Travian Crewchat Report Part 2

Here’s the rest of the highlights from the Travian Crewchat that took place on December 9th:

The Business Side of Travian

There were several questions asked about the business side of Travian. The Crewchat is one of the best places to get answers if you have any questions about that.

Question from Empirical: Who gets all the money spent on gold?

Answered by shadowspirrit: Most goes to new servers and such.

Question from Empirical: Shadowspirit you said most, and that little not spent on servers, where does that go?

Answered by shadowspirrit: Upkeep and development of the game.

One thing to also keep in mind is that Travian Games makes more games than just Travian. They also have Travians, and new games like Imperion and Wewaii came out this year. Without the money they made from Travian, it wouldn’t be possible for them to make new games like these ones.

Question from IRCmeet240: Where is the Travian gmbh office buildings located in?
Answered by Wildeye: In Munich, Germany

Question from vbo1: Hi.. I have seen that domains like Arab . have like over 30 servers . 2 speeds and 2 classics. Why isn’t .com the biggest, English is the most well known language and .com is most well known ‘ending’ on a webpage lol. So why is this?

Answered by monkey7: Because .com keeps about 15-30K players on a single server. The arabs, well… About 2K players.

This answer seems a bit incorrect. There are several Arab servers with over 15,000 players, and right now there’s one with over 40,000 players. Travian is just really popular in that part of the world.

Question from Roodbaard2: How many servers are there in total?

Answered by monkey7: A lot. Really. A LOT.

I’m not sure what the exact total is right now, but it’s somewhere between 300 and 350.

Question from Gamer: Question ! When was Travian first made?

Answered by Odinsstaff: Here’s a brief history of Travian – http://www.traviangames.com/content/company

That site is definitely worth a read if you want to know about the history of the game.

One last question that touches on a topic I wanted to talk about myself:

Question from JVMorrow|Heldenhammer: Can we have a Travian player hall of fame? I will be first inducted since I am that great.

Answered by monkey7: It’s quite intensive to maintain and we’d probably have a few civil wars over who should be on the list. So no, it’s probably not going to happen.

Making a Hall of Fame for individual players would be extremely tough to do, it’s a lot easier to record the winners of each server. But as time goes on, I think that players who repeatedly make it into the Hall of Champions or who finish really well will be remembered and I’ll do profiles on them. I might make a special section on this eventually on this site (note that I said “might”, this is not a promise). But if I do, like Monkey7 said, I expect there will be a lot of arguments over who should and who shouldn’t be in it.

Travian Meeting

They had one in Germany last year, but will there ever be a Travian Meeting in North America where players and crew members can meet one another?

Question from skypeiswm_reflex: Are there any Americans among you? Will we EVER have a USA real-life travian meeting, like the Germany one?

Answered by firedawg225: Yes there are Americans among us. I can’t really answer on the meeting. I’m a MH. If interested email support and maybe something can be arranged.

Question from IRCmeet556: You guys should have a Travian meeting in North America sometime! Will you?

Answered by monkey7: No, we probably will not. Most of the crew and players are based in Europe.

Question from Reflex: I know there was a Germany Travian crew IRL meeting, and that was awesome to see pictures of, but are there any meetings planned in the USA? ever? I know Travian is European-headquarter based…

Answered by Odinsstaff: I am not aware if there are any meets planned in the US. Players can take the initiative and organize one.

There are several people who have asked for a meeting to take place in North America for Travian, but it looks like they’ll have to manage it themselves. It’s hard to organize something like this in North America because the whole region is so big, compared to Europe where the countries and the population are a lot closer together. Still, I hope one does take place in North America someday. There will be another one in Europe next year it sounds like:

Question from Stevieus: Will there be another Travian Meeting next year?

Answered by monkey7: Yes there probably will be 🙂

Question from Keiji_Maeda: Do you think the Next Travian meetup in Germany is going to be more popular?

Answered by monkey7: Of course it is! 😀 I know I’m going to be there which is already one more :p

Questions About the Crew

Just like last time, a lot of people were asking if they can join the crew. I didn’t count, but I’m pretty sure that was the most common question.  Hopefully the crew will get a lot of good new members from this event. Remember, you can apply to join the crew anytime.

Question from Chumingo: Are there places available to join the staff of Travian?

Answered by KnightStalker: Yes you can join our team,try to apply,you can find the link in the forum.

Question from gyarados: How does a player join the .com team? any prerequisites that you guys look for?

Answered by shadowspirrit: We are looking for trustworthy people who know what they are doing.

Question from myx|Veritas: Tschena, is there still room for supporter staff?

Answered by Tschena: if the application is good enough there is always room.

Question from vbo1: to Tshena : Who reads all the applications for .com crew members ?

Answered by shadowspirrit: The admins at first.

Question from IRCmeet844: Is there any special requirement to become a crew member ??

Answered by Tschena: You need to apply, the application has to be good enough to get invited for an interview and then you have to pass the interview, that’s it.

Question from Missen: What is a normal IRL job for a crew?

Answered by Phanttis: There is no specific IRL jobs… we have bunch of students in the crew as well as teachers, lecturers, police officers, industry workers, military officers … anyone wishing to help are welcome to send us applications, no matter what profession they have.

Question from Jacuu: Where can I sign up to become a multihunter and or be apart of the crew?

Answered by KnightStalker: Please send your application(about your self and what you can offer and your online time and…) (It should be a nice written application) to admin@travian.com

Crew positions include In-game Support, Multihunters, and Forum Moderators.  And if you want to apply to be a crew member, remember that Regional Servers like Travian.us and Travian.co.uk need their own crew members as well.

Question from IRCmeet767: @ Tschena – how much do you get paid as admin?
Answered by shadowspirrit: nothing, we are volunteers

A lot of people still seem to think that Crew members get paid. The truth is they do it all for free. So we should all be very thankful that they volunteer to help out to make this game better.

Question from Azen: so you guys are ALL volunteers? and this is in no way profitable to you all? except just fun?
Answered by shadowspirrit: we are all volunteers, we get nothing from it

If Crew members were paid I would be doing that instead of running this website. I might try being support or a multihunter one day.

There were some questions about how Multihunters work. For the sake of my readers and for my own sanity, I won’t bother repeating any of the ones that were players complaining about why they were banned.

Question from Mickey: do you have access to our igms?

Answered by monkey7: Multihunters and Admins can view them when given a link, but it’s not like we read a few inboxes before going to bed.

Question from Pieter: How does Travian detect userscripts?

Answered by KnightStalker: We have some special systems that detects them.

Question from Luxaxix: Why don’t you repay people who get banned wrong with, e.g Gold?

Answered by Chrisvc: It happens very very very rarely that people are wrongly banned, and it there is absolutely no rule violation that occurred, they might get some compensation

If you ever wanted to know about what the crew members are like, the Crewchat is one of the best opportunities to get to know them:

Question from stormmy: I love you guys! how many of you run a server? Like are u admins and multihunters are MHs bots? Or is it you or are they old players? do you guys get paid?
Answered by Tschena: I am running 11 servers – but i have a lot of people helping me, between 5 and 10 people are hunting/supporting on one server. Multihunters are people as you and me and no bots 😉

Question from Reflex: who has been on crew the longest? the oldest vet among you? and are there any historic, famous crew members who are gone now?

Answered by shadowspirrit: I don’t know, but Tschena Phanttis Blackpaladin and myself have been here for more then 3 years as crew

Question from maj212: Wil there be another Interview like this anytime soon?
Answered by shadowspirrit:  No, we only do this about 1 to 2 times a year, its very stressful since we see dozens of questions fly before our eyes every minute.

Question from Duck2: You guys must get a lot of Abuse…how do you deal with it and stay positive?
Answered by Tschena: Yes, we do. But the seldom “thank you”s or “you are great”s or “you are doing a damn good job”s are worth it.

Goofy Questions

Okay, some of these were actually pretty funny. Here are the best ones:

Question from Stevieus: Shadowspirrit…. Will you marry me?
Answered by shadowspirrit: No.

Rejected!

Question from Mickey: Will you give me golds for cheesecake (Tschena)
Answered by Tschena: If the cake is good then we can talk about this

There was a surprisingly high amount of discussion about Cheesecake during the crewchat.

Question from maj212: I should be studying history right now and I blame you, because this is too much fun to pass

Answered by monkey7: Tell your teacher you were at a very important meeting 🙂

Just don’t them what the meeting was about.

Question from Mickey: I have 2 personalities can I have 2 accounts?
Answered by Odinsstaff: Your two personalities can dual one account

Sounds fair.

Question from Phoenix: Question from Phoenix: Are any of the 10% female staff unhappy with their bf/husband? Here is me: 6 feet tall and 13 years old, awesome jet black hair and according to girls in my school awesomely cute.

Answered by firestorm: Well a bit too young for me;)

Nothing like horny male teenagers in an internet chatroom trying to pick up people who are in their twenties. Note that this stud doesn’t even ask if any of them are single, no, he’s going straight for the ones in committed relationships. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you Phoenix.

Hope you enjoyed my summary of the Travian crewchat. The next crewchat will likely take place in June 2010.

Travian Meeting 2009

Pictures from Travian Meeting 2009 are posted in this thread on the Travian.com forums:

http://forum.travian.com/showthread.php?t=125121

Travian Meeting is an event for players and crewmembers of Travian to get together and have fun (If you ever want to see wha the mods and admins look like in real life now’s your chance). It looks like at this event they played some Soccer, played some weird game I don’t recognize, had a Barbecque, and did a lot of drinking.

The meetup was held in Hammelburg, Germany. A lot of players from north America were disappointed that they couldn’t go, so hopefully there will be one held somewhere in the USA of Canada sometime in the future.

News and Notes

– Travian.com’s administrator, Tschena, paid a visit to this site and she was kind enough to e-mail me the answers to some questions I asked in this post about Travian.com’s classic server.

Question from IRCmeet704: when s3.com restarts, will it be classic version or t3.5 version?

[12:14] <Interview> Answered by Chrisvc: it will restart as a classic server again, but with T3.5

Randomgeek: I assume he means with 3.5 graphics. Unless classic is getting things like artifacts and 7-croppers as well. I’ll try to get a clarification soon.

Tschena:That’s correct. It will stay as classic server and therefore as T2.5 server but with the graphics of T3.5 – whether it get artefacts and 7-croppers is not sure but it is possible.
But it will never get heros or oases and the other stuff which (weren’t in Travian 2.5).

Personally I think they should keep the old Tileset and not add in artifacts, just to keep things as retro as possible on the classic server (Then again I don’t play Classic so it shouldn’t be up to me). 

Question from koentjuh1: Will T2 ever return?

[12:43] <Interview> Answered by Tschena: no

Randomgeek: To my understanding, besides graphical differences, the main difference between Travian 2.0 and 2.5 was that there was no Tournament Square, Trade Office, Great Barracks, or Great Stable.

Tschena: T2 had a completely different code and were therefore not running that stable as T3 is running. T2.5 is based on T3 code (even if it sounds strange) – therefore it runs a lot more stable.
This is the only reason why T2 never will come back. T2.5 was created to compensate this.

Thanks for clearing that up Tschena! I didn’t know they completely changed the code when they made Travian 3.0. So that’s it folks, we’re never going back to 2.0.

– The strategy guide I added to the site yesterday has already gotten over 110 hits in less than 24 hours! I’ll be sure to keep adding new strategy guides to this site regularly, and most of them will be strategy guides you can’t get anywhere else.

–  I’m going to start putting some of this site’s posts on Digg.com, starting with C0unse1’s strategy guide. I’m not going to bother putting every post that I do on it, just the ones that I think are the best. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Digg.com, it’s basically a site where you list a website, or a blog post, that you find interesting, and then other people can browse through Digg to find it. They can also say whether or not the “Digg” the story, and if they do then it’s more visible on the site.

Digg has a lot of Travian related sites listed on it already, that’s why I decided to start using it as well. If you like my posts, be sure to Digg them (that is the whole point of the site after all). If any visitors to this site would like to be friends on Digg, my Digg profile name is Randomgeek1.

– There’s going to be a Travian player meetup in Germany from August 7th-9th this year. Here’s the announcement. It would be very hard for me to attend it, but if someone going wants to write about it for this blog you’d be more than welcome to.

– Travian was mentioned in a recent article on Developmag.com entitled “A New Golden Era For Games”.

Excerpt:

Perhaps it’s a question of evolution, not revolution, particularly in the behaviour online games induce in players. Travian’s gameplay and timed services encourage truly novel collaboration between players.