Wednesday 29 June 2011

Comeback feature: PETS - Located in Mount Tilia



So, the Big July is about to start. Are you ready? (We know it's not quite July yet, read on)


Mount Tilia
Mount Tilia, just west of Ghost Town, is a place where vampires can home their pets. Pet fighting in the Dead City is forbidden, so all pet battles and tournaments take place over in Mount Tilia. You can get to Mount Tilia through the portal, as it's now a new location on our map.

Pets
Pets is one of those things that people will love or hate. Don't like them? Don't use them! They're not a compulsory part of RoB. You will however, be rewarded for using this feature.

Pets were originally added in May 2006 (Just a month after the site opened), but were subsequently removed a year or two later. Ever since then, people have been wanting them back. Without a good method of doing so, I haven't bothered... until now.

The pet tournament area located in Mount Tilia will open for battles within the first week of July. As a teaser, you can all now go buy and name your pets.

I do encourage you not to think too much of this until you see it in action :) It's pretty cool, and the rewards for using it is pretty tasty too (Although you won't see all this until it's open).

Thanks to Sirus for spending the last couple months doing the images.

Help For Heroes
The Help For Heroes charity campaign will end at the end of June. If you want to support this charity for a final time, buy any charity pack or potion credits from Trik's.

June Competition
The June competition will end midnight on the night of 30th June (Thursday). I will be staying up until midnight, and on the strike of midnight (game time) I will close the leaderboard and the winners will be revealed. Good luck to all the people who have entered.


Thanks & enjoy!
Ash

Friday 24 June 2011

New Points company, rank incentive & a couple small changes



Points
For those who didn't know what points are, they are rewards for completing offers/surveys etc. I got an email today saying that our points company #1 (the most popular one) is shutting down so they can focus on their mobile side of the business (Because web apps aren't cool enough). So I've been hunting down more companies to supply the points to you. I've found one! And I want to give them a try.

I've tried to make things as clear and easy to navigate as possible on the points page. The new points company is now at position #1. You'll also notice these guys have a load more payment options too.

To celebrate, points company #1 will pay out DOUBLE the points that's displayed until Sunday. (If it says you'll get 12, you'll get 24!)

Did you know?  Points are currently selling at around $48,000 each on the market.

Slight rank incentive
So you need a little more incentive to rank up? No problem. I've added some rank duration quests.

Chat backlog
You can now view the last 500 lines of each chat.


June competition leaderboard
With only about a week left to go on the Greenwood hunt, a real time leaderboard has been added to the competition page (accessible from the Dead City). Here you can see the top dirt finders and how many grams of dirt you've found.

Enjoy the weekend,
Ash

Friday 17 June 2011

June competition update




So this weekend my Dad has decided to get married, so unfortunately I won't be around much the next few days. It's out in the sticks somewhere, but I have heard rumours they do have Wifi at the hotel, so I'll be able to get on, check things, and add Google Checkout purchases.

I didn't think it would be fair going for a few days and not tell you how well you're doing in this months Greenwood competition. Below is the top 20 at the moment. A real time leaderboard will be added when I get back next week (As well as you being able to find out how many g you have collected).

797g collected - Aislinn (54285)
773g collected - Shawn Breach (245670)
727g collected - Misha Keates (208044)
720g collected - AngelFire (330366)
711g collected - Footman DCXLV (40487)
698g collected - Linus C. Tourettes (252462)
695g collected - J0k35t3r (164141)
686g collected - Dreamweaver (248485)
686g collected - Lelouch (424861)
665g collected - Arch Aestus (236669)
652g collected - avantgarde (109004)
651g collected - Armand de Anjou (299922)
645g collected - Jessica Rabbit (135259)
630g collected - Jonathan DeLaRosa (411454)
627g collected - Macabress (176585)
623g collected - Legion, White Tiger (142699)
609g collected - honeyb15 (370593)
606g collected - Lady Dionysia FĂ«aduhith (311006)
600g collected - Akuba Reiko (320073)
596g collected - Gideon (392232)

My last blog post indicated a secret Project RAHP, have any guesses as to what it could be? Post on our Facebook status with your theories.

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback on the merchandise thread, we definitely see a demand and will hopefully be able to get something up and running during the summer heading into Autumn.

The poor blood bot has been alive for 192 hours and has already been defeated 211 times. That's on average half a million blood it's pumped out already.


See you all next week, enjoy the weekend!
Ash

Thursday 9 June 2011

July 2011 Events & Double Points weekend



July is going to be a big month for RoB. We're going to get some new cool features and an interesting test project.


So what's happening in July?
- Project: RAHP
- A new location!
- The come-back feature
- Faster hourly reset with new database structure (killing off 503s [yn])
- & loads more

Help For Heroes Charity
I can happily confirm I got this email recently:
"We are delighted to tell you that your Help for Heroes fundraiser has been
approved! We would like to say a huge THANK YOU for your amazing support."

Show your support by buying a charity park of Trik's potions.

Merchandise Poll
A year or two back we had a CafePress merch site setup. We didn't really sell much so I decided to close it down. Although recently we've had a wave of people interested in getting their hands on some merch. Would you be interested? I want to get a general poll of people who would be interested. Please give us your thoughts here.

Double points this weekend
Earn double points this weekend (Starting now) on all points offers. I.E. If an offer says it pays out 20 points, on completion, you'll get 40 points!

Bloodbot!
There is a new blood bot around these parts.... the ID of this bot is 3. Click here to view his profile. Hes a weak rank 100.  How many people are going to fight over him each hour?

Blog Pages
If you've not already noticed, I've added some different blog pages above just for more general information for people who come across the blog who are not RoB members.

Top 5 June competition dirt finders
Here's an update to the top 5, in no particular order:

- Aislinn (54285)
- J0k35t3r (164141)
- Blade (424861)
- Shawn Breach (245670)
- Footman DCXLV (40487)


Enjoy the weekend :)
Ash

Sunday 5 June 2011

Plasma lottery feature test, new coven donate options & June comp status




Plasma Lottery
Going to buy plasma this week? Good call. I had this idea brought to me a while back, and spent 15 minutes coding it up. I don't know whether it will be successful or not, the only real way is to try out. A new plasma lottery (this week only for now) has been launched! It'll give people who buy plasma this week a chance to win a bit more! If you go to the BUY VIP page you'll see the amount of entries you get with each of the plasma packs. This also includes the charity plasma pack. Whether this will be successful or not, we'll have some fun with it this week. The draw takes place on Saturday night and you can enter up to the draw. (The exact time has not been decided yet). Just a little extra thank you to our supporters. You can find the link below the regular lottery in the Dead City. If you love the idea and want this feature to continue, support it! :) The future of the feature could be just turning it into the regular lottery but buying tickets with plasma itself, rather than entries direct from the packs, that's possible too. Let me know your feedback on that. Of course the only problem with the feature, is you're gambling with the most valuable currency on the game. Will people be willing to do it? We'll see. (Paypal and Google Checkout only at the moment) The formula for working out the jackpot will not be displayed at this time. Not into plasma? That's fine. You can ignore this feature for now :) A way of earning free entries may come at a later date. Stay tuned.

Coven storage
Due to the horde of requests, you can now donate plasma and potion credits to a coven. Coven members with the option to "Give/Lend funds" have access to distribute the plasma and potion credits. Plasma/Potion Credits will not add to your "total donated" variable.


June Competition
I've been asked quite a bit about the status of the June Competition. Let me tell you that you will be able to see how many grams of dirt you have found next week. And the total leaderboards will be posted at the end of the week. I will however tell you the top 5 dirt finders to date (in no particular order):

Footman DCXLV (40487)
Shawn Breach (245670)
Blade (424861)

Linus Tourettes (252462)
Dreamweaver (248485)



This weekend is over, but try to enjoy the week!
Ash

Friday 3 June 2011

ReignOfBlood DENIED by charity, new competition & May's winner



June's Charity
This months Charity was going to be UniCef, they help children all over the world and also one of main charities which are helping with the Haiti Crisis. But after I setup the fund-raising page, I got this *DENIED* email:

Hello Ashley,

I wanted to make contact to inform you that we have unfortunately needed to remove your myfundraising page. Although we are very grateful for your support here at UNICEF, after careful consideration we have decided not to accept the funds raised through your ‘reign of blood’ game. We feel it would be inappropriate to accept funds raised through a vampire computer game. We are also guided by the public view and perceptions of companies in the UK. Whilst we understand that that these might not always be totally accurate, we must take these views into account in order to avoid any negative publicity.


I didn't realise charities could afford to push away donations. I guess a vampire game isn't good enough for them. Their loss!

UPDATE: They sent me another email.

So this months charity will be...













Everybody knows the Help For Heroes charity. We're going to do our bit to help those who are injured fighting in the current wars.

Thank you for all your continuous support & allowing us to be one the few online games that help out good causes (or at least try in some cases).

Real time Clock
If you've not already noticed (or read the last blog yet) we have a new ticking clock! Pretty cool huh? But remember, if it doesn't work properly in your browser/mobile device, you can turn it off the account options page.

May competition winner
Here is the winner for the may competition. Why? Simply because it speaks truth. Congratulations - Xenia Le Doux (319314) [ View Image ]

June Competition
This month's competition is being held in Greenwood. Special grams of dirt are hiding around inside caves, the top 3 players with the most amount of dirt found by the 30th June, will win 100 plasma, 30 plasma, and 10 plasma. Leaderboards will be put up later in the month.

Blood shortage
Battling activity is at a all time high. Although that's a good thing, but with the lack of ~20,000 blood filled accounts being killed an hour, there isn't enough to go around anymore. (Even with the 200-300 new vampires each day). We are working on more ways to get blood to you all. Yummy blood. Stay tuned.

Enjoy the weekend to come,
Ash

Wednesday 1 June 2011

The evil 503 & new real time clock




The evil 503
I apologise for the recent 503 nonsense. We have found what is causing it, and taking several steps in order to stop it. I invest wisely into a good server back up system which backs up everything every hour without interfering with server performance. Because of this, we have made some server log changes to help prevent the 503s. They should happen a lot less (even at all now) but there a couple other improvements we'll be making to keep the game running as smooth as possible. Growing pains can be painful!


As for the midnight downtime last night, the server guys do apologise because inconveniently their mail server was doing a software update and they didn't get the notification. (They get notified as soon as the server is down). They have SMS alerts too now, so they're always in the know, keeping a close eye on RoB.

Real time clock
Oh yes, we have a ticking clock. It's quite mesmerizing too. If you don't like it, you can go to the accounts page and turn it back to the static clock.

Potions
People lurrveeee potions. People also lurrveee that a portion of the potion credit sales go to charity. Have an idea that would be cool for a potion? Trik is always open to new ideas. Click here to discuss.

Thanks!
Ash

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