Hello! Welcome to the first episode of #AskTravian. I'm Ecki, the Game Director of Travian: Legends and today I'm going to answer some of your questions.
So, what is #AskTravian?
A while ago, we asked you to go onto our forums and ask a question that you really wanted to have an answer to. We’ve read all your questions, but obviously, we cannot answer them all here today. So we’ve selected the ones that came up in several communities to give an answer.
A popular question was about the origins of Travian:
So, how was it born and is it true that it was inspired from the board game “Settlers of Catan”?
Well, Gerhard Müller, one of our founders, had the idea when he was playing the early browser games. He was about to finish school by that time and he started to develop the game.
When he was at university, he released the first version - that was 2004 and the game very quickly became very popular among his fellow students.
Travian has a lot of sources for inspiration. One was a popular cartoon series you might know and, coming back to the board game I just mentioned, it served as an inspiration for the resource layout of the first version.
Let’s go to the next question:
Who came up with the name Travian, and how?
Well, Gerhard basically completely invented Travian. When he was looking for a name, he did some research and he found Trajan, one of the greatest Roman emperors ever, at least according to several sources, and as global domains were already taken as you can imagine, he changed the name slightly to Travian, still keeping the Roman sound that fits so well with the game.
This question comes from the community in the United Kingdom, and they ask: Do any of you actually play Travian?
Yes, of course we do. First: It’s fun for us, too. And second: It’s an extremely valuable source of information. So we have always several people playing a round of Travian together in the office and it’s really extremely important for us to also still have the feeling of "how the game is developing", "how the community is developing" and "how is the mood in the community". So it’s a valuable source of information for us.
The next question is from Italy and it’s actually pretty funny: Is it true that, the game was initially used as a war simulator by NATO?
Unfortunately, I can neither confirm nor deny this allegation. No, honestly. I don’t know. Maybe some NATO employees used the game to train their skills – their tactical skills – in their free time. But I guess that’s it.
So, we also had a lot of questions about the future of Travian: Legends and possible changes. The first comes from Brazil:
Isn’t it time to change the graphics?
The graphics of Travian: Legends used to be a bit lighter in the past to also cater to the demands of players without a high-speed Internet connection. But if you check out the start page, we’ve just announced, you’ll get a pretty good idea where we are headed to and how Travian will look in the future.
The German community asks: When will the map be adjusted to the number of players? When will we get smaller maps?
We are currently working on a sustainable solution to that issue. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy as it probably seems to adjust the map. Still, I’m pretty confident. We have tried several approaches and I’m pretty confident that we will find a solution soon.
Here is the next question: Italy and Portugal players are wondering why we don’t have an alliance chat.
That’s a long story: An in-game chat is one of the more obvious features if you think how crucial communication is. For example, if you want to sync with your teammates for an attack. Unfortunately, a chat didn't have a high priority in the early development days and in the meantime players got used to Teamspeak, Skype or something similar. Now for us, it’s really tough to come up with something - with a solution that’s clearly better than the ones mentioned. And that’s the reason why we don’t have a chat today.
Now to a classic question that comes up from time to time: Will there ever be another retro-server with version 3.6?
The short answer is: No. Due to technical reasons, we cannot have another round of the original version 3.6. And to be honest, last time we did this, not that many players joined. Still, in the first round of our last annual special “Rise of Alliances”, we almost used the entire feature-set of 3.6.
Alright, a question from Spain: Are you going to add new buildings to differentiate the tribes we have even more?
That’s one of the ideas for our future. But before we go there, we want to improve the art style of Travian overall. That includes the buildings, and probably the units as well. And after we have done this, we can probably tackle ideas like that.
This is a question from the USA: Are there any plans to copy the single account lobby system from Kingdoms to Travian: Legends? If so, when? I’d love to be able to earn some lasting achievements in Legends.
Yes, we definitely want to have a system like that. It would be great to offer a home for all the accounts and the achievements of our players. Before we are able to do that, we have to answer some questions. For example: How are we going to merge all the nicknames in one central account, and is it global or only per domain. But it’s definitely a challenge we want to tackle soon.
Now we come to the two most asked questions worldwide.
Number one: Will Travian Games develop an app for iOS and Android that is reliable for veteran players and even attract new players?
You can believe me, I would love to provide a reliable and good mobile experience to our players. However, we really face a tough challenge there. Travian: Legends started as a hobby project and some of the early development decisions don’t allow us to easily release a companion app. Still, we are working constantly on that issue and, even if it might sound a bit silly, it took us a lot of work and effort to even be able to think about developing a mobile app for our players.
And now drum roll, the most frequently asked question worldwide: Is it true there will be two new tribes in the next annual special?
We don’t have many details to share now because we are still in the research and development phase, but yes we will do it. In the coming month, we will provide you with more information and keep you posted. I hope you are happy with this.
Alright. That was it for the first episode of #AskTravian. We hope you enjoyed it and that you got all the information you were looking for. Soon we will collect new questions for the next episode. So stay tuned, check the forum and keep asking questions. Thanks for watching.
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