The History of Orkfia (Part III)
During this period in ORKFiA as more players became inactive, those remaining began to merge together to form new alliances from the embers of their former glory.
One such alliance was CORE which was made up of players from several former top alliances. Martel was one of these players. He had joined ORKFiA originally after hearing about it through his friends at school in Sweden and had played in many alliances before finally settling with fellow old timers Airro, VC, Wheelie amongst others to create CORE.
Describing that period in the game Martel said “it frustrated me a lot, bugs ruined my age several times”. Despite Martel’s obvious love of the game, at this time he was not involved with staff and hardly knew Skathen or fRoSt. He was an active member of the player community however and spent a lot of time in the #orkfia IRC channel.
After each age change he took it upon himself to create a printable guide so that people could compare the races more easily and a lot of players relied upon Martel for this.
Earlier in 2002 American player Scarlo had joined ORKFiA at the invitation of his younger brothers. Scarlo had not really expected to find much fun in a text based game but found he was pleasantly surprised. Rather than playing ORKFiA just to have a connection with his brothers who lived two thousand miles away he found the game stood up on it’s own merits.
He became an avid player and an active member of the community surrounding the game. After playing a few ages he was recruited by CORE and after the initial settling period that all new alliances go through. Scarlo and Martel emerged as co-workers, they worked together as the active elders of the alliance teaming up to devise strategies for the alliance in war and peace time.
Their partnership continued into staff as both Martel and Scarlo were invited to become staff of ORKFiA. Game Admin fRoSt had realised he needed to organise the staffing of the game so he set up divisions of moderators called resorts. He recruited a leader of each resort and those leaders in turn recruited extra staff to help them.
Martel had not initially been a popular choice for staff it seems, as after fRoSt initially approached him to invite him into staff, someone must have disagreed with the choice as Martel’s invitation was withdrawn. Martel still does not know to this day why this was or who had objected but it didn’t really matter as soon enough he was invited again to work in two of the staff resorts.
Over time Martel found himself more and more involved in the day to day running of the game and as fRoSt took even more of a backseat in ORKFiA things took a natural progression as Martel was made a co-Admin.
Martel was still supported by his friend Scarlo amongst others but he was finding it difficult to keep up with improving the game code, developing race changes, fixing bugs and of course resetting the ages.
At this point the idea for losing the age resets came up as players were unhappy with waiting a week for the game to restart every six weeks or so, it was reasoned that with no age resets this could free up time for actually improving the game rather than just maintaining it at the same time as providing more fun for players, and killing two birds with one stone… “ORKFiA Infinity” was born.
Infinity went live to players in August 2006 and whilst some loved the idea of no boring “inbetween ages time”, others longed for the ORKFiA of old with the excitement of beginning a new round and the bloodbaths that ensued to get to the top of the rankings at the end of age.
What remained of ORKFiA’s players began to divide into two camps – those for Infinity and those who preferred the original ORKFiA.
Scarlo had continued supporting Martel as an active staff member but the game was being taken in a direction he just didn’t agree with and he felt his concerns were not heard. Around the time Infinity began, Scarlo who at that time was Head of Marketing, deleted his staff and player accounts and left the game along with the Head of Development Airro.
A few months later Scarlo returned to see how things had turned out and decided to give Infinity a fair chance, he created a new player account and soon his alliance was dominating ORKFiA.
Despite holding the number one ranking he and his alli mates yearned for “old” ORKFiA and made the decision to quit.
After talking with a number of the old players Scarlo realised he was one of many who preferred the game style of the original ORKFiA and he began trying to think of ways to bring it back – if this version of ORKFiA was not prepared to change then the only solution was to get another version online.
Scarlo did not have coding knowledge himself but he knew there had been a past Admin named Natix who may be able to help, the trouble was that Natix had quit the game and disappeared from orkfia sometime in 2003 around the era when the game had begun haemorraging players.
Natix was a professional programmer who had been involved with ORKFiA throughout much of it’s history as a coder/Admin working in the background, he had even hosted ORKFiA in the beginning for a short time when ORKFiA had been kicked off sourceforge due to being too “resource intensive”.
In 2003 Skathen and Frost had given Natix the task of re-writing the code of ORKFiA as the buggy old code was to blame for a lot of the crashes within the game since it had not been designed to serve so many players. Natix had taken the task of the so called “ORKFiA 2″ and used many hours of coding time on it but unfortunately that version was never completed as, in Natix’s own words it was “too little, too late”. When the majority of his friends left the game in 2003 he too got bored with ORKFiA and quit.
Scarlo knew that even if Natix was not interested in ORKFiA at all anymore, he at least had a copy of the code which would be a start, so he decided the best hope original ORKFiA had was if Natix could be found. The trouble was that the only contact anyone had for Natix was an old email address which they were not sure if he even still accessed.
Call it fate or luck but even though Natix usually could go for months without checking his old MSN account, within a week of Scarlo’s call for help Natix read the request and got back in touch with Scarlo.
They spent many hours catching up over the following days and it turned out Natix is now a senior programmer in his native Canada and runs his own consulting company.
After hearing what Scarlo had to say Natix felt he wanted to help, with his coding knowledge having improved since his last foray into the ORKFiA code he decided a programming language called Python would be the best to use for the new “old” ORKFiA and he began the task of coding the game from scratch.
The new partnership named this version of the game “ORKFiA Origin” and set up a forum at the beginning of this month so that players, old and new could discuss ideas for the direction of the game.
As with Infinity there are no clear cut answers and everyone wants different things for the game but it certainly sounds promising.
And so we are up to date on the history of ORKFiA. Whilst there have been peaks and troughs in the game’s popularity, the community have always managed to keep the game alive. We are all involved and all responsible for the future of ORKFiA.
Whilst Martel and his team of staff in Infinity are striving to keep ORKFiA moving in a new direction, his past cohort Scarlo is separately breathing new life into the ORKFiA so many knew and loved.
Whichever style you prefer, the choice will soon be there for all of us, as players of this game things are only getting better as we move into the future of ORKFiA.
~ By Jamzi ~
This was the last part in a serie of three where Jamzi described the ORKFiAn History up to the point of Aug 28 2007, next I’ll try to write down whats happened since then.
Stay tuned for Part IV.
