Letter to the Community

An Open Letter to the Community

Over the last few months there have been waves of support and waves of agony, both in the studio and in the community. Today, we want to do our best to try and bring some calm to the situation. Lately you (the community) have either been misinformed on some specifics about the game and its development or simply misunderstood the facts. So, the purpose of this letter is to bring everyone together in the hope that a general level of understanding can be achieved throughout the player-base and community. So, let’s go through a few poignant topics and see where things end up.

The Anti-Cheat System

The main issue is as new cheats are developed we need to add those to our detection system. We will be the first to admit that our anti-cheat system (at present) is not the best and still needs work. At present a lot of our player base assists us with detecting suspicious players and (if they chose to do so) file a report which sends a ticket through to our Support Team who then investigate said reported player. Now, while our anti-cheat does search for cheaters itself what it does not do is auto-ban them. A ticket will be automatically created by the system and then sent through to our support team to review and ban manually. This is, as you will agree not the best or the fastest way to remove cheaters from the game. However, as we continue to develop the anti-cheat system one of the next functionalities to be added (in a forthcoming version) will be that the system can detect and auto-ban legitimate cheaters without the need for a member of staff to do the banning. This will, however not remove admin from the task of monitoring the game and keeping it as free from cheaters as possible as part of the team’s job will always be manual bans along with the auto-ban system. Having said all of the above, there will be, once this function is working, continued development and improvement on the anti-cheat system. As much as we work on the game, we work on the back-end anti-cheat.

Video Developer Diaries

When development first started we made the promise to release a new develop diary video every 2/3 months to keep the community and player base informed as to the state of the company, the game, the staff and development. We, a while ago made an announcement (around the same time we changed our approach to a published yearly timeline) that we would be switching to a text based format for developer diaries and roadmaps thus they can be more concurrent with the current state of development as many procedures and plans change rapidly, even so rapidly as day to day. So the long and short of it is that the text diary format is far more practical. However, we understand that text is not always the best way to express or inspire the public so we do have plans to show work-in-progress assets via videos in the future.

The New Graphics Render

We want to improve the game’s performance and quality for both low-end, high-end and notebook users. The game has been in development for three years at this stage and over the course of that time many ideas change, implementations of features need adjustment or removal. As some plans worked and others failed sometimes a regroup of sorts is needed and a new approach must be taken. This is the very reason we chose to build our own engine from the beginning as we knew that with our ambitions there would be limitations or restrictions that were unavoidable and we wanted the possibility to build the tools around the game. Another reason is to keep the game up-to-date in visual terms a render overhaul is required. Unfortunately, it is not a simple case of build a new renderer and implement. We wish it were.

Where Is Freeplay

The internet is king of many things, chief among which is conspiracy and lies. Lately there have been more and more statements from community members or players claiming that the Freeplay mode is not being developed and it was always just a marketing trick. Let us be extremely clear: This is not true, not at all. Freeplay is most certainly in development, it is, for us, the mode we ourselves are looking forward to the most, the same as all of you. So, why have we not shared any news regarding it? Simple, we have a plan for a first reveal of Freeplay, we don’t want to have that leaked nor do we want to talk about the mode to such an extent that as time goes by more accusations of lies and broken promises are hurled our direction. Freeplay is being developed. We are working very hard on it. Please, we ask for your patience on this.

Adding Features Instead of Fixing Bugs

As you all know, Survarium is in development and for a project of its particular scale and our vision for it, still pretty early in development. So, adding new content is vital to the project’s progress. There are many assets that should be in the game that are far behind schedule and we are trying our best to implement them. However, with implementation come new bugs along with the old ones. Suffice to say that we are just as dedicated to fixing game-breaking bugs as we are to improving the game and adding more features and as always, with your diligence and help in submitting bug reports in detail, we can hopefully fix them quickly. However, it can be extremely difficult as every bug that is reported to us, we must replicated 100% of the time, many times over to make sure we know what the cause is and then we can approach a fix. So, it’s a rather tricky process.

Ignoring Community Petitions

This has been a general issue of late with many forum users claiming that petitions and polls serve no purpose as the result often does not lend itself to the game. However, please believe when we say that is simply not true. The feedback is invaluable. The number of suggestions we receive from the community is simply overwhelming and we cannot react instantly to requests for a change here or a change there. Sometimes they take time, other times they are simply not possible for a number of various reasons. But we do try to provide feedback and explain our strategy towards everything we read on the forums/social media and emails.

Why Don’t You Hardware Ban Cheaters

For the moment, we think it's unfair to not offer the offender a second chance. However Hardware bans are something we are always considering and if the existing methods (which need current improvement as stated above) of fighting with cheaters don’t provide sufficient results, we may indeed have to take a stronger stand!

Why Killcam

Each day we strive to improve the player's comfort of play and help them to better understand the game. That is the reason we integrated killcam into the game. We are confident it helps most of the players understand the in-game situation to a greater degree. This is our stance on the gameplay mechanic at the present moment. Will in change in the future… who knows? For the moment those players who don't like/want it can switch it off in the "options" menu.

Final Thoughts

We know times seem hard at present but all things improve with hard work and dedication. We truly appreciate every single one of our community members and players. You have been behind us for three years and for that we cannot thank you enough.

Stay strong Survivors!

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