About me

As many players have asked questions about me, I thought I'd dedicate an entire blog post to it. I hope you'll enjoy reading it!

My name is Marc, and I'm 22 years old (19-05-1988). I live in the Netherlands, and have a Bachelor's degree in Information and Communication Technology (BICT). I'm currently in university (Radboud University Nijmegen) doing a MSc in Information Science, which will probably take another 2 years. It is fair to say that I got my degree partially thanks to TMN and its creator DragonCurse.

How it started
Back in June 2004, DragonCurse asked me if I was interested in testing somehing. I ended up testing and later managing the game we now know as TMN. We grew from 0 players to 2200 players online at the same time within a year, and even though we had our share of corrupt moderators, it was a great time.

Development
With no knowledge of programming, databases or even webdesign, DragonCurse trusted me with administrator access to the server (this was early 2005). He explained the (very) basics of getting data from a database, and soon I was on the way learning T-SQL. About 2 years later (January 2007, I was in the first year of my ICT study), I started programming in ASP.NET. I e-mailed my first code updates to DC on January 12th 2007 (although I may have updated more before that).

Misjudging
Because we were still too young to handle a successful game, TMN kept shrinking... From 2200 players online we shrunk back to less than 500 online, so halfway through 2007 we thought it'd be good to launch a new version of TMN: tmnX. We launched the game in January 2008, but unfortunately we misjudged the TMN players, who really didn't want another game! After 8 months of tmnX we decided to pull the plug and update TMN to a version we could manage: TMN Classic was born. TMN Classic was a 90% recoded version of TMN that performed a lot better and was easier to manage.

More recent
In 2010 the game had shrunk to less than 12 players online at times, and since I was in the middle of graduating (February - June 2010), I didn't have much time on my hands. Eventually TMN went offline. Because I personally wasn't done with TMN (and realized the players weren't either), I stepped forward and started working again. The rest can be read in the previous few blog posts.

Future
We can't predict the future, but we won't expect any luck (like in 2004). For that reason we'll be carefully planning new features, advertising, updates and promotional events such as holiday weekends. From the credit purchases we don't need to worry about server fees, but we do need to make sure the game attracts new players and keeps its current players. We may continue to work with DragonCurse and his new game (TMN4).

Marc