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zOMG Bloodstone Amulet
People asked for a clarification on the announcement, as it was a little unclear. We're going to raise the price for the zOMG Bloodstone Amulet at 5:00pm today. Now is the best item to get this fine, fine looking amulet that I'm wearing, as very soon it will either go up in price or be removed from the stores (we're close to the 5k limit).

Spring Cleaning Votes Cleared
We cleared the vote status for the main Spring Cleaning Forum, so you can go ahead and vote again (may take up to 10 minutes for the cache to clear).

Note that less than 1% of active users vote in SC, so your vote is very important!

Alchemy Tweaks
Long dev notice.

Level 10 Reward
There were concerns that the level 10 reward unfairly awarded users with tons of gold. So, we'll change it so that a reward will be given to anyone that reaches level 10 -- not just the first n.

Getting Past Level 3
The fundamental issue here is that the components are too rare, and that's making it difficult to proceed past level 3. Components are contained in the Philosopher's Cache. To that end:

• we're reducing the difficulty of the GGB formula
  
• in appreciation to those folks that soldiered through the existing GGB formula, we are going to back-granting GGBs to anyone that created a GGB to compensate so that they get the advantage of the easier formula. This backgrant is proportional to the number of GGBs that you've created, so if you've created 10 GGBs, you'll get 10 backgrants.
  
• instead of opening or selling the GGB, you may instead want to craft a Philosopher's Cache (for components) or Alchemist's Case (for formulas).
  
• we are adding an alternate path to the Philosopher's Cache and Alchemist's Case that is constructible through farmable components

Many users wanted to have the components in the gold shop, but pricing the components fairly is difficult in that case, and we don't want to price them so low that it kills value of the farmable recipes; we'd like to see how the components price out with this strategy, and then if we need to improve the liquidity we can have a limited time sale in Dernier Cri or something.

Recycling
This week, we'll use the marketplace for any item above a certain marketplace value. However, we'd really like to use diving dumpster instead (it's more fairly redistributive), so we'll be experimenting with that next week.

World Page Re-Design Update

Hey guys, just fyi, after the most recent feedback on the World page re-design, we have decided to move forward with the changes as presented in the above thread.

My team will begin development on it following the Halloween event for launch some time before X-mas (launch dependent on sponsorships and event scheduling.)

For the time being the thread will be locked but I'll keep it as a sticky in the SF forum for all to see until after the launch is made.

For those asking for updates to the World map, expect a very small one with the Halloween event...

Spring Cleaning 2011
Please be sure to check out the Spring Cleaning 2011 forum often, as proposals are moved up from the Proposals every so often. Also, our artists just added a late proposal for animated eyes (including an example of what they would look like), so if you'd like to see this sort of animated item offered in the future, be sure to let us now!

Zoey and Cathulu Fixed
Zoey and Cathulu will now show up in the aquarium properly, and will glow / drop gold as expected during Booty Grab.

Booty Grab Gold Curve
Long dev notice. TL;DR: Booty Grab gold grants are changing.

Old Method
Previously, as both an anti-bot and gold scaling measure, we would keep a count of a) the number of games you played, and b) the number of games from your IP. As you played more and more games, we would start biasing your player count up and up, and if you exceeded the number of players in a game, we wouldn't allow you in, even if the tank wasn't full.

As an example:

• Your first game of the day? You can be the 1st player or the 34th -- you're still in the game.
  
• 100th game of the day? You have a +20 bias. If you try to come in as the 20th player, you're not allowed into the game (since 20 + 20 = 40, which is greater than the number of players allowed into the tank)

This had a number of disadvantages:

• emphasis on number of games meant that users would go only for the high-tier tanks
  
• it was an invisible bias, so the user had no idea when they were getting scaled
  
• penalized people on the same IP (usually families)

New Method
Here's the new method:

• No penalty until you hit a certain gold amount (currently 150k)
  
• Afterwards, you are prevented from playing anything except low-tier tanks
  
• Low-tier tanks never count against your daily limits
  
• Messages in the tank window that tell you exactly what is happening

Why did we pick 150k as the upper bound? It's the top 1% of users. Ostensibly this will lead to a 2% reduction in the number of plays, but it's hard to predict the actual impact because a) the top 1% played a larger proportion of full tanks (i.e., presumably the slot would have been filled by someone else), and b) the top 1% tended to bump much less frequently than lower earners.

We're a little worried about removing the IP limits, but we'll have to keep an eye on it. Please note that using multiple mules in an attempt to work around the 150k daily limit is going to flag you as a bot.

Gold Balancing
We've also slightly reduced the player bonus, since tanks are now easier to get into. We'll be doing further adjustments over the next few weeks to try and get BG and zOMG into approximate parity, both on a gold-per-hour and maximum-per-day basis. Some of the gold that is being diverted from BG will be redirected into other flash game grants. (Although we're still discussing internally, other possible ideas we're considering are a) ramping up CAPTCHA levels as people play more games, or b) requiring a bump every nn tanks, or c) requiring low-level tanks to be played every nn tanks, as well as some others.)