Ciao Druglords!

Today was the day of the release of v0.6 of Drugwars, but before introducing the update, let's take a look at some statistics.

As you already know the game is available to all users and they can simply login with any social account (thanks to the oauth system, also used by 3speaks and probably a few other apps), this gives the ability to promote the game on social media like facebook and increasing the player count day per day. Well I had to fight with facebook and make complaints until they accept to display DrugWars ads, but I managed successfully to make them understand that was in my rights!

While the number of likes/shares is not huge, the success consisted into being accepted as a crypto game and I will launch a big campaign after the release of the next version with a bigger budget.

Here you can see the number of players who logged into the game this past week but also the number of new players joining us and obtaining a free steem account simply by logging to the game. My next goal is to improve the retention and keep the players on DrugWars, and don't tell that to anyone but I have some plans for that!

Source auth0 - 2020-01-07

Another look at the performance of Drugwars

Source cloudflare - 2020-01-07

Well let go directly to the fixes, new features and improvements coming with the v0.6.

Daily Prize

A big bug or mistake (consider it as you want) made it so that the prize displayed in USD and STEEM were totally wrong. It's now fixed and the prize are now accurate, with a small increase on all prizes.

Fight prize

It is now dynamic and will increase when the total population increase, making it more fair for everyone.

Lottery

Some people complained about the lottery not being fair, while it was provably fair since the first day by using the steem blocks and their merkle root to define a winner, but we also had to make the data's auditable, so the server is now publishing the block, the merkle root and the whole list of people who participated in the lottery

Free Lottery ticket

Now each players participate automatically because they obtain 1 ticket per day and per player for free. I will probably improve the lottery to reward more players and give them different bonus (like shield, booster or units).
I invite all developers or coders to audit the code and check the result, if something is wrong I will instantly make the necessary change. (The code used to get the winner is available in the useful-links of the discord : https://discord.me/drugwars)

Action page

An easy way to select your base

Choose directly one of your base (for transporting and stationning units) to fill the coordinates.

Don't share your fridges with your gang

Some players asked for this change and you can now hide your fights from your own gang.

Colored tabs

The tabs at the top are now less confusing, I also noticed a bug where you could have some problem to see all your fights with the pagination system, this is now fixed and navigating trough your fights, transport, etc are now faster.

Fight results

A better report

The fight report display now the prestige of each players with the gain and the lose in their prestige.
Additionally the rewards are now also displayed for the defender and not only the attackers.

Price of units, buildings, trainings

According to the issue with the daily prize, all USD prices were displayed wrong, giving the impression that using instant upgrade or recruit would cost much more than the reality, it's now fixed and all players will appreciate the accuracy of the new prices. Don't forget also that all prices in DrugWars are tied to the DWD price, and it's only decided by players. At this point Drugwars, nor me or the team, never sold any tokens and we will start to buy back tokens from players on market to reward bug hunters.

Gangs

Demote them all!

You can now demote a capo to soldier with a simple clic!

Gang deposit statistics

With this big improvements on the gang deposits statistics, you can now see who deposited what and if it's above the average of the team/building

Changes for units

Most units had their price reviewed and changed according to their power. Since 90% of the units had a change in their price I will not detail all the price change but only the value for few units who got their values changed. I really trust that the new prices are more fair for everyone.

Big mama have now 40HP instead of 25.
Apache pass from 70 ATK and HP to 60, with 10 defense instead of 15.

You can retrieve the full change list simply there : https://github.com/FutureShockco/drugwars.js/commit/579afd2260c523e7203891026c31274e2f7e8ca1#diff-b56281cc0e49530ea2f1af2b2cc4550eL61

Bye bye to the live chat

While the chat was helpful for new players, some people thought that it would be a good place to bring their hate, this was confusing new players and since I had no time to fight with them( I'm sorry for people who liked to use it) I preferred to simply remove it.

Solo Jobs

Minimum and maximum opponents

The minimum and the maximum amount of jobs were a bit confusing, since a job take into count your production to increase the number of opponents, the displayed amount before starting the job was not accurate, it's now fixed and you can expect to face the good number of opponents

Small drop on the job rewards.

While players loves to make jobs I balanced the rewards for each job to make them paying a bit less. Not too much too since I want to improve the gang jobs in the next update.
Edit : after the feedback of many active players I decided to increase back the rewards! So you can keep killing FBI and CIA agents while enjoying fair rewards :)

Async issues and notifications

No more async timeout

At some point many players had ASYNC TIMEOUT issues, I literally had a hard time finding the problem, but this is now gone forever.

The notification system

All notifications are now giving you more information, instead of having a wrong format message when you did not have enough units you will see now which unit is missing/not enough.

Defensive buildings

Probably the biggest point of the v0.6 is the apparition of new defensive buildings. Those are made in a way to help the defender and mostly small players.

The cameras (permit you to see now which units are coming to your base, additionnaly to the amount )
For other buildings their description should be enough detailed but if you have any questions you can always reach me on discord or ask other players.

Rename your bases

A simple way to rename your base

Give them the name you want! Keep in mind that you can not rename your primary base.

Prestige system

Many players are still asking how the prestige can be increased, so to give a clear answer, first of all the prestige can be increased by attacking strongest people (with bigger production) but this may also differ depending on your opponent's prestige. So if you attack someone with a bigger production and with a lot of prestige you will obtain even more prestige! This also makes people with high prestige becoming good targets to shoot down.

What's coming next?

Multi-server

Did you notice that the last update gave a name to our server? I chose to use the name of one of the most dangerous cities in the world which is Detroit. This is the first step before announcing a multi server access to the game. So few players were afraid to get their account wiped, this will never happen and new players or old ones, will be able to play on a new fresh server!

A better design

To be honest I'm still jealous of few other games when I compare the UI of Drugwars with them. In that way I will make a big rework on the interface to make the game more appealing.

Mobile apps

Yes I know that most of you are already using their mobile to play DrugWars and after the UI work is done I will make the official mobile apps to give you a better way to enjoy the game, instead of logging with your browser.

More buyable items

The shop is now looking pretty empty, we are going to solve this issue by adding nearly 10 new items that you can purchase with a different purpose for all of them.

New diplomatic options

I noticed that not many bosses are using the embassy of their gang. In that way we will add new feature to give them the will to check their embassy and use the new options to interact with other gangs.

The complete guide of Drugwars

Making a guide takes times, and even more if we plan to integrate them fully to the game as tutorial and helps. Zen-art started the complete guide of Drugwars few months ago and I'm going to do my best to finish it after being sure that features does not change too much.
If you want to give it a look you can find it here : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UMq4cYMDCGiQCbEiBgGavzvJ-isqLRdYORgOr4xD6cE

Sabotage actions

I promised that a few months ago, and had not had too much time to work on, but DrugWars will offer a sabotage system that permit to deactivate opponent productions.

Improvement on gang jobs

The gang jobs are now working like solo jobs, I will change that by adding a way to gather units (sort of preparation system) before sending a big attack on the NPC's.

An open source sidechain for Steem and for Gaming

While SteemEngine is a great way to get started on Steem with custom assets and soon NFT's I trust that most of project will have a wider benefit of having their own sidechain which can give another dimension to the decentralization needed for dapps. Following the idea of Dan that you can find in this post : https://steemit.com/lisk/@dan/why-lisk-is-inferior-to-ethereum, I think that Steem can still surpass many other ecosystem with a sidechain.

The code source is available there : https://github.com/FutureShockco/teelkey

You will notice the number of different transactions available on Teelkey, it has a dex, an account recovery option, a nft system, a bid system comparable to ebay that can be used to sell and bid on nft's and many other features to make it solid and usable for many projects.
I'm thankful to heimindanger for the work he made on avalon, that gave me a good point to start from.

A big thanks to all Drugwars players!

Many of those improvements were suggested by players and I am thankful for their feedback and ideas. While this post cover most of the new features and changes I might have forgotten some of them so you will have to discover them while playing.

Keep tuned for more informations and see you on the Battle Ground!