Interview with Ned: the creator of Maxithlon part 2

We met Ned another time: many news are coming!!

Between the seasons 21 and 22 we met Ned another time and we thank him for the availability.

Hi Gabriele! (Gabriele is the name of Ned in real life!)

Season 21 is finished…first of all…what about your team and the standing?

Another question? 🙂

In this season there was many news and many others there will be…the coaches’ number, competitions’ news , candidature changes , offers’ managment…practically no one can say you didn’t work on the game?!?

Yes,there was many changes and the cycle is almost closed. The next “serious” changes will come when we will acquire all the data from these last changes so we could improve them or correct them if something will give problems…In fact i want say to everyone that we supervise the game all the time and if we will find out the changes didn’t go in the right way, we will create corrective changes in short time.

Why did you create these changes?What do you think it will change in the game?

We wanted to solve the old problems….. At the end, the meeting will be less important than before for the economy, manager should be clever to choose the best way to train the athletes (and for this , there is the Favorite Event change which will give differentiation to the event.We hope that you like it),the athletes will be competitive until 30 years old (and more), little nations will have less facilitate in the economy than before…ecc ecc

Usually the community is divided when the staff create a news. Many users agree with the news and other user don’t agree with it.What do you think about these new releases?Do you think the community accepted all these news?

It’s really hard to imagine a modify which everyone can appreciate…also give to everyone 100.000 it don’t satisfy all (and we aren’t speaking if this action is judicious or not)… i can’t judge becouse many times we read quick analyses,sensations and not reasoned analyses.Since the first season we heard “Maxithlon is closing down” or “Maxithlon was better than before the last change” but we are still here and we have to say that development is good,no? Maybe some changes went better than other ones.We are all humans and all the decisions are based on specific analyses but we work for supposition(especially for the economic side) and we don’t know where the game’s dynamics will go …. i ask to the community only one thing: be patient and you try to create a calm speech for every change (also becouse many times from the speech someone give us good ideas for the game). We don’t need demagogy, we need a good community with good ideas to improve the game … 😉

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The last time you told me that the Maxithlon’s community is really qualified…there are many user which are athletes in real life.Is this  for you a spur and a big responsibility to do the best for the game?

Yes,it’s a big spur…but Maxithlon is a game which was born from the reality but it don’t try to imitate the reality in every point of view and it happen for technical,economic reasons and, most of all , becouse Maxithlon is a game…… Maxithlon’s standard user is an adult player which try to know the game deeply , he wants to knows all the specific section and for these reasons, when we create every new change, the community do a strong analysis.We know that “out of there” there are many users which are ready to examine the modifications from all the point of view and many times,for this reason, development slowing down becouse we try to release only the sure things therefore all the modifications which don’t allow to downgrade the game ruinously…

Only one news maybe didn’t give to you the right signals and it was the evaluation post system.What’s happened? Can we say which it was a failure?

In fact we took away it from the game.We done it for 2 reasons: first of all, many users used the system in the wrong way, only for personal use.After, there was a section wrote with jquery and this section was really slow for many browser.So we chose to unprime it.But the code is still there…i don’t know if it will come back…. 😉

If you should see the start, in what direction is the game going?

If you think that the starting code wasn’t created for a sport game (which i left time ago), we could say that the platform had many evolutions…. 🙂

Many game’s sections now are bigger than before and others sections now are easier than before.In these years we tried to make slender the boring sections while we tried to improve game’s possibilities and we tried to do that without changing the time which standard user uses for the (20 minutes at day).

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Many important and old users left the game this year.Maybe there are physiological reasons…what do you think about it?

I’m really sorry when the old users leave the game but it’s normal but it allows a replacement in the game.It happens in all the game (how many users from the season 20 or 25 still play now in Hattrick?)and it happens in the reality too… active users’ number constantly grow up (and it grow up the average game life for the users too) and there wasn’t “tears” in the game and it is one of the most important gauge that i consider to understand if Maxithlon is going in the right direction…

Everyone knows that Maxithlon and Gamefox have a bond…can you tell us some news or something about the new game’s releases?What do you working about?

You should ask it to Macao. He usually wants to talk to me about the news 😉

Now, could you try to be in the user’s shoes?What can you tell about the game?And what about the staff?What’s the most difficult news to manage?

The only criticism i can do is that there was many many changes… i’ve to admit that we changed many thing and maybe, the master plan could be hard to understand … however, i will think that all these news are stimulating becouse with all these releases , many strategy could change and many manager could grow up fastly…

Is there a project to give to maxithlon more visibility?Is there a national or international advertising campaign or similar?Do you want to spread out the game?

One of the activity behind the scenes is the promotion.There were different advertising campaigns on the web but the budget are really limited and it’s hard to have a registration’s boost and it happen becouse for these kinds of game the principal promotion way is based on the “mouth”.Usually a friend or a acquaintance help the new user in the first steps in the game.Different users(specially in the small countries) think that it’s really convenient to be few users in the country…but this is false…in fact, the last news specified that “little isn’t good” and the only one action to win is to create a country system.

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The last time you also told me you want to insert other people in the staff.I saw that in the last days there are many new international “Assistant”.How do they will work?Another question:Spain, after Italy, has the biggest community in maxithlon but in the same time , there aren’t Spanish members in the staff.Why?

The assistant will help us in different functions like the managment and to promote the game. You have to think that all the new collaborators were inserted after a specific search and, above all, nobody ask to us to become a staff member.It isn’t easy to find out the suitable users for the staff (and these users should be interested to become a staff member)…and in this moment, for Spain, there isn’t any interested user.But in this moment the Maxi-operator are working to manage the spanish community so the spanish users have few discomforts…The better to choose these thing is without hurry.

We saw a good news with Kiva and the microcredit.How did this bond is born?Do you know Maxithlon is one of the few online games which has a Kiva’s Team?

I know Kive from many years and i signed up myself for curiosity and to fund some project. After a bad event in the Spanish community, i felt that money(the users payd Maxitrainer package) “in my conscience”…so i chose to devolve the money to finance Kiva. From that day, Maxithlon support Kiva with a group.Part of the Maxithlon’s surplus is used for Kiva’s projects.Now Maxithlon has 4 microcredit project (total amount: 100 dollars).

I hope many user will support this initiative.Everyone can start with 25 dollars (16-17 euros) to fund them in one of the project in the web site. After some month you will have back your money and when you will have the starting amount , you should fund them in other project…In our group we are few users but we already fund project for a total amount of 2000 dollars..

Seeing that Maxithlon’s community , and generally Athletic’s community, is really united and generous , i think which it could be great if some users chose to agree our group in Kiva with some Euro.

thanks to ValerioNeo for translation!

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