Infestation: Survivor Stories (War Z)

nightscar

Hey guys,
just wondering if anyone else received an e-mail from these guys?
I had all but forgotten about them lol
O and hammer point isnt in charge anymore? when did that happen?
Think they can actually turn the game around from the train wreck it was/is?

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To the Community of Infestation: Survivor Stories

It’s been a long a year for OP Productions, with many lessons learned and even more successes, which we would like to share with you, our loyal community. Before we address the mistakes that were made, what we’ve learned, and the steps we are taking to improve, we would like to thank our players and fans. Thank you all so much for your support, your time, and your feedback. Without you our jobs wouldn’t be worthwhile, and without your feedback Infestation: Survivor Stories would not be the game it has grown to be today.

To begin, we want to address some issues we had with making accurate predictions on the launch of certain features for Infestation, and discuss what we’ve done about it. As some of you may know, it took us much longer than expected to launch some specific features we had been promoting since the launch of our closed beta. Some of these just took longer than expected to create (vehicles and large 400 km² map, anyone?), test and release while others were pushed back due to our focus on more pressing features, like cheat protection and gameplay balancing. One thing we didn’t do well is communicate these adjustments in our release calendar effectively to our players. As a lesson learned from all of this, we’ve been able to make changes to how we plan out our releases. In the past four months this has been much more accurate and we’ve also made sweeping changes to improve how we are communicating with all of you.

Even with these challenges, you all have continued to support and play the game, and we can’t express how much that means to us as a team. We’ve had over two and a half million players and over 100,000 people are playing ISS every day. This is the type of success we could only have hoped for and we are working hard to continuously find ways to make this game a better experience for everyone.

Furthering our efforts in building an experience that supports our community, we’ve made some changes to our approach. To help rectify the communication gap mentioned earlier, we have brought on highly experienced community managers, who’ve been managing communities of games like World of Warcraft, Heroes of Gaia and Planetside 2 which have revamped our entire process when it comes to providing information to all of you. We’ve also adopted an internal motto of complete transparency whenever possible - meaning you will be able to talk directly with the people here making decisions, and we will be making constant changes based on what we hear. We’ve also made massive changes to Customer Support, starting with bringing in team members that are fighting for you guys every day. Since they have joined the studio, we now have an average response time of less than one business day to any submitted issue.
Backlog gone!

To support our players we’ve also made some really positive changes and advancements to our game:

Over the course of the last year, we have made sure that almost everything in a store is sold only using in-game currency (or zombie dollars, as our players call it). Items that can affect gameplay – armor, ammo for guns, meds, food and water – are now all available to be purchased using in-game currency only, not cash currency.

We’ve also overhauled our launch map “Colorado.” The newer version is larger (more than 100 km²) and more importantly, the game is now more open to exploration with fewer restricted and cut off zones.

Although we originally underestimated the work involved, we’ve also alpha launched our largest map, "California." This map is a huge expansive world with around 300 km² of explorable terrain, and an overall map size of over 400 km². Due to its massive size, it will be some time before it moves into the beta phase, but we are very happy to give players an early look at what we’re working on and offer a new area to play in and explore.

Vehicles have been introduced into our game and we are regularly improving the vehicle experience for players by tuning and upgrading them to make the entire in-game world more accessible and offer genuine variety to the genre.

We’ve even launched the infamous Super Zombie and added missions to provide a better variety of gameplay experiences.

To keep the experience polished and seamless for everyone, our game is constantly being play balanced based on player suggestions. We’ve made several major changes based on the results of various player polls. This is a huge part of our evolving core philosophy to bring our players the best possible experience with the resources we have available to us

We also would like to mention that we are proud to be part of the independent game development community and continue to work on our games without any external funding. We want to make an example out of ourselves so that hopefully our peers can avoid the same mistakes we've made along the way. You’ll be hearing even more about this from us as we are going to publicly expose our processes during the development of Infestation and have a candid discussion about who we are and what our goals are as a team. Learning these lessons has been painful at times, but ultimately it has been the best learning experience we could have hoped for.

With these lessons, we at OP Productions have decided that to continue proper development and growth of the game we needed to have the development team working closely with the operating and publishing team. We now have a new in-house development team that was formed with some of the members of the original dev team, joined by new developers we’ve brought on. This team completely took over development tasks from Hammerpoint Interactive in January 2014 and we are excited about the future possibilities. We are also working on some fresh, new concepts for Infestation players that we will be announcing later this year.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and we hope for your continued support. We love making games here, but without dedicated and loyal players we wouldn’t be able to continue the evolution of ISS. Everyone here at OP Productions is dedicated to achieving the goals in front of us and taking to heart the importance of having all of you with us on this journey.