Trik's new potion system, NEW CHARITY, April competition & new spell!

I hope you're sitting comfy...

Trik's New potions

The big update this week, is a huge evolution of the potions. Potions were brought into the game last month with the Action Aid charity packs. A half-successful feature I want to make into a full successful feature. So what's changed? A lot. There are now a huge variety of spells. From more battle blood, coven exp & money, to motivation and turns top up. Other than the different types of spells, here are the other changes:

- Potion credits (which can be bought) is used for buying the advanced potions
- Potion credits can be traded on the market!
- A variety of potions are also available for purchase with In-game money as requested.
- ALL potions (except the one off turn ones etc) are bought with a 1 hour lifespan. The main problem with the 24 blood potion was, people felt like they were wasting money as they do not play 24 hours a day. So now each of the potions last 1 hour so you can use them as you need too, this makes them more valuable.
- When potions are bought they get put in the "Your purchased" section, where you can drink for the potions to take effect.
- The majority of potions are capped. For example the turn potion is capped at 1 per day to stop people being able to to buy more than a fair amount of turns. It's to be looked at as a quick daily boost, rather than something to harvest for turns, as that's not what I want it to be.
- War exp will NOT be put into potions, please do not ask.
- Vampires under the battle protection do not appear on the "attackable vampire" list at the battle arena.
- You can send potion credits the same as you can plasma and money.
- Everyone gets a free potion credit!

New Spell! (Beta)
There is a new potion which increases your battle protection to one hour. Which is useful for those hunting in Spring Valley and getting some stamina building up. There is a counter for that, the new spell "Break Out" which elimnates ANY (including the 15min) battle protection from a player. (To counter this you can use the spell protection potion :P) Also remember everyone has a permanent 10 minute protection from spells.

As you can see, there's a lot of fun to be had here with so much going on. Can't wait to see how it all plays out.  Please note that the figures in the potion shop can change due to testing & monitoring of results and player behavior.

[ Please give feedback on the potions and spells here (bugs too) ]

New Charity
A big thank you to everyone who donated to this months Charity packs. I'll add up the totals and announce what will be donated on the next blog. We'll be supporting a new charity this month:

We'll be supporting the British Red Cross' Japan Tsunami appeal. The same bundle packs will be kept on the Buy VIP page for this campaign. And what's even better, 20% of all the proceeds from the new POTION credits will also be donated to the fund. Everyone knows what happened in Japan, we can help too.



April Competition
There was no competition in March, for that I apologise. But fear not, there is one for April, and it starts today.April's competition is to test the sense of humour of RoB players!

Click here to get the full image.

There are 2 stick-vampires at the plasma shop. Fill in the speech bubbles (with paint, photoshop, any program you want), save the image, upload it to Photobucket or Tinypic.com and send it to the ROB-BOT. The top 3 get a nice plasma prize!


Here's a quick one I did, of course yours has to be funnier than this.

Oh, and happy birthday to our boy Darion tomorrow.

Have fun, good luck & enjoy!
Ash

Double "Thank you" weekend!

Small quest change

I have removed the V quest from the quest lists.  They seem to be causing more hassle then they're worth as we're getting a lot of help tickets about it. It's meant to be a pain in the ass, but I think it's too much of a pain in the ass. Please remove it from your guides.

Potion updates
So you're curious what's going on with the potions? All in good time my friends.

Double "Thank you" weekend
People don't say thank you enough. This is my thank you.

Thank you for playing RoB.
Thank you for telling your friends about RoB
Thank you for donating to RoB
Thank you for buying a charity pack to help us raise money for good causes
Thank you for posting your link around
Thank you for sticking through the painful quests I create
Thank you for giving feedback on the work I do
Thank you for voting us top RPG every year
Thank you for helping me make this the best online vampire RPG
Thank you for creating covens which are homes to so many vampires
Thank you for keeping the competition high throughout the game
Thank you for taking part in events and competitions
Thank you for allowing me to create and work on something loved by many people.
Thank you for keeping RoB going for nearly 5 years.

Want me to shut up yet?


To show how thankful I am, this weekend you all get:

• +10 turns an hour for everyone

• Double points on all the points offers 

• Double bank interest

• Double PvP battle blood

• Double PvP battle coven exp

• Double motivation

Get another +10 turns an hour if you buy any of the charity packs this weekend!

It's going to be a mental weekend...

Have fun guys,
Ash

48 hour potion notice & motivation update

Afternoon everyone,

Server bump
Some of you were kicked off this site this morning, i didn't get chance to send a warning, but we simply had to make some changes to the RAID array in one of the servers. It's all sorted now and back up and running :) We run several servers to keep RoB fast as possible, sometimes, if we need to do any work on the servers and you get "logged out", don't panic. I do my best to warn before we do work on it, but if that ever happens, don't worry about :) Just login again and you'll be placed on a server that is live.

Potion notice
I'm announcing this notice because of upcoming changes with the potions. The potions were brought to the game in the charity pack to help raise money for good causes. This potion pack is no longer available at the time. The potion system will be getting an update very soon, which would render the current potions out there, useless. So here is a 24 hour notice to use them because when the new update is put in place, you won't be able to use them. You will however, be eligible for a transfer to whatever is coming up, but won't be at the same rate for reasons you'll see when it's updated.

The potion pack is no longer available to buy until the new update comes into place. Don't worry though, we're still supporting charities.

Motivation Changes
Overall positive feedback with the motivation boost, however there was one concern, and that was not everybody likes to throw 50 turns away in one training session because it's too risky. I listened, and now I've acted. You can now enter how many turns you want to train with your motivation.

We love followers
That's right, we love followers so much, that if you follow us, you get exclusive news & the odd chance of a social-only promo code. I will be releasing a promo code soon over our social sites.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/reignofbloodnet
Twitter: http://twitter.com/reignofblood

Please note: This notice has extended to 48 hours.


Enjoy,
Ash

Hourly turn changes, quest changes & new gym update [Updated]

Quest changes
The quest list 1 has been annihilated. They were made years ago and they're just not worth modernizing. So things like the bar pass etc no longer exist. In the space of quest list 1 are the "duration quests", which currently consist of the metal man and potion mixer quests. The quest 2 list is now the quest 1 list. Sorry for the confusion, but I'd thought I'd let you all know so you can update your guides accordingly.

New Gym
The gym is one of the first features that was created for the game, and it's been pretty much the same the entire life on the game. So today, I can happily announce a new update for it, along with some changes to ensure proper addition of your stats.


- New enhanced training added. You get 25 (more for VIPs) motivation a day for a chance of x0.04 at the gym. The enhanced box will disappear when you have no motivation to use. (Non VIPs still do not have x0.03 unlocked). This is OPTIONAL. It's completely up to you if you want to use this or not. Some people, of course, won't like spending 25 turns in one go, and that's fine. It's an optional chance of you getting a better result from training.

- Everyone starts with 25 motivation (You will have 25 until reset tonight where you will get added the correct amount due to your VIP etc)

- The minimum amount of turns per train in now 10 if you have over 9999 in any stat due to rounding problems.

It's best you just head over to the gym and check it out for yourself :)

Hourly Turns update
People have always asked me why the odd 14 and 19 hourly turns. The honest answer is, I cannot remember. So non VIPs now get 15 turns an hour, and VIPs get 20 turns an hour. I'm sure plenty of you will be pleased by this.


Extra turns, plasma special, beer drinking & gold coin hoarding ends tomorrow night. Enjoy it whilst it lasts :)

Ash

Quest changes & new gym system

Quest changes
The quest list 1 has been annihilated. They were made years ago and they're just not worth modernizing. So things like the bar pass etc no longer exist. In the space of quest list 1 are the "duration quests", which currently consist of the metal man and potion mixer quests. The quest 2 list is now the quest 1 list. Sorry for the confusion, but I'd thought I'd let you all know so you can update your guides accordingly.

New Gym
The gym is one of the first features that was created for the game, and it's been pretty much the same the entire life on the game. So today, I can happily announce a new update for it, along with some changes (which are needed to stop the last decimal number results).

- The minimum amount of turns per train in now 10
- You can only train turns if the amount of turns is a multiple of 10 (10,50,260 etc)
- New enhanced training added. You get 25 (more for VIPs) motivation a day for a chance of x0.04 at the gym. The enhanced box will disappear when you have no motivation to use. (Non VIPs still do not have x0.03 unlocked)
- Everyone starts with 25 motivation.

It's best you just head over to the gym and check it out for yourself :) I know most won't like the multiple of 10 thing, I understand that, but hopefully the motivation will be nice compensation for that :)

Extra turns, plasma special, beer drinking & gold coin hoarding ends tomorrow night. Enjoy it whilst it lasts :)

Ash

St. Patrick's Day event extended & EXTRA turns weekend!

St. Patrick's... Extended!
Taking into consideration the weekend long hangover you'll have celebrating St. Patrick's today, you can enjoy the gold stealing and specials until the end of the week. That's something, right? So you can buy your cheap plasma, use your gold coins to buy drinks & everything else until Sunday evening. How about that.

Extra Turns Weekend(Double for some)
Everyone gets +10 turns an hour for this entire weekend!
You get +10 more turns an hour this weekend if you bought one of the St Patrick's Day packs! (If you buy one now, it will unlock the extra 10 turns an hour bonus)

Starting from tonight, until Sunday night, enjoy extra turns :)

Polls

Thanks for everyone who took part in the various feedback polls - I have read through everyone's feedback and have decided on the changes to be made to the potions. More on that next week.

Charity
The charity packs are doing well. If you can donate, please do. Remember 5% of the special packs are donated to the charity fund too. We'll run this charity campaign until the end of the month.

OH, and you can all have another free drink on me ;)

Enjoy,
Ash

4 day St Patrick's Event & Charity pack updates

Charity Pack changes

People have requested that the charity packs to be purchasable with the pre-paid cards, because it's is not fully set in stone, they are not available. Although, If you want to buy any of the other charity packs through any of the pre-paid game cards, I can do so manually, please send me a blood letter. Thanks for all your support so far, I'm hoping we can raise much more!

St. Patrick's Day Event
Some peoples favourite time of the year, St. Patricks Day. I thought this year I'd have some fun with it. Here's what's going on...
 
The damn Leprechauns drank all the whisky at the green bar then ran over to greenwood. Hunt them down & steal their gold.

- Green Bar is open in DC for you to spend your looted gold coins on beer!
- Beer gives you a variety of awesome perks.
- Greenhouse is where some sneaky vampire is growing shamrocks, every hour you get 5 attempts to go steal them.
- With your stolen shamrocks, you can take them to the Shamrock Shack where you can trade them for gold coins.

There is a St. Patrick's day VIP and plasma special, what's even better about this, is that 5% of the revenue from the special packs is going into the ActionAID pot too. Hopefully this will raise even more cash for the charity.

Oh, and you all get a couple free drinks on me ;)

My thoughts are with any RoB players and everyone else in trouble with the recent events happening in Japan.

Have fun!
Ash

"A Bite Out of Poverty" campaign. New Charity donator packs.

A Bite Out Of Poverty
Many people have the power to help those in need, but so very few actually do. We thought it was about time that we did our part to help and now we're asking each of you to join in making this a success through your help and support.

Every penny counts.
Every little bit we give, goes a long way to help fight poverty. We have no idea how successful this campaign will be, but donating even a dollar is better than not donating anything. We hope you support our "Bite Out Of Poverty" campaign by buying at least one of the Action Aid packs. Our hope is that we can make this a big success.

How To Give.
To encourage your participation, we have made specific VIP and plasma packs that you can purchase where a percentage of the revenue goes directly to charity. (Paypal/Google only at this time)

Why do it ?
Some people may ask why get involved? The answer really depends on you! We believe this is a great way for you to get your own plasma/VIP fix while helping out a good cause at the same time, but ultimately your reason for participating is your own. We have a large community of people here and thought this would be a great way to do something for the less fortunate.

Packs available: 
- 30 VIP days, 10 VIP+ days, 1 plasma for $10
- 6 Plasma for $10
- 24 hour blood potion for $5

So when you renew your VIP next month, do it through the charity pack :)

About the charity
I've been in contact with a few charities over the last few weeks. ACTION AID has been most helpful & appreciate of this campaign I wanted to setup. I have known about them for quite some time. I like them because they're not majorly in the public eye and they do a lot of good helping with poverty around the world.

ActionAid works with local people to fight hunger and disease, seek justice and education for women, hold companies and governments accountable and cope with emergencies in over 40 countries. We want a world without poverty, where nobody goes to bed hungry.

Read more about them by clicking here

Trik's Potion Shop
What's the blood potion you ask? Good question. This kind of feature has been suggested before, whether I keep it around, or expand it after this charity campaign, is not decided yet. But, it's pretty simple. After you purchase the blood potion and use it, you have 24 hours of a blood bonus from your battles. Head over to Trik's place to check it out.

There will be dedicated page they're going to setup for us to keep track of donations. I'll either donate all the proceeds at the end or as we go.

This campaign will finish on the 31st March. Where I will review the campaign and make decisions on what to do for the future.

Any comments, questions or concerns, please post here. Or head straight over to the VIP page to check out the packs.

Thanks to everyone who's going to support this. Let's take A Bite Out of Poverty ;)


Thanks,
Ash

Couple notices & Pancake crazy summary.

I'm glad everyone enjoyed the pancake craziness! It was pretty amusing. Nearly 1000 of you put pancakes in your name today, obviously there's a still a big chunk that didn't, it's okay, it's cool to rebel =P Hope you all enjoy your 3 free pancakes you started with, and the additional 2 if you had "pancake" in your name.

Just a quick note also that the 100 new player blood has been removed, so please remove this from your coven guides etc. The reason for this is because the first couple ranks blood requirements are less.

You have until 11pm (game time) tomorrow night (Wednesday) to eat all your pancakes, the pancakes will be removed from the plasma packs at this time too. Oh, and for tomorrow, ALL the daily quests will guarantee at least 1 pancake for completing them.

I'm launching a campaign tomorrow night, I hope you can all support it and hopefully we can do some good. I'll blog about it all tomorrow.

See you then,
Ash

3 day PANCAKE event & new VIP page!

Brand new buy VIP page

I've completely (for the most part) re-designed the buy VIP page. I was looking at the page last week thinking "this is a complete mess". So I decided over the last week to re-design it. The changes include:

- VIP & VIP+ (VIP Max) tick box table to advertise features & benefits
- Ability to buy VIP Max for 6 months & 1 year
- Slightly cheaper prices for our New Zealand players
- Added pre-paid cards, gift packs & mobile packs at the top
- Made the whole page a lot less cluttered
- Direct [Buy Now] link which takes you to one page explaining both Paypal and Google Checkout.
- Added a $10 plasma pack
- Added a $15 Dark Ruby pack (+5% critical & no rank requirement.) This has been quite a requested option, of course the top ruby is 12% so you still need to fork out loads of IG money to get top rubies :)
- New cheaper mobile packs. There are now mobile packs available (for some countries) where you can buy packs as small as 1 plasma and 7 VIP days.

Gift Packs

Carrying on from the new VIP page, the gift packs now offer all the regular packs for you to buy other players for any special occasions that may be going on.

Pancakeeeeesssssssssssss!

Tuesday 8th March is Shrove Tuesday. Over here in the UK we celebrate that by eating pancakes. So starting from now until Wednesday night all plasma packs contain pancakes you can eat! You can also have a chance of getting some pancakes from the daily quests too ;) Oh and by the way, because pancakes are so awesome, there are no bad ones! (Everyone starts off with 3 free pancakes too!)


I'm glad everyone enjoyed the double blood weekend! When people complain to me nobody is alive all day, I know you've all enjoyed it :)

If there are any problems with VIP/Plasma packs, please contact me ASAP.


Have a good one
Ash

DOUBLE BLOOD WEEKEND! Feb comp winners, 6 new quests & loads more.

Double Blood Weekend

It's time for another double blood weekend! Starting RIGHT now until Sunday night (Game time) you will earn double blood on all PvP battles.

New Quests

You guys keeping up with the quests okay? Well this these should keep you busy for a while.

- Gem Collector I
- Gem Collector II
- Gem Collector III
- Max your Stamina
- Max your feeds
- Max your energy

Spring Valley Changes

People have been complaining lately it's harder to get Stamina in Spring Valley. Don't worry, I don't ignore you :) Here are the changes:

- Slight layout update
- You can now buy (in game money) stamina potions. These are of course capped, you can unlock better stamina potions the higher hunting skill you have.
- Because of the potions, daily quest has been increased to 125 (still down from 150)

TIP: You get 2 stamina every 5 minutes but only when you're alive. Every 5 minutes it checks if you're alive, if you are it gives you stamina. You don't need to alive the full 5 minutes to get the stamina. Just make sure you're alive after each 5 minutes mark to get the stamina.

Forum Update
The forums update last year has been very liked, I have made some more slight changes and a couple extra features.

- Fixed blank names coming up after people get deleted
- Changed around the layout a bit to make things less squashed
- Direct option to search for players posts and started threads

This update will rollover to the help, RP forums & covens soon.

February Competition winner

The total blood earned at Vadenhill since it started is: 74,147,043
Nobody got the correct answer, so the nearest person was Blood Sucker (455900)  who guessed 76,896,058.

(The Stig (159582) guessed 76,148,932,167 and would have won if he were 3 digits less =P)


Congratulations!

Enjoy the weekend,
Ash

Comments & BL layout updated & 5 new quests

Comments page

Your comments page layout has been updated. It now also includes the tick box delete option for you to be able to quickly sort through and delete any unwanted comments. The username and avatars of the players comment now shows their current information, instead of the information they had when they made the comment.

Blood letters
I have updated the blood letters page update a bit, got rid of all the old links and stuff from the top and gave it a new look. The sent & saved messages are now formatted so they're not just a huge clump of text.

New Quests

A few more quests for you all!

- Which Slot?
- Which Slot? II
- Which Slot? III
- Which Slot? IV
- Full House

There's going to be pretty cool stuff very soon. There will also be something coming up where we can all prove vampires can be nice!

More to come.
Ash