Hi all Hi all.

You may know me as « Mafaldrag » or « Oto Mustam », which are two characters I use to communicate with the heroic and Spanish speaking community.

I am a Community Manager, which means that I am in charge, among other duties, of the communication from ANKAMA to the players and, at the same level, to report the players’ feelings to the rest of the team. A Community Manager is also responsible for recruiting moderators and organizing in-game animations, etc.

Those missions are normally fulfilled by Kaoly, the International and UK Community Manager who, as you have noticed, has been absent for the past few weeks. Meanwhile, the INT and UK Community have been lacking attention from our part and for this reason, as the Leader of the Community Management team, I post here to apologize and I would also like to offer you some change.

For personal reasons Kaoly won’t return immediately. I do not have enough time to replace Kaoly until she comes back. Therefore, we have started to recruit a new Community Manager. Until this person arrives to do the job, we cannot imagine leaving the INT and UK Communities without a leader, or at least someone for you to communicate with. Contrary to some comments I have read, your Communities are not less important to us than any others (of course not!), though I must admit that, a big part of the members of the DOFUS team being French native speaker, more interventions are made in French by our people, ensuring a wilder communication towards the French Community… but it is a question of means, not of will.

So here is my offer: I will open a new section in your forums where we will be able to talk together directly. I will read this section daily and answer as much as I can to make sure that you have a direct link with the DOFUS team. I will of course go on posting the news for your communities and will rely on the competency of the moderators’ teams of both your Communities to make sure everything goes right during this period.

About the “everything goes right” I prefer to warn you that, with the little time I have available, I won’t spend hours (or even a minute) explaining to someone who insulted the DOFUS team or anyone of his fellow players why this is bad, bad, bad… I will just directly sanction them, for what I invite you to is a place for mature and reasonable talks, respecting the basic rules of courtesy.
You will discover this dreamland here.

P.S: thanks for your understanding regarding my imperfect English as well

Thanks for your recomandation SnarfSnarf!
Though those kind of decisions are not taken by a single person and I can't promess we will dedicate 20 persons to the International Community in the next weeks... We are not that many in our team, and, for exemple, only one person is 100% dedicated to the french Community which is (not my fault) the biggest one, from far.

Regarding the importance of the international communities, they have been taking much more importance lately, but there is still a gap between what we want to give, and what we are actually giving... But we are ambitious and, I hope, improving as well.

About the ideas to implement in game, no more are gonna be implemented this time: it is too late. Though the Game Designers' team is making the last changes and modifications on what has been announced in the news of the past few weeks.

Sorry It takes me a bit of time to answer in english but I definately want to answer to all your questions. Our day of work is ending by now and to give you some more precise answers I'd need to ask myself people who are now leaving ANKAMA to go back home. I suggest we go on tomorow morning, but before I answer to the first question of Medgix since it's about Community Management itself:


Let me tell you more about our organization. We originally used to work independently from each other: one CM for one Community. It has changed since September… or let’s say we are changing it since September. We are now a “team” in charge of the animation and the communication. But we still are not as well organized as we wish: I still was in charge of the Spanish Community (as Mafaldrag) until January and could not commit myself more to the organization of the team. Now that Sir-Dal is in charge of the Spanish Community, I have more time to do my job as “manager” but the results are not necessarily visible to the players because it requires a lot of time to get everybody to work together and because, at the same time, Kaoly absence has started… My point is: now, when something happens in a Community, there’s a team talking about the situation, what we should do, etc… And each Community Manager’s voice having the same importance than the others, we don’t have 1CM/C anymore, but several CM for the whole DOFUS Community.

If the results are not visible for you yet, I hope they will be soon, we are recruiting some more people and we start getting used to work together by now.

Why are we recruiting some more people? Because some of us had different tasks at the same time (translations for ex). Our aim is to soon have people only dedicated to Community Management.

As visible results, the examples I can give you are the “Bandit’s event” (with the enigmas) and the better Communications we’ve made about the Version 1.26 and 1.27 (you can read a summary of the 1.26 on the website and it will be the same with the 1.27).

Hi all (again) I go on answering the first questions. I'll answer them one by one (I might skip some of the questions if I feel I already have answered them but my aim is to answer them all). I've been very busy this morning and only had time to answer two more. But they are important, so I spent the required time to answer them properly.



One of our main preoccupations is to improve the quality of your gaming experience. Limiting the number of “bots” is part of this aim. To do so, we have been using a lot of new means during the past few months and we are getting better results. Even though those new means have had bad consequences for a little number of people, they were bringing good things to the majority.

But about the minority who has suffered from the situation, do we plan to offer a refund? No. Offering a refund is a very exceptional measure we only use in very particular cases. In the situation we are talking about, people were prevented from playing more than five accounts at the same time, but they still had access to all their accounts and still could play all their accounts… not more than five at the same time, that’s it. Even though I perfectly understand that this “detail” matters, it should be understood as well by the players who suffered from the situation that ANKAMA has the right, and even the duty to react according to the interest of the majority and that, for a matter of security, ANKAMA should be able to put on some IP restrictions, if required.

This, at least, is announced in the Terms and Conditions of Use of DOFUS that every player has to accept before enjoying the game. I perfectly know that most of the players don’t read them but… they should. So, putting it this way it’s like if, before they started to play, we had told them: “But be careful, at some point there might be some ip restrictions you might suffer from…”. Later on there have been those restrictions, so it shouldn’t have been like a complete unexpected thing, and now those restrictions are getting less strict. Someone with 24 accounts can still complains he cannot play them all at the same time, but this is part of the contract.

About the Support not answering fast enough on this matter, maybe at the beginning, but now a new procedure has been made and they can treat your demand on this matter during the day.


This is a sensitive topic because each time we say “Hey, we’re reading what you’re writing!” players answer: “So where can I see the result of my influence on your work?”.
The right answer would probably be: “nowhere and everywhere at the same time”.

I personally think that DOFUS is a great game with wild possibilities of evolutions, of new spells to add, of new dungeons to create and so on… But who will decide of the right direction to take? It would be such a mess if we were millions to do it...

So what we got is a team of game designers, of professionals, with Lichen, as their “Lead”.

If you go to those guys and ask them: “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have some new lands in DOFUS? A new Island or something?” They won’t start thinking about a new project of island. This is not how their brains work. They will ask themselves: “Why do players ask us for more content? Because they got bored too quickly about the last content we added. How can we change the game so that they can enjoy it for as long as possible? Let’s work on the balance of the game before going further.”

I don’t pretend to know exactly how a Game designer’s brain work, but what I can tell you, is that they go deep into the problem of the game when they offer some changes. To give you an example, if Game Designers were gardeners, they wouldn’t offer you a garden full of beautiful plastic trees like you asked, but a desert square of fertile ground, for fruit trees to grow… Does this image speaks to anyone? ^^’

So basically, the conclusion is: Game Designers read about your ideas, but how can we prove it to you?

If I have to be more precise, I’d say that indeed, the Game Designers don’t read every post. The Communities Managers are spending muuuuch more time on the forums than GD are, and the CM’s work includes the task of pointing out to the GDs what Idea they think could be used for the game. Kaoly has done this job when she was there, other CM do it for their own Communities, and I know that during Kaoly’s absence, Lichen has been spending some reasonable time reading the international forums… But we go back to my first question: how can we prove it? You cannot reasonably expect that an idea of yours, even good, even great, could be directly implemented into the game for Game Designers are working according to a planning prepared months in advance… Ok, it has happened sometimes but it was exceptional. The general rule would be more that an idea of one player here and another there will influence the evolution of the Game during the coming year.

On the other hand, if you would stop posting your ideas, your expectations, etc. The team would be completely lost. You see, it’s like if GD were standing in front of a gigantic crowd shouting at them… They can’t hear about the spell which should be cast for 4AP instead of 5, this sentence is lost in the tumult, but they hear the tumult which tells them which direction to go…

Ok, I hope I’ve answered this question properly, there are many others and I will have to go on. About Lichen official announcement, I’m not sure which one you were referring to, if it’s about the changelog for the beta-test, as I said before, if it’s been made in French and not in English it’s a question of means, not of will and at the same time we’re making sure your receive the official news (published on the website) simultaneously with the French, Spanish, etc. The changelog of the beta-test is nothing official. The official changelog of the version 1.27 will of course be translated and published at the same time than the French one.