Since the announcement that Ojom would be ceasing its services for Face of Mankind at the end of November, FoM players have been wonder what the future holds for their game.  Now, the Face of Mankind staff has posted a letter to the community saying that they will take on the responsibility of running the game, detailing the changes that are necessary to do this, and hinting at their plans for the future.

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.

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.

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.

Read more here.