I'm a little confused as to what is happening to FoM. All i've heard is that there is going to be a free trial and then i've seen that there is going to be a shut down... So what is actually going to happen to this game

Well if you look at the ratings on this site FoM is one of the top games, if not the very best mmo on the market today.

If you can't afford the subscription fee, I would wait for the free trial.

Lol, no i'm not exactly rich at this time but I was wondering more about whether the FoM team are going to pull the plug or not

Dear FoM Community,

many of you are waiting to hear word from us about the future of Face of Mankind.
Since we have been informed about the cease of service by Ojom at the end of november, we had to do a lot of thinking and planning. The main questions were whether we would be able to continue hosting the game by ourselves and if we would be willing to take the financial risks involved.
We have spent a lot of efforts, diligence, money and even health into the project, and we are not willing to give it up that easily. So we decided to go on, with a few changes, but at least go on.

In order to be able to host the game on our own, we need to simplify everything a lot. During the last weeks we've come up with a concept for this, which I'd like to present to you roughly.
By simplification I mean the game, the server structure and the portal.


1. The Portal
The portal will be reduced to the minimum necessary to present the game to the public.
We will no longer host an official forum or irc channel. We want to give that into the hands of you, the community. As the developer we will present all necessary information through the portal or the game. Also, we are going to implement a biweekly development blog with all kinds of information that would be interesting to you, both official and internal. That is to give you an insight view of how hard it is to create and manage an MMORPG.


2. The Server Structure
The server structure has to be simplified in order to allow for an easy administration, setup and expansion of the cluster. There will be a master server to which all available world servers will connect. Clients who are registered on the master server, will receive a list of world servers they can connect to. The importance of the world server will be increased compared to before. You will find out what that means when you are able to test it for yourself.


3. The Game
The changes to the game will be rather dramatic. But rest assured, these are necessary changes for FoM to survive and hopefully grow later on.

First of, the accounts. There will be two kinds of accounts, a free one and a premium account. Free accounts have no time limitation (so they can be used forever) but limited features. With such account your character can't evolve beyond a certain point. With premium accounts all limitations are lifted. They will cost a yet to be defined monthly fee. We are also considering the option to purchase premium game time to remove the necessity of having to "subscribe".

Next, there's the game mechanics. During the last years with FoM we could gather a lot of experience and let's say "maturity". We've tested a few very revolutionary features, if we remember the first versions of the mission system. After a few more iterations, we have to admit that some things just won't work, at least not yet. Some have worked out, others rather not. We took a very honest view at all of the features in FoM and decided to do the following changes. I'm going to list them here as notes only.

- Introduction of Clans
- Factions: each faction will be turned into some sort of profession and the old professions will be removed, each faction will give the character a speciality
- Planetary Overview when logging into the game, no more travelling between worlds through vortex gates
- There are worlds for combat and worlds for socializing
- Local economy only, "what is generated on the world, stays on the world", this includes everything from mining, production, market sales and removes transporting
- Storages work like safes
- Introduction of Bio Updates: Character stats, features and options can be enhanced
- Introduction of Bases: On each world, there will be a certain number of bases that can be conquered by clans. Bases consist of a number of linked energy plants that have to be taken out for the force shield to come down. A lot of the PvP oriented gameplay will be about bases
- Turrets are linked to bases
- The mission system as we know it will be no more, instead there are going to be tasks with waypoints that can be defined by clans on a world
- Permanent death will be removed
- Re-Implementation of aliens
- Other world AI (birds, rats, civilian NPC's, server controlled vehicles etc) has to be simplified, the chat AI will be removed and NPC responses will be streamlined


4. Timeline
What we cannot do is giving you an exact timeline. What we will do is trying to keep posting regular (weekly or biweekly) development updates on the portal, so that you can get a picture of the progress yourself. Before the relaunch, we are going to set up another closed beta test to make both the client and the server as stable as possible.


5. The Future
This first relaunch will be called "Face of Mankind: Rebirth".
If things are going well and the customer base grows, additional world servers will be added step by step.
When we reach a state where we are able to generate a stable income, further development steps are planned. The next stage will be called "Face of Mankind: Evolution". We are not going to give out any details about that yet. They are still too undecided to publically announce them.


At the end, we would like to thank everyone involved in the creation of Face of Mankind again and each customer for their loyalty. We will try our best to bring the game back to life, since (and you will most likely agree on this) the concept deserves it.

The Face of Mankind Staff

Due to the publisher pulling out, Duplex systems is basically downsizing the game. While doing so, from my understanding, they are aiming for a larger target audience. Which basically comes down to, more action, much less RP.

According to what DPS has said, there will be two account types. Paid, and free. They haven't said anything along the lines of what the differences between the two account types will be. IMO if they had implemented a free trial much sooner, they probably wouldn't be in this situation.

Originally posted by drdysdy

IMO if they had implemented a free trial much sooner, they probably wouldn't be in this situation.

Forcing people to pay for the game sight unseen was the only thing that kept even a trickle of new revenue coming in. A free trial would have been FoMs' wordt nightmare: instead of free advertising, the word of mouth from the trials would have been a free burial.

Originally posted by zigmund

  

Well if you look at the ratings on this site FoM is one of the top games, if not the very best mmo on the market today.

 

 

Was that a typo? If that were so, why would the servers be closing?

Originally posted by Zorvan

 

Originally posted by drdysdy

IMO if they had implemented a free trial much sooner, they probably wouldn't be in this situation.

You're right. If they'd had a free trial sooner, the game would have been dead sooner.

 

Forcing people to pay for the game sight unseen was the only thing that kept even a trickle of new revenue coming in. A free trial would have been FoMs' wordt nightmare: instead of free advertising, the word of mouth from the trials would have been a free burial.

Thats really not true, at all. The reason that FoM wasn't fun, was because it didn't have the player-base to support the player-run aspects of the game. If it had the player-base, it would have gained momentum.

Im gonna miss this game. I loved OB, and 2-3 months after it.

They made huge mistakes. like the new skins.. wtf.. the old ones rocked. new ones look like pansies with guns.

Anyway.. Game was at its best in OB, I suggest they start work from there..

I think the problem was it wa snot advertised enough.....I aiccdently found this game and not by any site or anything I search *mankind* on google and found this game on the 10th page...so advertising should be better. and gl KEEP US UPDATED!

And I do look alot of mmorpg sites and never saw face of mankind

Originally posted by mock0

I think the problem was it wa snot advertised enough.....I aiccdently found this game and not by any site or anything I search *mankind* on google and found this game on the 10th page...so advertising should be better. and gl KEEP US UPDATED!

 

 

 

And I do look alot of mmorpg sites and never saw face of mankind

So I hope DPS has learned the following thing: Don't take a company who mainly makes games for mobile phones as your publisher!

I disagree Ojam had very little to do with the changes, and the only thing they had to do with the shutdown, was after over a year of losing money they decided to cut there losses and leave...

The Vast majority of changes to FoM was made to counter PLAYER behaviour.

Originally posted by arutham

I disagree Ojam had very little to do with the changes, and the only thing they had to do with the shutdown, was after over a year of losing money they decided to cut there losses and leave...

 

The Vast majority of changes to FoM was made to counter PLAYER behaviour.

It wasn't untill one of the Ojom staff (zordax) started playing the game that DPS got some more freedom.

Yes, actualy most of what we say is speculation, there has been very little info from DPS or Ojam about exactly who did what..

Im pretty sure that Ojam was behind the anti swearing policy and the removal of the more mature pictues (club 69 picture)

I don't know wether the file of our character will be delete, if it is delete, I feel very sorry.

Yes. i think its safe to assume that there has/will be a wipe...

with the changes being made makes no sense to not to restart everyone.

I can tell you right now as someone who worked behind the scenes alot of the things that got added later into the game came from imput from ojom, as soon as ojom took a more direct role into things everything went downhill, you could also see the devs were also alot under more pressure.

Originally posted by Baihuigau

I can tell you right now as someone who worked behind the scenes alot of the things that got added later into the game came from imput from ojom, as soon as ojom took a more direct role into things everything went downhill, you could also see the devs were also alot under more pressure.

And who are you claiming to be?

Consider this from an outsiders perspective, at this point your flogging a dead horse. You're down to a few developers, you need to make huge changes and then re-build your community. As much as everyone hates to admit it here, it's not going to happen and you're going to end up in much more debt then you already are.

What's your purpose with this? That you're going to become rich in the end? That the game must live?

I seriously doubt it's the former and if it's the latter why not just open source what you got minus the propitiatory stuff and move on with your life. You're already bastardising what FoM was into a generic FPS anyway and making yourself bankrupt isn't going to make things any better.

Do you think all these internet buddies are going to be there for you when your homeless on the street? I think you should have a hard think seriously about where your business is going and possibly think about doing something that is going to earn you more cash. It might be a couple of months, or it might be a year but in the end the MMO dream is going to come crashing down on you like a ton of bricks.