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Game Network, currently the providers for online games as Legend of mir 2, Legend of mir 3, The myth of Soma and Horizons: Empire of Istaria, is changed a lot the last years.
This thread is about an interview with the current management and what changes has been made since the dark months of 2004.
Taken from the original gnonline forums:
Quote:
Game Network has defied all odds, and in May 2006 is standing in one of its strongest positions in its history. For what many said was a dead company, it has recovered from its problems in recent years, to ironically sign Legend Of Mir 3 Europe after the failure of its piped successor Quality Gaming Online. With the return of Legend Of Mir to Game Network, the now sole provider of Legend Of Mir in Europe, we wanted to interview the man behind the change and understand what has caused this turn around. In an interview with the manager of Legend of mir services, we attempt to uncover why users should return to Game Network, and what future improvements lie ahead.
Part one of the interview targets what he believes has changed, for what reason and what future lies ahead. It at least provided us with an insight into the thinking behind the change and what Game Network plan for the future. If your interested in reading part one of the interview, you can find it here
You can also read the first part of the interview here (original posted on mirzone)
Click here to see the interview
Game Network has defied all odds, and in May 2006 is standing in one of its strongest positions in its history. For what many said was a dead company, it has recovered from its problems in recent years, to ironically sign Legend Of Mir 3 Europe after the failure of its piped successor Quality Gaming Online. With the return of Legend Of Mir to Game Network, the now sole provider of Legend Of Mir in Europe, we wanted to interview the man behind the change and understand what has caused this turn around. In an interview with the manager of Legend of mir services, we attempt to uncover why users should return to Game Network, and what future improvements lie ahead.
Hello Luca, it’s nice to meet you.
Response:
Hello to everyone at MirZone, it is nice to be here with you for this interview.
You are the man behind the changes since August 2004, in one sentence; what have you changed?
Response:
It is quite hard to describe what has been actually changed in a few words. We, more than just myself (I firmly believe that this change has been possible only thanks to the team of people that worked with me), simply took the service as it was during summer 2004 (the “DOS Attack” era) and brought it from that terrible situation to a better one by using all the means we could use. We started communicating a lot with users (while before there was no staff presence on the forums at all), we created a new website, we introduced a new support website (rather than using just the old e-mail based system), we managed to update the game at a faster rate than before (reducing the gap with the Korea servers down to no more than 2 months while before it used to be at least 1 year). These are just some of the ‘apparent’ changes, but the most important thing was a new internal reorganization of the team and their daily tasks. I still believe though that mamaging to move the game from our old italian based servers to a professional structure like NTT/Verio is probably the most important change that affected the game and server positively.
Behind the scenes at GN has much changed since the problems encountered in the early parts of 2004?
Response:
Definitely, things started changing rapidly in 2004 and we are still undergoing constant changes that hopefully will bring even better results in the near future.
Game Network Online has become much more one service in the last year with the grouping together of games on one forum and one account system. What is the idea behind this move? Has it been successful? Will any changes be made to this system or will it continue, for example with websites integrating?
Response:
The idea behind the new style for Game Network Online, since the launch of the new integrated web portal in early 2005, is the idea behind all the changes mentioned above. This system allows us a better management of our activities and things are running definitely better now rather than when each game or service had a separate team. One year later we can say that it has been successful and we are happy with the results we have achieved so far. This was just the first step, in the next few weeks we will be ready to move the second step forward and Game Network Online (under the new company name of Game Media Networks) will become an even more large portal of online gaming and services. We will obviously still focus on MMORPGs, but at the same time we will start managing also web-based games, free online games and so on. Talking about this we are ready to launch in cooperation with another company a sport themed game, we have acquired the license of the online version of a very famous brand game (which will probably be free) and we are constantly looking for new titles. Apart from games we will start servicing digital delivery of games (and for Italy only also a shop where retail games can be bought), we will probably host servers for the most famous online games and so on. All of this, as you can imagine, will affect Game Network Online as it is now and I’m pretty sure this will be just another positive change.
Many users still outline problems with your service. Do you agree there are still many problems, and what improvements do you plan to further improve your services? Do you have any plans to expand your staff to cope with the higher demand for support services, and apply new techniques such as phone support?
Response:
This is a service where you must always expect some problems, so every time it’s just a matter of asking ourselves “What problem will we have to face this time?”. I’d say that in these last two years we had to face our good number of problems and I believe we manage to do a good job all in all. Yes, the staff will expand and I’m personally doing an average of 5/6 interviews every week to evaluate new candidates. The support itself will be improved as well, we are evaluating new systems to use with the new web portal, but we will continue not to use phone support which makes the handling of each issue more difficult (as with phone support you have no track of the history of each case and manually creating it after the phone call would just double the time needed to solve it).
One key area which many users have criticized is your support. How do you plan to further improve this?
Response:
Support situation is definitely better than it’s currently painted by some (something that too often goes unnoticed is, if we take the example of forums, that when there are people complaining there are also players saying that they had no problems at all with it). Surely there’s still room for some good improvements and that’s the direction we are moving towards. As said above we are currently trying to find the best way to reach that goal in the very near future.
You are now hosting both Legend Of Mir 2 and Legend Of Mir 3 (Congratulations!) Do you have any plans to integrate the two services? For example character transfers or gold trades?
Response:
Wemade always considered the two games as completely separate (although it is undeniable that they are very similar in several aspects) and that’s how we see them as well so we are not planning any kind of integration between Mir 2 and Mir 3.
Another concern of users is that you will be unable to cope with both games. How are you organising Legend Of Mir behind the scenes. Are there separate or joint teams and will this need to change in the future?
Response:
As said on the Forums part of the team will be shared and part of the team will be independent for each game. Parts like the server management or the account management will be almost identical (although we will surely grow in numbers with time) since there’s no difference in the job (we use one account system only and the servers are on the same network and work in the same way), but there will be definitely parts (like support) who will have separate teams.
With the release of some big named games in the recent year, the online game market has increased dramatically in size. While this is the case, many of these new users do not even know about the Legend Of Mir. With the television show now off air, how do you plan in the future to advertise the game and gain additional users?
Response:
The launch of the new web portal will be followed by a marketing campaign all over Europe (mainly Italy and UK though). This combined with the new kind of services and games we will host should result in a dramatic increase in the traffic of potential new players for Mir 2 and Mir 3.
Your service aside, what does the future hold for both Legend of Mir 2 and Legend of Mir 3? Are patches still on there way and are Wemade still developing the game?
Response:
Wemade's success is based on the success of Mir 2 and Mir 3 which are still providing amazing numbers in Asia so the two games are still under development and we will definitely see more patches in time. In the next few weeks we will try to have a patch schedule plan for year 2006.
For many, Legend Of Mir 2 has become outdated in the sense that many of the features which were once challenging for lower levels, no longer is due to the level base of the servers. Will features such as Sabuk Wall ever be revamped? Or is Legend Of Mir 3 the future of the Legend of mir?
Response:
This is the current task of the developers and the “Game Developer for a Day” contest is there also to help them understand better the current situation of the game in order to make it more challenging with the next patches. And yes, we have already been told that Sabuk Wall is one of the first things on which they would like to work.
Do you have any plans to expand further your MMORPG Market?
Response:
Definitely, although our games are still doing good they’re growing old and they will not last forever so we are constantly scouting the eastern and western market for new titles... I’m pretty sure that once people will be back from the current E3 I will have lots of new contents to test and evaluate.
How much longer do you realistically think Legend Of Mir can last?
Response:
It is quite hard to tell. People said it was dead and with no future back in 2004 after Mir 3 launched. I can now say publicly that Mir 3 never had more users than Mir 2... meaning the game still has potential and that at the end of the day, we didn’t make such a tremendous job in trying to save it! Anyhow, I see both of the games running without problems for a few more years.
What are your hopes for the future of both games and for Game Network?
Response:
In the last two years the goal was to create a solid base from where to “jump” and reach a new level... we’re now getting ready for that jump so my hopes are to achieve this goal and with time establish ourselves as one of the main online gaming hosts in Europe.
Do you think you will ever lose the negative reputation which has been built up?
Response:
In all honesty I’d say that the reputation nowadays is way better than what it used to be when I started working on the projects... with time I believe things can only improve also under this aspect. There will always be someone who’s not happy or who will mention problems that happened years before in order to have some strong reasons to complain... we even have people who haven’t been playing for months or years still complaining on the forums. For some it might look like nonsense... from my humble point of view, it just shows that at the end of the day the interest in our games is still strong and that those individuals can still be convinced to become members of our community again.
Finally, what do you see as your number one achievement during your time running Legend Of Mir?
Response:
Raising it from the ashes where it was, seeing the numbers of active accounts rising by 30% in just 4 months and keeping them high for the following two years. Finally... ‘winning’ the small war that some created with the launch of our most direct rival Mir 3 in Europe... which is now in our ranks ;-)
Thank you for allowing us to interview you, especially with your busy schedule. Hopefully users will continue to benefit from the changing practices of Game Network, and will allow for a stable environment for the benefit of both Legend Of Mir games. I don’t think anyone can argue, Game Network has come a long way in a short space of time, and here at Mirzone we look forward to the future of Legend Of Mir in Europe.
mir is kinda ancient, the only reason i'd ever log back on to my old toon is to have a chuckle at the old graphics and the scant content ><
was good in its day, shame things have moved on so far to make it look so mediocre.
Interview with Game Network
Linear Mode
