Reinforcements have arrived

Hi All!

I’m Carid, a new producer for KND. I wanted to introduce myself and announce some exciting changes.

A brand new team is taking over the helm of KND. GREE is still the publisher and they’ve put us in control of the continued development and operations of the game.

So who are we?
Our humble studio specializes in operating “older” beloved games. We’ve worked on a lot of these kind of games in our collective careers. Some teams like to work on building games from scratch, we love the challenge of trying to take something that is already beloved and making it even better. We are in this for the long haul and our goal is to keep KND running for a long, long time.

What are our initial impressions on the game?
This game is truly amazing and we are excited to take on this project and work with you to make the game even better and longer lasting. We love working with passionate communities and we find the best projects come from where the players get involved in the process of improving the game.

What changes can you expect?

1) Nothing drastic until we ramp up more
We’ve been shadowing the current team for a little while now, but we still have a long way to go in understanding the game enough to make any significant design changes.

2) Simplifying technical operations
We have been looking critically at the technical operations of the game and trying to figure out how do we improve the overall service. The first thing we noticed was that some things were overly complex and error prone. In older games, it’s very typical that there are near constant issues occurring because of the built up complexity or poor technical foundation. This can create a vicious cycle of poor performance. Teams constantly get bogged down reacting to fires and don’t have enough time to fix the root problems and thus the issues only accumulate and push players away.

3) Accelerating EU version to NA content and design without merging servers
So our first change is to reduce the complexity created by maintaining a separate EU version of the game. For those that don’t know, there is a separate version of the game with slightly different content and design. The initial reasoning behind that version of the game hasn’t played out as it was initially intended, and it would be causing more complications overall than its benefitting.

We debated how to best service those players playing the EU version, and we came to the conclusion that a technical merge or sunset was not the right approach. We decided that keeping the EU servers running and players separate but syncing up the content and design with the NA version was the best option - we plan on doing this over the next season with a series of cool events. This approach allows the players to maintain their accounts and progress but removes most of the complexity and issues of maintaining different versions. For everyone playing the NA/international version of the game, this will not affect you at all.

3) Critical bug fixes
There are a number of bug fixes currently in the works such as the freezing during the guild battles and pvp. We are still working on those and will continue to prioritize those kinds of issues.

What can you do to help?
Taking over games is tough and bringing our plans to fruition is obviously no small feat and will require some change and above all, as mentioned before, your support and understanding. A transition like this will never go by without some bumps in the road and we will be counting on you to help us identify the issues and help us ramp up on the product. We will be keeping the communication system with sages and moderators that is already in place going while at the same time making sure to gather the input from the global audience.

We want to thank all of you for taking the time to read this and we look forward to working with you on this great game.

Sincerely,

Your KND Team