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Unique Hacker

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BG Update
Thanks for the feedback. We've created a thread in Site Feedback to try and centralize discussion. However, there were many good suggestions, and we've made some changes as a result:

- we've changed the CAPTCHA frequency to 1 in 4. We'll try this level for a while and see how people feel about it -- we can raise it and lower it as needed.
- since users with slower Internet connections / computers were complaining about missing tanks all the time, we've both slightly increased the number of maximum players in a game, as well as slightly increased the glow time.

Short FAQ:

Why not put the CAPTCHA at the end?
That is a good suggestion and something we will look at. However, the way the game is currently set up, the gold is granted at the end of the game, so a CAPTCHA after you've played would be too late to do anything.

Also: putting the CAPTCHA at the front of the game stops some classes of bots from jumping into the game -- which means it's easier to get tanks, since you don't have a bunch of bots jumping in before you.

Bots don't exist!
They do. I hate to give these guys more views, so I won't direct link, but a ten-second search will reveal tons of booty grab bots, with accompanying videos. We have a bunch of these in house and have confirmed that they do in fact work (or rather, used to work).

Why so sudden!?
We've been saying for a while that we have problem with BG -- you can see previous AtAs and such -- but we've seen a recent sharp spike in the amount of botted gold, and it has become a problem. Fixing bots is a labor intensive process by our amazing but overworked mod team: not only do we have to go through and ban the bots, but we have to undo all the transactions that the bot completed. This means going through trade logs, holding trading passes on people that received botted gold, so on and so forth. Stopping bots at the time of gold grant with a CAPTCHA is far more effective and a better use of everyone's time.

I'll change the OP in the feedback thread as more FAQs come up.

Unique Hacker

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New mini-comic
And, now for something that will hopefully appeal to both humans and bots: new mini-comic is up!

Unique Hacker

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Gold Grant adjustments
As part of our ongoing efforts to adjust gold granting, we have made some changes:
  • the gold grants for posting have been increased substantially
  • the gold grants for OMGPOP have been increased some
  • a curve was added at the upper end of zOMG earnings. This should only affect about 1% of the players.

Over the next few weeks we'll be adjusting and tweaking grants all over the site.

Unique Hacker

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Booty Grab Tweak
As an experiment, we have temporarily reduced the number of players in a tank from to 35 to 9, and increased the payout to 1:1. Note that this results in the same or more being paid to the tank owner, but opens up the competition for tanks a bit. This change will propagate across tanks in the next hour as caches clear. We will run this experiment for a day or so to see the effects.

Unique Hacker

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Booty Grab Tweak Over
We've reverted back to 34 players / 4:1 ratio. The changes will propagate to tanks throughout the next hour.

We are going to continue to be doing a number of experiments with Booty Grab over the next few weeks, so you may want to keep an eye on the dev notices.

Unique Hacker

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New Aquarium Subforum
A new subforum for Gaia Aquarium, Gaia Aquarium Discussion, has been added, for discussion about... yeah, you guessed it, Booty Grab and Aquariums. Use it to trade tips on maintaining tanks, tactics, tutorials, and whatnot.

Unique Hacker

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BG Max Users
Some users are reporting encounters with tanks that are still limited to 9 players. The tanks should be reset on the next glow, which may be more than an hour. We'll continue to watch the logs tonight and take action if needed.

Codebreaking Sex Symbol

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Daily Patch
The daily patch was released about 2 hours ago. I've been putting out fires and fixing issues.

Changes:
  1. Forum timestamps are now "relative times" rather than "absolute". This is a test for now.
    A timezone but was fixed soon after the initial change. Note: If you attempt to adblock this feature, be warned that adblocking may not work in the future, but we will give you a way to opt-out (if this feature stays).
  2. Animated Avatars on most of the site currently have a white background. This is a bug and should be fixed in the next day or two.
  3. 12 other code patches not worth mentioning

Kairi Rora's Husband

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St. Patricks Day Event

...Launch and testing in progress. If the site crashes... It wasn't me ninja
Narumi Misuhara
St. Patricks Day Event

...Launch and testing in progress. If the site crashes... It wasn't me ninja
Now that's a bit of blarney blather.

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Fashionable Visionary

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Shamrock 2011

Event is now fully live. This event will continue until Monday.

Event Notes:
While your avatar is under the green spell from the npc other animated items (including the one granted by the npc) you have equipped will not show. This is temporary and is not a bug but simply a restriction of the way the green effect works. Animated items will display normally when you un-greenify yourself or when the event ends, whichever comes first. wink
Rally Achievements

The "Hang out in Rally for X minutes" achievement is fixed. Lets achieving!

Codebreaking Sex Symbol

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Relative Timestamps changed
I'm continuing this test with logged-out users only. We've read a lot of the feedback and it looks like enough users depend on the full, absolute time that it's more of a hindrance than a help.
You'll be happy to know that we aren't linking/loading the extra JavaScript file if you are logged in.

For logged-out users, however, the relative time will continue to show (as it's more useful because we don't know the correct timezone for logged-out users).

This is also a good time to remind users that:
  1. We do listen to Site Feedback
  2. You can edit your timezone preference in Account Settings (near the middle of the left column).

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iPhone App version 1.2
The new version of our iPhone app was released to the App Store last night.
Here is what's new:
- fixing login error for users with spaces in their username
- limiting the number of loaded Announcements and Private Messages to prevent lagging
- visual enhancements to the Announcements list.
Go check it out!

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New Trade Page!

The trade page has a new look! It also features an updated inventory, which includes the ability to see ALL your items (not just the first 800), and use the Inventory Search lab to find items to trade.

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