PowerPlay 杂志

The interviews are back and today I bring you Vlady, S-Admin from PPM. Most of decisions inside the game come from him regarding the most varied subjects. Today I'll have the help of our translator everhenr.

Hello Vlady! Tell us about you. Who is Vlady? What do you like to do? Are you married? Got any kids? Do you have any favorite sport or a hobby?

vlady: “Hi. First of all I would like to say that it is a pleasure and honor for me to do this interview. I am 28 years old and I live mostly in the Slovak capital Bratislava. I am single, I don't have any kids, but I would like to have some in the future. I am a big sports fan, I follow a lot of sports and my favorite sport is hockey. I don't just like watching sports on TV, but I also enjoy doing sports actively. I also like listening to music, especially heavy metal and thrash metal.”

Slovakia isn't a known country to Brazilians. Could you tell us how the things are on your country? The weather, politics, culture, sports, etc?

vlady: “Slovakia is mostly a mountainous country although I have lived all my life in lowlands. Our weather is mild, we don't have any extremes although in recent years it's been getting warmer. In winter we have snow and we have plenty of ski resorts, in the summer you can enjoy warm weather over 30 degrees celsius on many days. Slovakia has been a democracy since 1989. We have parliamentary elections every 4 years and presidential elections every 5 years. Right now we have a left wing government. The mood in the country is not very good regarding the political situation, but we are a stable country without any armed conflicts. The cultural life in Slovakia is very diverse. We have a rich folklore tradition, but I am no expert in this field. The most popular sports in Slovakia are hockey and soccer. In hockey we are one of the world's top seven countries and there is great tradition in this sport. People also like tennis, basketball, handball, volleyball etc. The funding of sports in Slovakia is not very good though and in most sports we have very poor facilities and very few of them too.”

You're one of the creators of the PPM Project, is that correct? How did you start with the project? Where did the idea of creating a sportive management game came from?

vlady: “I am not one of the founding members. I joined later on, originally as a translator. Tuttle could tell you the story of how he got the idea and how hard the beginnings were when he and Gioel and maxo were working nights after they got back from their day jobs to put together the first ideas.”

You're the translations' coordinator and we also notice your dedication to the users and communication with the captains. Could you tell us more about your role inside the game?

vlady: “Like I said, I started as a translator and soon after that I was promoted to the position of translators' supervisor. At the beginning I was a volunteer working from home just like you. But then tuttle offered me a full-time job when the full version of hockey was launched. I accepted and since then I have been given many other responsibilities. Right now I am the chief of development as well as director for public relations. I write all the texts in the game including the news. I also serve as the coordinator for all PPM team members including captains, gamemasters, moderators, helpers, editors and translators. I even do some programming occasionally. I am not a programmer, but I have learned something and I am able to fix simple bugs or write simple codes myself.”

I got with satisfaction the information that you're working on a new game (Racing Duel). However, I'd like to ask if this new project has any influence on the late release of the Handball. I ask that because most of the Brazilian users prefer management games like football and hockey. So the question is, how do you see the success of the management games until now and why you decided to go for secondary projects knowing that the PPM development team is small and also that the management games are what you do better?

vlady: “The management games are slowly but surely losing on popularity. People now have lots of other entertainment options on the internet. We cannot compete with facebook. Most people like simple games where they don't need to analyze too much. The income from PPM was going down and the outlook was not very bright. In order for PPM to survive, the creators needed to ensure that there is enough money to run the game. If we hadn't launched Tennis Duel, PPM would have to fire some programmers or reduce the expenses in other way to survive. Games like Tennis Duel and Racing Duel are less difficult to develop and they generate more revenue. Therefore they help fund PPM development too. Maybe there would be no handball if it wasn't for these side projects.”

We have big waiting lines of new users to the sports that weren't released yet. What's the development team's prediction date to release all the sports? Could you give us at least an estimated date? Will all sports be released someday?

vlady: “There is no telling what the future holds. We don't plan beyond handball. I am not sure we can release all the sports.”

The relationship between support and the Brazilian community has been improved significantly with our new captain (jorgenius) and with the participation of portugalec. That caused an increase on the amount of active users on Brazil. Taking as example these changes on our country, don't you think that democracy could make the game grow even more, hearing the needs of the countries that actually have just a fewer active users?

vlady: “We are happy with the progress made in Brazil. I think the situation in countries where we have captains is very good now. We don't have any such problems as we had in Brazil. The captain of the community will always be chosen by us. We need a person that we can trust and who is capable of performing all the duties. Popularity in the community is not enough to do this job. Of course in a perfect world, the captain should be a charismatic person who everyone respects and we like to choose those types of people.”

Now I have a question to make you relax a little bit. Is it true that to be a PPM investor one of the main requirements is to be bald?

vlady: “Hehe, Gioel is not bald!”

If I'm not wrong, the Handball was predicted to be launch on the first half of this year and then it was postponed to this half. What happened to justify this delay?

vlady: "Hard to say, we had other things to do in hockey and soccer that couldn't wait. I don't remember now what those things were. The good news is that the handball development is moving on now and we are making progress.”

Why the maximum value of the football attributes is 655? What's the limit on hockey? Talking on this subject, what's the maximum rating that a player can perform on football?

vlady: “It's a programming convenience. Attributes are stored in database including their decimal values in numbers 100 times bigger than you see. Unsigned smallint data type has a cap of 65535. Divided by 100 that is 655.35 and that's the maximum attribute value a player can have in soccer. This way we can save some space in the database by capping the number. In hockey there is no such limit. There is no maximum rating. We have not simulated a perfect player so I don't know what kind of rating he would get.”

Looking at the GM list, we notice that there's no GM to represent the Americas. Have you ever thought about choosing a GM to this region?

vlady: “We are always willing to take on board GMs who speak various languages. But for that, there need to be suitable candidates. I don't think we had any applicants from these countries. It is a tough selection process and not anyone can become a GM.”

The most controversial part of PPM is the Simulator, a lot has been changed and improved, however we have too much things to fix. Do you plan to improve it more? If yes, what would be the modifications?

vlady: “I think the way it is now is pretty good. There are still some odd results and there is still room to improve, but right now we have other priorities and we think the way it is now is good enough for the time being.”

The next question was sent by the brazilian user Lucas Teodoro. Was the idealization of PPM worth it? Did you get any profit with this? Do you have any joy of working on a game where you can’t play seriously?

vlady: “You would have to ask that the founders. I am just an employee. I think from my previous reply about Racing Duel you can guess whether they made any profit or not. For me personally, it was definitely worth joining the team. It's a job that I enjoy.”

Thank you vlady for the explanations, for the excellent game you guys created and for taking our community into account more and more each day. Even though the game needs some improvements, we feel PPM is kind of addictive and we really like it a lot.

vlady: “You're welcome and thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk to the Brazilian community via this interview”

And that was Vlady in an exclusive interview for PP Magazine Brazil. Thank you and until next interview!