Can you get your head around this?

I'm struggling too... but it's almost complete =]

For the VIP discussion please continue posting your views here

Ash

VIP/Plasma pack increase discussion

Had a talk with my new accountant and seems that I have to start charging sales tax for all vip/plasma packs. Which is a huge pain in the ass. But governments suck right?

Sales tax (in the UK) is 15-20%. (My accountant has yet to get back to me about whether non-UK people don`t have to pay this because they are not located in this country, but I`m not going to hold my breath, but if this is true i prolly wont make any changes)

So a few things i could do about this because i don`t really want you guys to feel ripped off.

- 1. Just put on the 15-20% tax and leave things as they are.
- 2. Add the 20% tax on and increase the vip days/plasma in the packs by 10-20%
- 3. Put on the 20% tax and have a 1 in 3 chance of winning extra days/plasma (similar thing to what the mobile company orange is doing in the UK for each topup you make).

I`m open to discussion, until i get a call back from my accountant i cant really do anything. But every purchase made now (as tax isn`t added) the site is gonna lose 15-20% of. But i don`t want to do anything till a)you guys are happy with a result and b) the accountant confirms the situation.

Please give any feedback or suggestions on my forum post. Click here to view the post.


Thanks!
Ash

New homepage layout!

If you're thinking to yourself, what new homepage layout? Gently slap yourself. (I say gently because i don't encourage violence... much)... but Dark August has made a beautiful new layout for us, looks good no? Should get a lot more people who visit the sign to create an account!

Lots to come!
Ash

Few changes and delay in new feature....

First thing is that I have reduced the bar prices by around 30-35% in an attempt to stable the market a little, we'll see how it turns out.

Thanks for all the feedback for Spring Valley, mainly positive which is good, the main fault being the amount of times you die, which is fairness is needed to make it more strategic. BUT i have decreased your chance of getting killed by up to 25%. As for the non VIP cost of traveling and healing, an upcoming feature will *help* with this, so stay tuned.

Today i wanted to present you with an awesome new feature, BUT it turns out it's more complicated that i thought and going to take longer to do. Booo. So i'll have it worked out and done over the next few days and post a new blog with the info.

As some of you have noticed 'Reputation' has popped up! It's so funny seeing everyone go crazy about it. All I'm going to say is that its related to this new feature. Maybe i shouldn't tease you so much?

Have a good week

Ash

The New Spring Valley v2!

The long awaited Spring Valley upgrade is now in working motion. For the past while each player got 5 free hunts a day. They could use these hunts to hunt humans in the town 'Spring Valley' just off our borders. NOW as the human civilization is growing I thought i should take off the 5 cap and let you hunt humans more freely, and that's exactly what i have done.

The new features of Spring Valley:

- New house images
- STAMINA is used for hunts.
- 1 hunt uses 1 stamina (whether it's a successful hunt or not)
- You get 1 stamina every 2minutes as long as you're ALIVE and located in SPRING VALLEY.
- There is a 300 cap for stamina.
- Hunting SKILL added (stats on home page).
- Your hunting SKILL increases every time you have a successful hunt.
- The higher your skill your chance of draining BONUS blood increases.
- A ranks page to show the top hunters.


As well as the 4 rank 1 quests that has been added (quite long winded ones too) which links with the new Spring Valley. (Harlot the hunter I, II, III & IV).

I'm hoping this feature will reward active players and give you something else to do waiting for the hourly reset.

This feature is in BETA so changes COULD happen over the next couple weeks depends on how it runs and the feedback received.

Feedback/comments etc can be posted here

Enjoy :)

Ash


Edit: I have updated the start hunt skill at 1. So if you had less than 1, you'd now have 1. & there was a typo saying you got 0.01 but you get 0.1 (it was adding correctly just wasn't displaying correctly)

Announcement regarding voting & upcoming feature upgrade.

I've spent the last few days working on a major upgrade of a well used feature in Reign Of Blood and currently in the process of testing it out. To put it simply, it's a way to reward those who are active and hopefully give something useful to do in between turns. It'll come out in BETA and have a week test run to see how it goes. If it takes off i can add more similar things which will give the active people plenty of things to do whilst waiting for turns, but wont be a major hinder to those who just spend a few minutes on the game. But obviously the more time you spend on the site & the more you work you do on your account should be rewarded, right? More on this in a few days.

As you can tell I've added a couple more quests, there are more to come. I'll keep adding them.

Now onto voting. I have added the 6 (and 1 more, totaling to 7) non turn bonus voting sites into turn bonus voting sites, meaning you now get turns for them! All voting like have been reduced to 4 turns BUT the extra sites make up for the loss, so don't worry about that.

But over the next 6 weeks (till the end of October) if i see a dramatic increase in RoBs place over the voting sites I will increase the turns (which is even more daily turns). But again that's up to all of you.

Hope you had a good weekend :)

Ash

New voting system, new marketplace & quests

Some of you will like this blog, some won't. Here goes anyway...

We'll start with the new voting system, instead of making them coming up one at a time i decided to simply leave the list there but put a timer on them. Last night I set it at 10 seconds, a lot of complaints charged in so I decreased it 5 seconds. Before the rant of hate for this decision, please read below (it's nothing new).

I add voting sites where you all can vote to help get RoB more players. In return for your vote i give you x amount of turns. As only Apex and DoG have incentive set up voting (meaning they have coded a script to work with my site so when you vote it adds the turns then) I think that 5 seconds is FAIR for 5 turns (more for some). They are NOT *FREE* turns, they are rewards for your support in the game. Simple as that. This block will help stop people just opening them all up and then closing (i know some people open them all up and then vote, and for those guys, i apologise for having to do it this way, but you have to agree this way is better than just having the sites appear one at a time which is what i was going to do originally). The idea is you open then 1 at a time, vote, then close. Then move onto the next. I agree that you could just open one up, leave it, and then move onto the next. But that would be boring and in my opinion i might as well vote.

5 seconds = 5+turns = fair.

As i said before, the majority of people who will complain about this are those people who just get the turns and don't vote.

Okay moving on... I have done some work on the market, to stop people posting stupid offers and to keep the market active I have made the following changes:

- Your listing is deleted (and everything returned) after 14 days of not being sold. (All current listings will start as if they were posted now). This will help keep the lowest prices on the market by getting rid of the ones that are not selling.
- You are only allowed 3 of each type of listings at any one time . (i.e. 3 plasma, 3 ap, 3 weps, 3 armour).
- To stop stupid listings there is a 1% transaction fee for all listings. So if you want to sell 1 plasma for $500,000 then you will have to pay a non refundable fee of $5000 when you make the listing. If you remove the listing from the market, you will not get your $5000 back, if you do not sell it after 14 days you will not get your $5000 back.
- Deleted all the deleted players listings

This will keep the market much cleaner and active :)

And the last thing being QUESTS, the start for the rank 5 quests has began, I have added 3 small quests to start off with.

have fun :)

Ash

EDIT: And FYI today is exactly 1 year since I posted my first RoB blog. wow =]

To the future!

A good afternoon to you all. Thought I'd blog just to let you know what's going on.

I have been playing with these voting sites, some have reported some don't work, funnily enough i tried them out and they all worked fine, I then must come to the conclusion that you're trying to vote right after reset? I think the reset times of the site and their site isn't matching, so I've put them all on resetting at the same time so you shouldn't have a problem anymore, leave it for a couple days and if you're still having problems, let me know.

As for the new voting *system* I have thought of another (but similar) way to go about it. So I'll probably spend tomorrow getting that coded up.

As for everything else, well, there is lots. Please remember if you have any suggestions please do put it in the suggestion forum, even if I don't reply, I do read them. From the current standing people in general are wanting:

- Market place tidied up
- Blood letter past messages showing up
- forum & coven forum updates
- & most popular... MORE QUESTS!

I am adding quests regularly, probably have a couple more on tomorrow. But from now on I'm going to level the quests so new players are not bombarded with all these quests. So the current lot would be rank 1, then 10 or so more for rank 5s etc etc BUT saying that, I am running out of places to have quests... ;)

Due to the interesting feedback with the coven invite update I have allowed people to use blood letters to invite people to covens. It is just comment invites which are now not allowed (because they do spam up profiles). BUT if you are reported as spam x amount of times in an x amount of time then your coven will lose the ability to be able to do it and caught doing so will not end pretty. But as long as you don't spam people you have nothing to worry about.

Last thing is I wanna get the Facebook page booming with fans, so if you have not joined yet, please do =) CLICK HERE!

Keep an eye on the updates page this week =]

Ash

*edit* below you will now see a "reaction" link, so click after reading so I can see your reaction :)

TOS has been updated & coven invites tweak

The coven invite system has been slightly improved and now a total of 1000 characters is allowed with each invite. Thus doing this the TOS about coven invite spam has been updated:

http://reignofblood.net/index.php?step=tos&page=3 (under Coven invites/spam)

Also, on the online vampires page I have added a newest vampire list, and newest covenless vampire list (link also available from the coven invite page).

Thanks
Ash

Ash is back! Things are back to normal...

The muse gig was AMAZING. To read my full story and pics/vids check out my post on my HALES BYTES site.

I have an exam tomorrow and then after that things are back to normal and the updates will start, with regard to the voting, I think i will implement that system previously discussed, i'll do a lot of testing and tweaking with each vote site because i know each one is different. I'll let you know during the week the progress.

Thanks
Ash

Going away for a few days notice.

This notice is mainly for the Google Checkout VIP users, I am going to see Muse Friday night at Teignmouth & camping there tonight to get the front spot (sad i know). Then I have Paint balling all day Saturday, so I will not be back online until Saturday night. So all Google Checkout/Phone payments (everything that has to be done manually) will be done saturday night/Sunday.

Thanks && have a great weekend :)

I will =]

Ash

Some software tweaks, things should be faster...

Evening,
Had the host guys take a look at the software of the server and do some tweaks to see if they can speed things up, they took some time doing so and things should be running a little faster. From the feedback so far from chat things are faster and hourly resets run quicker too.

Is it faster for you?

Thanks!
Ash