Salem

Greetings Salemites,
Its been a long hard road, and trust me when I tell you that I honestly feel that today feels much more like the beginning of the journey for us, than the end. We have been giving a lot of thought to where Salem was, where it has gone, and where we want it to be and quite frankly in almost every facet of the game there is more that we have changed, and like than there is that we feel 'needs to be done'. As we get down to more issues of 'refinement' and less issues of broad sweeping changes we cannot help but feel that it is beginning to feel a bit unfair to hide behind the "Beta" tag of Salem, and even-more-so to consider the title in Alpha or some such. We have grand ambitions for a large volume of future changes to Salem but very few of these we feel are essential to the core game play.

All that being said, we feel that it is rapidly approaching a time where we should climb out from under the rock that we have been hiding under and let the gaming world, community, and general population know what we have been up to. So much so that we have made a tentative "Release Date" of June 19th. This will hopefully coincide with the launch of first expedition. And no, we have no immediate plans at this moment for any kind of server wipe to providence. We are still considering how many patches, updates, and changes we wish to 'squeeze' into Providence between now and then. We are also strongly considering a "test expedition" that might last a single week or so that would be simply to stress-test the new technology and provide a more seamless "launch".

The egotistical and evil side of John Carver that you have all come to loath wishes I could say you are a bunch of nubs and we could of done it without you. But the realistic fact of the situation is that we could not have gotten to this point without a tremendous amount of help, assistance, support, and encouragement from the community at large. Y'all have had every opportunity to spew hate and negativity and despite the toxicity of a permadeath environment I begin each day with countless inspirational posts, pm's and optimism from those of you who still feel as passionately about Salem as we do. The performance of the title is on track this month to be almost 800% higher than the point of acquisition and it was all done without a SINGLE marketing post, dollar, or effort being spent on our end.

It is hardly fair for me to ask more of a community that has already done so much for a game that punishes them so badly, but I do feel that now more than ever is Salem's time to once and for all carve out our piece of the market in addition to find and connect with all the lost souls who have been searching for a game just like ours. Very little will change in terms of our attitude towards making Salem a 'mainstream' title that everybody will love. Salem was quite simply cut out for a different future and a special playerbase. This simply means that we will now be sharing that be believe Salem has enough polish and content to entertain from expedition to expedition for hopefully years to come.

Effective immediately, I will begin contacting all major media outlets, gaming channels etc. to make sure that Salem, and our launch date, are reflected in the gaming community.
Effective immediately, myself and Marp will be refunding to the corporation 100% of ALL revenues and salaries taken for ALL work we have done. This refund will be used for the purpose of maximizing opportunities to market this game.
Effective immediately, we welcome all of you to like our facebook, up-vote our post thingies, forward our little tweets, and in general support whatever other social playgrounds I will find myself forced to dabble in for the upcoming month(s).

Please feel free to use this thread to do TWO things.

#1: Scream your heads off about all the mechanics or systems we cannot possibly 'leave' in place for the launch. If there is something that you feel is just too unpolished, ugly, or unfinished, now would be the time to let us know just incase we forgot about it.

#2: Let us know any website, marketing avenue, streamer, youtube personality, opportunity YOU think we should be marketing in. How did YOU hear about Salem? Where do YOU think are the future players of Salem and how do YOU think we should get their attention? Thanks to your generous support we actually have MORE funds in the marketing budget than we did when we started developing and we are looking for any and all options that you think would be a good place to invest them.

P.S. Yes your animals will still be in before launch.


Marketing Efforts

Salem Facebook is now back online. come be my friend!
https://www.facebook.com/SalemGame

We are now tweeting.
https://twitter.com/salemthegame

We are now using Reddit for major announcements
http://www.reddit.com/r/Salemgame/

We reached out to this youtube personality to check us out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/GamerZakh

We reached out to this youtube personality to check us out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/SilverDragonLord

We reached out to this youtube personality to check us out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/paulsoaresjr/

We reached out to this youtube personality to check us out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Aavak/

We reached out to this youtube personality to check us out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DMJared/

We reached out to this youtube personality to check us out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/markeedragon

We reached out to this youtube personality to check us out.
https://www.youtube.com/user/TotalHalibut

Thank You,
John Carver

Very nice!

An answer to one:

Well, one feature that has bothered me and those I know every time we've come back to this game is the fact that terraforming(Not regarding biomes) is hit or miss most of the time, and isn't just "a exponential amount of work", but can in fact be impossible with the highly unnatural 1-square pillars/pits all lined up.

And an answer to two:

Seriously get the hell on Reddit. Even if it's just to post patch notes. Reddit's a pretty big place to get momentum/hype for things.

Stupid question but after launch will you still be updating providence with more content or focusing solely on expeditions?

Before june please prepare a thread / changelog listing the major changes done within the last year. That will be useful for returning players as well as the press.

my concern is the already laggy server....
i would think you would want to try and find and nuke the lag causing bugs before trying to get a mad rush of new players that are going to stress the server even more.

The game went from less than 50 players online when i left to nearly 800 active users every day, i thought it was a joke at first, but i could see it with my own eyes after coming back, the town is more alive than ever and my buddy list has always someone online to whom i can talk and share experiences with, truly the game has evolved and for good.

Now why did i comeback? Personally because i saw the game was being updated again, i did not care to know about admin changes, which i found out later anyway, but the pure fact of knowing the game was not abandoned, made me, and i'm sure that many others, come back and have fun discovering everything i've been missing.

Rubberduckbandit wrote:Stupid question but after launch will you still be updating providence with more content or focusing solely on expeditions?

Expedition content will "Roll" back onto to providence at the conclusion of each expedition. The idea is that if you want to play with the most fancy of toys then you play the expedition. But everything or most things 'should' roll their way back to providence eventually.

vysen wrote:Seriously get the hell on Reddit. Even if it's just to post patch notes. Reddit's a pretty big place to get momentum/hype for things.

Yes. I'm working on getting familiar with all the fad-sites. We will work on establishing a presence here as well.

Procne wrote:Before june please prepare a thread / changelog listing the major changes done within the last year. That will be useful for returning players as well as the press.

Fair point. You should make it for us .

Toorimakun wrote:my concern is the already laggy server....
i would think you would want to try and find and nuke the lag causing bugs before trying to get a mad rush of new players that are going to stress the server even more.

We pushed a fix that 'feels' like it fix'd a chunk of it. But the spikes are still too frequent I agree. I am optimistic we have identified another solution that should fix it even further but its a bit of a complicated fix that will soak up quite a bit of our remaining dev-time.

Great

JohnCarver wrote:Fair point. You should make it for us .

Keine english non comprendo monsieur!