please everyone and I’m sure I’ll get used to it. And a shorter name is probably good for all sorts of reasons. The initial name was shorter still!

    A huge thank you to both teams for keeping going for six long years to get to this point. Glitch was beautiful beyond words and your work to let us continue to enjoy as much of it as possible is highly appreciated.

    Thank you.

  7. Thank you @ladyceres – it has been a pure pleasure to play in alpha, however many resets, camping out in the world, starting over and over, etc. The last update has been amazing in ironing out problems and crashes, huge thanks to all the devs for their hard work and patience! It will be wonderful when we can all play together again!

  8. It’s Great to see the site active with so many post. It shows how our love never died nor faded away. As the years go by my love for the game is in suspended animation. All news is good news.

  9. Thank you so much Lady C..I’m so grateful to you and your team for all the hard work you put in to keep this wonderful beautiful game running..I love being an alpha tester and although I am fairly quiet on the forum I’ll always be there if you ever need help in any way…Thank you Thank you Thank you for all you do, Im so excited to see what the future holds.

    1. You are welcome to send me a private message on the forum, or you can send an email to contact_us at elevengiants dot com.

  10. Beautifully said, LadyCeres! This was excellently clarified. You and the team have been absolutely amazing in this whole process. All of us Glitchen are grateful for the coming experience from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you!

  11. Just wanted to thank you for working so hard on this glitch remake. All of us glitchen are so happy and excited. Since glitch died I am keeping my hope in you guys. Even though I didn’t post anything I always check in on both of your websites. No game like glitch. We have a big family and we made lots of memories with glitch. Can’t wait to build up new memories when Eleven comes out.

  12. First of all, thank you! Thank you for never giving up on this project, which would have been so valid considering the technical issues that’ve kept popping up all over the place. I want to say this first because it’s from a place of love that I’m going to say any form of criticism. I’m sorry in advance if i say it in any mean or upsetting way!

    However… I do have to agree with some of the flack you’ve been getting. I remember from the start that one of my good friends was deeply involved with the game and the community before shutdown, and joined the board because she hoped that she could prove that she would be a good member of the team. She never complained to me about anything, she never said anything negative about the team, as far as I know she stayed pretty darn active, and she had a history of helping build games and giving feedback.

    She never got in.

    I don’t know when she drifted away, but she did, eventually. Other games ate her, and the forum and updates slowing down as much as they did generally are a sign that a project is sadly on the way to being cancelled. I think like once in awhile she’d check the site for updates, but it’s not with any regular frequency. I feel sad for multiple reasons, and frustrated for others. She was a perfect fit for the team, and so it’s sad to see that she never got to help out, and it’s unfortunate that the team missed out on the talent. on the frustrating level, if even she couldn’t get in, what are the chances that I’ll get in?

    300 players is not that many, (unless you’re talking about 300 simultaneous connections at the same time, which would then make the player base around 1200 or more.) 300 people over 6 years is 50 people a year, or roughly 4 people a month getting in. Those are very long odds, and a hard ask for people to wait for. It’s like Glitch was this great thing, and that there’s two wonderful shadows of it: a version that doesn’t feel quite complete, and a version that’s more close to complete, but it’s a gated community, and few have the keys in.

    And this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the team admitted that they needed to hire developers and help to speed up the timeline a little bit. I remember from “Unique Challenges” that you guys said you didn’t want funding, but even back then i felt you might need it, considering the other issues you mentioned in that blog post. My feelings on that haven’t changed really. People have lives and jobs, and unless your job is being hired to make Glitch Live Again, that’s going to take priority over other unpaid projects, even passion projects. I really URge (get it?) you guys to look into crowdfunding and/or hiring on others full time, at the least when you do go live you’ll need them to work on whatever glitches and issues that are bound to happen. (because no matter how stable the code, issues always happen)

    The reason I’m so down on those aspects is because… well, the unfortunate truth is that unless you spend money on advertising when the game opens, you’re going to be using word-of-mouth from existing and potential players to help bring people in and utilize whatever monetization method you’re going to use to keep the servers afloat. If most of the potential playerbase has already wandered away, then you’re either going to have to spend more on promotion, or have difficulty keeping up with monthly costs. The only other way around that is to have each glitchen community have to make/rent private servers, but that feels a little against the spirit of the game.

    But that’s a lot of the negative, let’s talk about the positives:

    I’m so glad that you’re teaming up with CoU, and switching away from flash. I know that conversions never are as short as we expect, but you’ve got a great team that’s already built up the world once.

    I’m also glad that you’re looking to the future for new ideas. with devs this tied into the community it gives me a lot of hope that we’ll be able to see more user-designed glitchery in the world.

    CoU will still be open! While it’s not quite my thing (the last time i went in quests weren’t up, i couldn’t do home-building, and a lot of the movement felt a bit loosey-goosey), for a lot of people it is, and it’ll be a good holdover until Eleven comes out.

    Thanks for listening to me and this long ramble. I hope that you take some of this into consideration, or at least see things through the eyes of the other side.

    And also a message out to you (yes, you) who may’ve wandered away from the game and are doing that “once in awhile” check, please do speak up about why you’ve drifted away and what could help. Devs aren’t mindreaders, and unless you tell them, they won’t know why something that meant so much to you once… doesn’t quite hold that level of interest anymore.

  13. Thank you so much…hoping to see the world and everyone again one day. We’ll be here when you are ready.

  14. Whenever it happens, I will be there. I am going into CoU very often and loving wandering around and doing what I can. I am ready to set up house and raise my crops and animals and just love the world of Ur again in full virtual reality. Long live Glitch. And thanks to all of you who are creating this possibility.

  15. Thank you so much for all of your work on this game. It was my favorite game of all time, and when it closed my heart was broken a long with the rest of the community. I can’t wait for it to come again!

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