Oracle is a Community Manager at Plarium, he is very active on the Official Discord Server, and the forums. He’s in charge of Discord and the Forums in partnership with the other Community Managers. He serves as a line between the player base and the company, and vice versa, passing feedback from us and notifying us about changes/updates in the game.

Oracle is currently stationed in Western Ukraine during the ongoing conflict for safety, having travelled from Kharkiv, one of the cities that have been hit very badly and we are incredibly lucky that he was able to spare some of his time in his very busy schedule to sit down with Deadwood Jedi for an interview.

Plarium’s preparations for Ukraine Conflict:

Plarium anticipated what was coming in Ukraine, in the weeks leading up to this, Plarium began evacuating important equipment and hardware, while ensuring that the servers would remain stable despite any disruption to the offices. Hardware was prepared to be transferred abroad to avoid the game facing issues for our player base.

Oracle’s experience:

Oracle was woken at 5 am on the first day of the invasion to very loud explosions, which must have been terrifying, to say the least, which as mentioned above was anticipated so didn’t come as a complete shock. Many people had ‘go bags’ packed ready in the case of an emergency evacuation.

Oracle was fortunate in the fact that he and his friends had made an evacuation plan to travel to Western Ukraine very early on via car, despite the traffic they were able to reach Lviv in around 4 days of travelling (This would usually take 1 day or so).

Geographical Breakdown of Plarium:

Plarium has many offices outside of Ukraine, however all of their development teams, managerial roles and support teams are based in Ukraine throughout Kharkiv, Lviv, Odessa and Kyiv, with the largest office being in Kharkiv.

With Kharkiv being very close to the Russian border, it was a prime target, and thus became a big threat for them to remain there. There was a lot of preparation for this, Plarium made lots of channels of communications to keep their staff safe and updated with the ongoings while they travelled to safety.

Plarium’s ongoing plans for the Ukraine Situation:

Thankfully many of the staff were prepared to work remotely due to the pandemic, however of course the offices are not safe currently, not all of the Plarium Staff are out of Kharkiv, some stayed throughout the situation due to various reasons. The vast majority however are evacuated or in the process of evacuating.

There currently seems no immediate threat of Kharkiv being completely taken and isolated from the rest of Ukraine, so everybody is in contact finding ways to coordinate everything that’s happening and how they can continue to work while prioritising everybody’s safety.

State of the game:

Deadwood Jedi asked a question that’s been asked commonly amongst the community about the state of the game, regarding the servers firstly – while Oracle is not able to disclose where the servers are located, he is pretty sure regardless of any scenario they are completely safe. The game should not be affected in any noticeable way.

This year was intended to be the year of PvP (in-game…) however with the situation we all assume the development has been put completely on hold, Oracle has assured everything will continue with the steady flow with Doom Tower rotations, Faction Wars rotations etc – as well as Tournaments and Events as they are pre-scheduled.

However, March will likely not have a Fusion Event, however, this will depend on how things go. Plarium does have the manpower to do so, however as a community, we’ve been asking for some respite for MONTHS now, and it allows them to focus that manpower elsewhere during these trying times.

Clan vs Clan WILL continue to happen every 2 weeks as we are all used to, this will not be affected.

The games development process will continue when all staff are safe and able to.

Raid Anniversary:

Deadwood asked if there would be the usual anniversary events for this year, since they are coming up, these MAY be delayed but there are huge plans in place so watch this space!

Unity Issues:

Plarium is continuing to work on compensation for those affected by February 13^th login issues for those who were affected and will continue to do so going forward.

• Ensuring this will never happen again
• Carefully looked for all affected users through the database
• Restored all Champions, and resources.
• Masteries restored to lost champions.

Unfortunately, the war broke out in the middle of this process, as it couldn’t be done in one go, but this week the process continued, and players received another batch of compensation. This may be the last compensation however they are monitoring the situation still to see if more is necessary.

Replacing gear is by far the biggest thing after some players lost all their gear during what we called Raid Login Roulette, however the hardest thing to replace.

Russian Sanction impact:

In terms of the impact to the game, an announcement will be coming regarding Plarium’s stance on the situation on the Russian Sanctions and how it will affect the game.

Community Events:

More community contests are coming when everything settles, memes, art contests and so on – stay tuned and get ready!

The full video of this interview is available on Deadwood Jedi’s Youtube Channel which can be found here.