Each month we interview someone for your reading pleasure. Seeing as this is the first issue though, we are giving you two for the price of one as we sit down with Morthy and Gem!
What are your official titles? Or how would you like to be labeled or called?
Morthy: I'm the community manager. I also work as a developer for Innogames but I am not currently involved in The-west
Gem: Co-community manager, or coma as its known, and tech admin. This means i deal with all the bugs. In regards to the forum I am a sheriff.
When did InnoGames launch the-west.net?
Both: The 16th of September as far as we remember!
How much later than the German version did the English version launch?
Both: Around 3 months
How many servers are up and operating now? As far as countries or languages?
Both: There are 65 worlds in total on all language servers. There are 18 different languages open.
Any idea how many players are in the English server's nine worlds? Is there any way to track where those players are from? I'm guessing it's pretty much the entire globe.
Morthy: There are a widely different amount of players in each world. While we can't give out exact statistics world 1 is still one of our most popular worlds. Naturally followed by world 8 and 9. There are no worlds with less than 10,000 players. We have no way to track where the players are from.
Like a lot of players, I played tribalwars and came here after seeing ads for the west. Is that game the main pipeline for getting players to this server? Or a big one, anyway?
Morthy: it's probably a big one but we don't have any statistics.
Does InnoGames advertise this game in other online games, or how do you draw people here?
Morthy: We've seen them everywhere really.
How much interaction do you have with InnoGames and their developers. That's an open-ended question. Just wondering if you get to offer feedback on what is working well or not working as well.
Gem: Currently we have a forum called "Ideas and Brainfarts". This is where most of our game ideas are mapped out, and developed. If the idea has enough player support and meets a few general rules I will move it to a section called "Development Discussions". The idea is then refined for a week then voted on. If it passes the vote, I then pass the idea on to Morthy who...
Morthy: ...then creates a new issue for the task in our internal issue tracker. Every week the project lead and developers look through the list of issues, decides which are good enough to implement and then plan the next weeks work (also called iteration). For other matters such as urgent issues or general questions we have an internal forum which is shared by all Innogames staff and the community managers. We can ask questions and communicate with developers there. Lastly, it is quite common for me to ask quick questions to either the project lead or lead developer via ICQ.
