Wednesday 29 September 2010

Vampire Powers V2



Vampire powers were added back in December 2008 (Wow time has gone fast). This type of feature was highly suggested and it turned out to be a great hit. But that was 2008, this is 2010. So I present to you V2 of the vampire powers. Since January 2009 over half a million powers have been activated. That shows people like and use them!

Vampire powers now work to compliment your current stats.. V1 adds an exact amount to your stats (I.E +5, +50 etc). But that's changing. So I present V2.

What's different? Well stats are now added in terms of PERCENT%. MP cap has been increased, and you can now activate only 2 powers at a time.

Head over to the vampire powers page to check it out.

Here is a screenshot:







































What about MP?
As you can tell the benefits are much greater now, so in turn the MP cost has increased slightly. Its up to you whether you want to unleash a mega attack every other day or so or use small powers more regularly. This gives you more room and options for your strategies.  The MP rate of 10/hour is still in place (VIP+ members get an extra 5 an hour remember). The cap has been increased to 400 for everyone.

Pretty cool huh? More powers and tweaks may be made (you've been warned), but we'll see how this runs to start with.

Remember that the lottery jackpot as I said last week will get an extra $10million on the already nearly $100million jackpot for this Saturday. It's going to be a good one.

Enjoy!
Ash

Friday 24 September 2010

Crazy double & extras weekend! Couple tweaks & weekend plasma special



I'm feeling generous so lets run a DOUBLE WEEKEND!

DOUBLE POINTS. DOUBLE BANK INTEREST. DOUBLE TURNS. EXTRA $10MILLION LOTTERY REWARD.

That's right! Until Sunday evening you'll receive double points on all point offers. If a point offer says you get 10 points, when completed, you'll receive 20! Bank interest has been doubled for the weekend, so make sure you fill your bank up to your cap to get the most interest you can. And mostly importantly, double turns! TURN CAPS REMAIN UNCHANGED! Make sure you login regularly over the weekend to use your extra turns.

There is also 20% extra on all the regular VIP & Plasma packs (not bundle packs) when paying with Google Checkout or Paypal (UG card and Wallie are available, please blood letter me for instructions).

The premium gym (where you can get up to x4) is open for business again! Everyone has access until 8am tomorrow morning (8am 25th Sep game time). Buying a VIP pack gives you access until tomorrow at 10pm (10pm 25th Sep game time). Buying a plasma gives you full access until Sunday night 10pm when the offers end and double weekend is over.

As for the lottery WINNER this week, whoever wins will get an extra $10million to spend on whatever they want!

I have slightly increased the bank interest cap for now, you can head over the to City bank for the latest rates. Made couple changes to the new blood letters as you can already tell. I know the funky reply button doesn't work on mobile browsers, which is why i added a hard link at the bottom of the page for you to reply.

Enjoy!
Ash

Wednesday 22 September 2010

Blood Letters V3, bank interest changes, Inventory & other changes



Been working on quite a few things the last week. Some new exciting features and some changes that some may not be too happy about, but necessary. Sitting tight? Here goes!

UGC Card changes
For those that use the Ultimate game cards you can now see some new packs as well as the monthly packs I added to the Paypal page a month back.

Metal Man II & V quest  II
As you've probably already noticed there is a new V quest (ha) and a new Metal Man (Grim) quest. I wonder what he's building?


Rank Up notice
You no longer level up automatically per se. When you complete a battle, hunt, quest etc it checks if you have more blood than your max and gives you a rank up notice and then ranks you up. The blood bar no longer stretches over the limit if you have more blood than blood max.

Drop down menu edits
There has been a couple very small changes to the drop down menu, one of which is explained below.

Inventory
For reasons explained below there is now a new inventory section. Which in its first stage, doesn't do a lot.  You know when you send gifts to each other? Well now you actually get the gift. They'll be stored in your inventory. In the future more things can be added to store in there & quests can be spawn from this. You can hold up to 50 items at this time.

Bank Interest changes
I've made some changes to the bank interest system. Because of abuse of the interest system I've made the interest rank based. The interest is still 1% a day, and every day at the main reset you get the 1% added with the new caps (explained below) and a news notification to let you know how much you earn. Oh, and you must have at least $100 in your bank to get any interest.

Rank          Interest Cap
1-9            $1,000 (First $100,000 gets interest)
10-19        $10,000 (First $1,000,000 gets interest)
20-29        $20,000 (First $2,000,000 gets interest)
30-49        $30,000 (First $3,000,000 gets interest)
50-74        $40,000 (First $4,000,000 gets interest)
75-99        $45,000 (First $4,500,000 gets interest)
100+         $50,000 (First $5,000,000 gets interest)

please note this is the first version, changes may be made soon

For example, if you're rank 20 you'll be in the 3rd tier, which means you'll get a cap of $20,000 interest a day. Which means that if you have $100,000 in the bank you'd get $1000 interest. If you had $10million in your bank you'd get $20,000 because only the first $2million earns interest.

VIP members get a  + 20% bonus after caps
VIP+ members get an extra + 10% bonus after caps
(25% total if you have both VIP days and VIP+ days)

So using the example above and you're rank 20 (and you have VIP and VIP+ days) with $10million in the bank you'd earn $20,000, then + 20% ($4,000) and then +10% ($2,000) which gives you a grand total of $26,000 daily interest.

So the maximum interest you can earn (being rank 100 and having VIP and VIP+ days) is $65,000 a day.

This will also give another incentive to rank up. Obviously a lot of people won't be happy with this because the majority of people will be getting less bank interest. But at the end of the day, its FREE money you're getting from the system. So some better than none right? Rank up and get more :)

Blood Letters V3
Blood letter changes! A complete overhaul of the blood letter system that will come to a shock to start with (it is different!) but once you play around with it for a while you'll learn to love it like we do. Sitting tight?


Blood letters v3 works on a 'thread' system similar to the forum setup. When you send someone a blood letter for the first time it creates a new 'thread' between you and the person you just sent a blood letter too. The message than appears on the blood letter homepage as it always has, but when they click it will it take it to the thread you started. At that point they can reply to the thread that adds a message into the thread itself which then sends you a notification (like before) of a new message where you can view the reply. The messages you send will have a dark background and the messages you receive will be a lighter coloured background so you can quickly and easily tell the messages you sent.

Blood letter homepage works like the news page, the messages you see are not the actual message like before, they are just notifications of a new thread or new messages in a current thread. If someone adds 3 messages to a thread before you get chance to look at it again you will get 3 notifications on the blood letter homepage even though its 3 messages added to one thread. In this scenario when you click on one of the unread notifications it will mark all unread notifications linked to that thread as read. Notifications on the blood letter page can be deleted but the actual thread messages CANNOT be deleted. They are deleted automatically after 30 days of inactivity (subject to change). So it does not matter if you're not using the thread anymore, just delete the notification link to it and forget about it.

Saved messages work the same, threads cannot be saved but individual can be, click the save image next to the message itself.

Sent messages has changed a bit, they work on the notifications, you can still see if a message has been read or not. You can no longer mark a message as unread, but you can flag them by clicking "Flag messages" when viewing a message thread. You can now longer view the message that was sent, only the subject and whether its been read or not. Messages will no longer disappear if the receiver deletes the messages, although you won't know if they deleted it, it'll stay marked as read.  Unfortunately, you can longer search by message
.

The old blood letters can still be accessed via the link at the top of the page for a couple weeks. Unfortunately saved messages cannot be transferred over. So if you have any messages of importance, you'll have to transfer them over manually. Some of the automated services (i.e. new player welcome bl) will be transferred to the new over the next day or so.


Gift Shop changes
As said above, gifts are now sent to your inventory with a news notification instead of just a blood letter, so you'll no longer see blood letter notification of gifts from the gift shop.

The bank interest, inventory & blood letters are running in BETA just in-case any bugs find their way to the surface or I have to make any necessary changes.

As you can see, lots of changes! Gonna relax now and have a drink. Next month will be a cool month, with lots of Halloween events. Next month hopefully we'll do a review of the coven wars & a couple other features that need improving.

Post feedback or ask questions on any of these updates here
Post any bugs here

Thank you!

Enjoy,
Ash

Thursday 16 September 2010

Server changes & competition winners



We've made some server changes which included a re-install of the OS on one of the hard-drives & a new cable because the cable was dodgy. All servers should now be in fully working order, so we've done some more work on the way the servers handle your sessions (Which is why you all got logged out earlier). This should have also fixed the rank jump bug. If you're still getting this from NOW on, please report it in this thread.

I apologise about the mix up with the August competition, had loads more last minute entries! Here are the new and final winners:

1st place: Lady Of Moldovia (390361) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmAeg1D1vyQ
2nd place: Squall (330173) http://tinyurl.com/32w4nvv
3rd place: Pikelets [Tass]™ (309053) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ77Q_HAA9k

A big THANKS to everyone who entered!  I will give everyone else who entered a free plasma (only if you sent the blood letter with the correct subject).

I can confirm there will not be a competition this month, a new one will be set for October. Still working on a couple new things and a couple changes. They're in the last stages and should get them out to you ASAP.

Not long till the weekend, can't be bad, right?

Enjoy,
Ash

Wednesday 15 September 2010

POSSIBLE DOWNTIME FROM 10am

Morning,
We plan to reinstall the OS & the software on one of the web servers this morning to help fix some of the server glitches. I've been told the work will start at around 10AM game time but it could vary. It'll be down for a few hours. As far as I know the other web servers will remain open but as everyone is piled onto one it will probably be quite slow. This is the quietest time of day so hopefully it'll be okay, but this needs to be done.

Will update you if there is anything to update.

Ash

Tuesday 14 September 2010

Paypal changes



Just a heads up that Paypal has changed their checkout layout. I went to purchase some advertising and this new Paypal layout came up, I thought it could have been some phishing attempt or something. I went and clicked the 'Buy VIP' link on RoB and the Paypal page it takes you is the same as I had. Checked the SSL etc and it's all legit. I know some of you get a bit thrown off when changes like this are made who are concious of security online, you don't need to be alarmed by Paypals change.

(I prefer the old one to be honest, don't like it when it goes gray and the spinning loading thing comes up)

Always keeping a watchful eye out,
Ash

EDIT: We're doing some extra server logging to help squeeze out some problems, so things might be a little slower overnight.

Friday 10 September 2010

2 days left of August competition, bug fixed, promo code & more



It's good to be back! Excited to get back into the motion making RoB better.


Earlier today I posted the results for the August competition, I had in fact realised that i said the 12th end date not the 10th. All prizes to the 3 winners have been recalled. Sorry! In 2 days time i will announce the winners again with any changes to better videos being submitted in the next couple days.

If you don't get know about it, click here for information and entry details. There are not many submissions, and I still have to choose 3 winners!


Moving on, there has been a lingering $0 equipment bug. What I've done instead of manually updating all the effected equipment, I've made it so that if the reselling value of any equipment is $0 it will shows as half the cost price as the reselling value. (Prices may vary if you buy a weapon bought from a VIP member buying equipment at VIP prices because of discounts).

Couple changes to 2 current features coming soon, one you'll like, one you probably won't like as much.

P.S. Use promo code ASHISBACK from some free goodies!

Enjoy!
Ash

Bug fixes, August competition winners & more



It's good to be back! Excited to get back into the motion making RoB better.



*post removed, please see later blog*

Moving on, there has been a lingering $0 equipment bug. What I've done instead of manually updating all the effected equipment, I've made it so that if the reselling value of any equipment is $0 it will shows as half the cost price as the reselling value. (Prices may vary if you buy a weapon bought from a VIP member buying equipment at VIP prices because of discounts).

Couple changes to 2 current features coming soon, one you'll like, one you probably won't like as much.

P.S. Use promo code ASHISBACK from some free goodies!

Enjoy!
Ash

Sunday 5 September 2010

I'm back!



I am now back at home! I'm not that jet lagged i don't think, it could kick in later. Going to go for dinner and have an early night and start catching up on stuff tomorrow!

I had a great time and it was good to get away. Back to work now though!

I am extending the current competition to September 12th FYI!

Have a good evening.
Ash

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