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Hello community,

due to a DDoS attack our forums and irc are still down, we are looking into the issues. Please be patient, we are talking to our provider about a solution. In the mean time you can join us in quakenet irc channel #fom-public. I would love to see as many of you join as possible, as it will help us to improve communication between gms and players as well as the player to player communication. All of our GMs please join this channel as well.

How to join IRC ?

1.) go to http://www.mirc.com and download mirc or find another irc client of your choice

2.) connect to quakenet, you can either use the menus or enter /server irc.quakenet.org in the chatbox and press enter

3.) to join our channel type /join #fom-public in the chatbox and press enter

zordax
Community Manager
Face of Mankind

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Dear Players of „Face of Mankind“,

It saddens me to inform you, that we have decided to cease the operation and
support for “Face of Mankind”. This step has become necessary after
subscriber numbers have been very low in the last months, in addition to an
unsatisfying support from the development team to implement important and
needed changes and updates.

While the service has never turned over any profits, with the subscriber
numbers being more than three times as low as they needed to be in order to
break even, we simply cannot proceed to throw money into a project which
isn’t likely to make any profits soon. We have discussed possible solutions
to this problem, and sadly all things that can be done involve further
investments and support from the developer, which both seem pretty unlikely
at this point of time. We have tried several solutions in the past, like an
added investment to upgrade the used game-engine, or added marketing
resources to get more people playing the game, all with too little of a
result.

Effective today, we will stop the renewing of subscriptions to the game
service, and keep every currently active FoM account which is in good
standing with us active until the end of November. For this last month, the
status of support is a bit unclear at the moment, as we largely depend on
volunteers whose motivation will probably (and understandably) be low.

Before speculations run wild, we would like to clear up some points. While
this game has never been targeted to a larger audience, FoM is designed to
just appeal to a very specific player-group. Changes needed to attract more
players seem at this point nearly impossible to implement, as the potentials
of the developer are limited, and furthermore will probably not be available
in the future. Even if we put legal aspects aside, having a new dev-team
getting familiarized with the project as it is, will proof at the least
problematic, and is going to take money which is simply not there. Added to
that a certain lack of interest felt especially lately from the dev's, we
have to assume that support for this intention would not be the best.

Some might point out that these actions might be related to a recent attack
on our forum server. This is of course not true, the decision to terminate
FoM has been in discussion from the day we launched the service, but the
recent attacks (along with attacks in the past) have shown that every
script-kiddy can launch an attack which is going to cost quite a lot of
resources, and this has fortified our decision.

As many people might ask, of course we brought these incidents to the
attention of the authorities, but this is a timely process, especially when
police departments of several countries are involved. Further, the questions
remains what good comes of it – it is no help to anyone now if in a few
months some kid in some distant country is sentenced to juvenile prison if
we have to deal with the damage now.

As a result of the last attack the forums are down at the moment – we are
very sorry for that, but in order to take them back online our provider
asked us to make some changes which we are not willing to make at this
point.

At the end not all feels bad when looking bad. We all here are grateful to
the many players in the community that helped us, especially the volunteer
support people did a great job and we couldn’t have gotten here without
them. We especially thank the people who just gotten recently into the
project and tried to turn things around.

Sincerely,

Christian Winter
Project Manager Online Games
Ojom GmbH

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the-middleman postete
edit: Fox das hier so darzustellen als hätte irgendeinen forenuser FoM getötet finde ich bischen seltsam

edit2: ne offizielle bestätigung gibts afaik noch nicht. Ojom will wohl die Zusammenarbeit beenden, aber Duplex will FoM wohl weiterführen

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limlug postete Dann sollte er sich aber ein kompetentes team zur Netzwerksicherheit besorgen. DDos ist eigentlich seit Ende der win2k ära ziemlich out^^

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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

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- Local economy only, "what is generated on the world, stays on the world", this includes everything from mining, production, market sales and removes transporting

Zitat:

- 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

Zitat:

limlug postete
Dann sollte er sich aber ein kompetentes team zur Netzwerksicherheit besorgen. DDos ist eigentlich seit Ende der win2k ära ziemlich out^^

Zitat:

en.wikipedia.org

* Around June 23rd, 2008, Marko Dieckmann declared on the official website that development of Face of mankind Rebirth has been cancelled. He is now pursuing another game under Duplex called Nanoverse Online. Little is known about the game, other than a small synopsis gleamed from the page source on the main website:

"Nanoverse is an epic science-fiction based massively multiplayer online game in a microcosmos, a persistent world where thousands of players world-wide can build their own nanobots and compete with each other."[2]

* On October 4th, Duplex Systems changed, once again, the image on the Face of Mankind website to state Face of Mankind, Coming Back Soon. It is unknown at this point whether Duplex actually intends to re-release the game. Many are speculating that it's just an attempt to deter people from the Emulator created for the game.

* On December 1st, www.faceofmankind.com was launched as well as forums. The new website claims to be working on and will soon be launching Face of Mankind as well as a new cooperation between Duplex Systems and Nexeon Technologies.

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warri postete
Es gibt wieder Neuigkeiten:

Zitat:

en.wikipedia.org

* Around June 23rd, 2008, Marko Dieckmann declared on the official website that development of Face of mankind Rebirth has been cancelled. He is now pursuing another game under Duplex called Nanoverse Online. Little is known about the game, other than a small synopsis gleamed from the page source on the main website:

"Nanoverse is an epic science-fiction based massively multiplayer online game in a microcosmos, a persistent world where thousands of players world-wide can build their own nanobots and compete with each other."[2]

* On October 4th, Duplex Systems changed, once again, the image on the Face of Mankind website to state Face of Mankind, Coming Back Soon. It is unknown at this point whether Duplex actually intends to re-release the game. Many are speculating that it's just an attempt to deter people from the Emulator created for the game.

* On December 1st, www.faceofmankind.com was launched as well as forums. The new website claims to be working on and will soon be launching Face of Mankind as well as a new cooperation between Duplex Systems and Nexeon Technologies.

Statement im Forum: http://forum.fomportal.com/showthread.php?t=196

Im Grunde wird die Welt erst ein mal von 30 auf 6 Welten verkleinert und es wird eine neue Closed und eine Open Beta geben, Termine sind noch unbekannt.

Mehr Infos gibts in den nächsten Wochen und Monaten.

Na hoffentlich wird das was :)