Wednesday 26 June 2013

RP, Market Updates & More



Time for more auction updates!

Coven And House Roleplaying

As much as I love the people who roleplay on our dedicated roleplaying forums, I know a lot of people rather roleplay in their covens and houses with their friends. So I have decided to add all the features of the roleplaying forum into your covens and houses!

Just go to your coven forum as before, at the top you'll see the regular coven forum boards, and below will be the new list of RP boards where you can add any of your created RP characters and use them within your coven or house.

Coven forum mods, the co-owner and owner have the power to add different themed boards.

I have also updated the house and covens forums to the new layout versions that are found on the regular forums.

Any issues, please feel free to post on this bug thread.


Market & Auction Updates

I have made a few changes to the market and the auction house today. (All of which is subject to change.)

  • [market] Up to a 2% fee for AP and Plasma listings. The rest stay at 1%
  • [market] Updated the layout to make it more constant with other pages
  • [wants market] Layout updated (fees stay as they are)
  • [auction] Now choose 1 day, 3 day or 7 day auction times
  • [auction] Made a few layout changes
  • [auction] Fee is now fixed and not % of starting bid on AP and Plasma
  • [auction] Reduced the minimum bid increment from 5% down to 2%

 

Union Church 

The Priest who works at the union church is getting pretty sick of the Dead City's divorce rate. A union between two vampires should not be taken lightly. Because of the amount of divorces and re-marrying, he wants to make a bit of money for all this work he has to do. There is now a fee for divorcing. (Don't worry, we're not ever going to indulge in property splitting or alimony payments.)

The Bar

The Dead City bar has had a facelift and a new bartender employed, Jasper. It has been given a new look, and the same 4 drinks are still available.

I have also changed the bar formula which has brought the prices down a bit, and the daily cap is 10 drinks. Happy days! Head over to the bar for more information on what secrets it holds.


Little Things

- Portal link added to Spring Valley when in the game is in cooldown
- Added more information on the VIP/Plasma basket page on what payment methods add packs automatically and which ones do not
- Added common problems if a payment is declined on the declined payment page
- Trik's potion [back] link now takes you to Trik's homepage
- QP achievement text updated on list 7
- When your VIP/VIP+ runs out, you now get a blood letter notification

June Competition

Just under a week left of June's competition. Click here for more information.

Enjoy the rest of the week!
Ash

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Minions, Collectibles & More




Last week we saw some blog changes. Many people love them and I'm glad to see such great feedback for it.  The top of hour page loads are much better, hope you all agree. So happy about that. I've got quite a bit lined up for you here, hope you're sitting comfy.

Petrik's Shack, the home of enslaved minions ready for work


Minion Updates

Ah the minions. A loved feature. But can be a little frustrating to get the little things to fight, right? I have watched minions over the past year, seen how people use and upgrade them. I have read the feedback on them, and have now come up with a list of changes which are active from today.

Attack Chance Increase

Your minion can now be upgraded to have a 1 in 5 attack chance, rather than the 1 in 10 chance it has been since release. There is a slight $ price hike when you're upgrading from 1 in 10 down to 1 in 5 (as to be expected.)

Food Increase

Because the attack chance has been doubled, I don't want to add to any frustration by making minions get hungry twice as fast. So I have doubled the amount of food required before getting hungry to 100. The food packs now fill up that 100, but are the same price as before.

New Defence Stat

Some argue (the same with the stat 'speed') that the counter to minion attack is itself. I somewhat agree, but because of the slight (unforeseen whilst developing outcome) issue that if you are not fast enough to get any hits on your opponent, your minion is still able to get hits in, and sometimes kill your opponent without doing any damage yourself. As fun as that might be, and seeing as your minion cannot do more than 10% damage than you, something isn't quite right there. So I am introducing minion defence.

Your minion attack increases the damage your minion does, and minion defence reduces the damage done by any minion to you from their minion.

Some might choose to ignore the defence part completely if their battles are not effected by minions much, but the option is there for people who do.


Minion-AP

Minions now have their own version of AP called Minion-AP. When your minion used to level up, you got +2 attack. Well now you have 2 stats, that makes that a little more complicated. I was just going to give defence when you level up, but that gives no room for strategy whatsoever.

So now every time your minion levels up, you get +2 minion-AP to use on  minion attack and defence.

Your minion defence cannot be higher than 10% of your toughness (just like your minions attack cannot be more than 10% of your strength.) You can now choose whether to use your personal 3 AP per level on either attack or defence (or even a bit of both.)

Hold up, that's not fair! I've already leveled up my minion!
You're right it isn't. Luck for you, I'm a nice guy. I have given every minion the amount of minion-AP of their current attack (minus the 5 you start with) for you to be able to allocate either back onto your attack, or to throw some on defence. It's up to you. I'd suggest you go to this as soon as you finish reading this post.

To view and use your Minion-AP. Just click the [increase] link under your minions attack or defence on the minion page.

New Profile Location

As many of you know, the minion only gets a one line space on profiles. With the update last week allowing you to have 5 blogs listed instead of 3, profiles can look a little lopsided. So I have created a minion section below the links on the right, giving it a bit more attention.



General Potion Store

I have given facelift to the general potion store at the Dead City. I have also reduced the cost of the turns heal option from 50 to 20. The most significant update to this is the new ability to drink a potion which gives you the strength to resist taking blood from vampires that attack you and lose. Of course there is a reversal potion for this when you wish to get blood again.

Pentagu's Hut

Pentagu has setup camp on the outskirts of Ghost Town. He is there starting a little project of his own in regards to all of your collectibles. You should head over there to check it out.

Collectibles

Vampires love their collectibles. We introduced the feature a couple years ago and until now they've not had that much use. Pentagu sorts that out. That's not all though. There are now 6 collectibles hidden around the site for completing certain tasks. You can view your collectibles by either clicking the [view all] link on your profile, or going: Home > Equipment > Your Inventory.

Here's a sneak peak where one of the collectibles are:

Winner winner chicken dinner!







Little Things

- Increased the amount of blood you get from 'the daily' daily quest
- Fixed the vampire powers activated number bug on home page
- Inventory summary section added  at the bottom of the equipment page
- New reign of blood game blog format (as you can see!)
- You can now add a reason with vampires you've blocked from your coven
- Inactive account deletion policy page wording updated

Voting Sites

I have finally gone though all the voting sites, cross referencing them with my analytics to find out which ones are giving good new players back to RoB and which ones are not. This resulted in me removing a few of the voting sites.

This has resulted in slightly less turns available for everybody each day. To make up for that though, I've put a timer on the voting page. What's great about the new timer system, is if you are completing your votes, it makes no difference. When you click a voting link, and continue with confirming the vote (sometimes including the captcha), close the tab/page, and come back for the next one, you will get bonus turns for not clicking through them too quickly. (Extra turns for patience and going through them slowly!)

There is a yellow or red notice on the top of the voting page, keep an eye on that text for information on when you can grab bonus turns. (You don't NEED to pay attention to this, you can pace through clicking all the vote links and voting quickly, but you will not earn the bonus turns, just the +5 turns for the vote.)

The voting page refreshes by itself every 10 seconds, but you can click the [refresh] button yourself to get the most up to date notice on when you are eligible for bonus turns.

Rare summer packs

[ This offer has ended ]

On a general note about payment methods. Of course all payment processing companies charge fees on all transactions. Some more than others. (For example pre-paid cards and mobile.) Some people increase the costs of items to the player (you) to cover those fees. I don't do that here. You pay for the value of those items no matter payment company you use.

Enjoy,
Ash

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Lag Solution & Blog Update



TAKE THAT LAG!

When I made Reign Of Blood back in 2006, I didn't really have much idea about a lot things. This has been amazing learning experience for me. When I started it, I decided on an hourly revive system to allow people to be able to play all day long. Of course, I wasn't thinking ahead. I was sat at my Mother's desk, on her PC, messing around and creating a game. I didn't have growth in mind at all. As Reign Of Blood gained a lot of popularity, the hourly resets started getting slower and slower as it had more people to update.

In the recent couple months, it had got pretty unbearable. I got advice, talked to a few people, did some thinking and came up with a few theories. I took the game down on evening of the 10th June, worked for about an hour on doing some structure changes, and it paid off a lot better than I expected.

When 59 past hits, you barely feel any struggle at all. I was  nervous when top of hour came for the first time after I let everybody back in, but I am so happy it worked out better than I planned. I am super excited everybody can now experience a top of hour that doesn't lag like hell.

There might be a few glitches here and there whilst it runs in the 'real world'. But I will continue to optimise as normal to keep pages as fast as possible.

Little updates

A few little updates I've also done today:

  • Jailed players no longer appear on 'top vampire' leaderboards page
  • Sidebar mp hover reworded
  • Fixed a small equipment page alignment issue 
  • Vadenhill feeds moved to half past the hour



Blog Updates

Blogs are one those features that not a lot of people use. But the people who do use it, use them a lot, and love using them. With over 45,000 total blogs posted so far, I can happily announce a good few updates for them.

  • Now fully named "blog center". Still can be found from your [social panel]
  • Updated and cleaned up the layout on many pages
  • Extended the title and mood box, added randomised default mood
  • Blog TYPE added. Choose from personal, RP, story and poems to set a category for your blog (you can go through and edit all your current blogs to update their category)
  • Up to 5 blogs are now displayed on your profiles (v2 only)
  • Updated directory which includes title search and category listings
  • You can now select which blog posts you want displayed on your profile with the new profile blog control panel. You can add up to 5
  • The profile blog section has been updated and looks much better
  • You can now SUBSCRIBE to blogs and get NOTIFICATIONS when a new blog is posted by someone you are subscribed to
  • You can now set blogs to 'family only' (family YOU have added)
  • Fixed a few small including linking errors
  • Private blogs no longer show up anywhere for anyone else

Head over to the blog center now to check it. I hope you agree its a lot more useful and use friendly now.

I hope you enjoy these updates and the improved page loads,
Ash

Monday 10 June 2013

10th June Scheduled downtime



Scheduled downtime

I talked about a couple ideas I had on this post last week. And tonight, I am going to give it a shot.

I have a theory on how to help reduce the top of hour lag. It will require an update on the code on several pages, which means I'm going to have to close the game for a small while. My estimates are no longer than an hour.

So at 10pm tonight (game/server time) I will close the game and work my magic.

The worse case scenerio, it will be no different than it is now. Best case, a much speedier top of hour.

Ash

Saturday 8 June 2013

Downtime Tonight



As many of you probably figured out, we had some server troubles this evening. The reason why it took so long for us to get back up was as follows:

The server guys get notified as soon as the server goes down, so they always know before anyone else. They did a quick check and two of the hard-drives seemed to have failed (computers eh? can't trust 'em.) They got them physically checked and the techies confirmed this. It turns out they both failed simultaneously so the RAID couldn't even protect it from failure.

The techies then replaced the two failed hard-drives with brand spanking new ones. And the server guys re-installed the OS and loaded the latest backup onto them.

I invest heavily into this sort of protection and with the backups in the rare event things like this happen. A lot of sites/games don't. It may have taken some time, but when it involves having to physically replace drives, it can take a while. There might be up to an hour of loss (as the backups are done pretty much hourly.)

Remember to keep an eye on our Facebook Page for updates when the site is down.

I have given everybody a free VIP and VIP+ day. Also a little promo code for everyone to use to make up for the loss and mess ups it would create in regards to the dailies and the slight time jump: junedowntime

Sorry again, and thanks for your patience.
Ash

Saturday 1 June 2013

New Co-Op Quests



A lot of my time this week has been given to a secret project I'm doing with our helpers, but here are the things I have for you all this week.

Pet (Mt Tilia) Changes

Oh the pets. As much as I didn't hope it would have to come to this, a few changes have been made starting from this month.

- The leaderboards will remain, but there will be no prizes for the top wins and highest level anymore. The QP rewards have stayed exactly the same.
- Tidying up the Dead City a little, the pet leaderboard page has moved inside the top vampires page.
- No longer in beta.

New Co-Op Quests

It's been a while since I've added new co-op quests. Simply because I didn't really know what to do with them. But on the recent poll, surprisingly, a lot of people asked for more co-op quests. So here we go!

- Vampire War II
- Vampire War III
- Feeders
- Feeders II
- Money Looters
- Money Looters II


I also noticed there was no direct link to the quest news page, so I have added a link on the top of the news page.

June Competition

This month's competition is for you writers out there. The great thing about text based roleplaying games, is that gives people a place to bring alive their imagination. I'd like a small article written about how Dead City is on a daily basis in your eyes. Plasma prizes for the best entries. Click here for more info.

La-a-aaa-aaa-a-ag

I've got it. I've figured it out. I have come up with a theory to reduce the top of hour lag by a large percent. It's been something we've all put up with for a while, simply because of the large amount of updates needed every hour. I've done my best to help strip things out of resets, but the server guys & I have come up with a solution that should help speed things up some more! More on the towards the end of next week.

Enjoy the weekend, and I hope you enjoyed the Midweek Madness!
Ash

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