Deathmatch begins today

Hey folks, if you haven't already noticed we have started deathmatch today! It will run from now until Thursday evening when the game will close ready for the new round on Friday evening (find more on the new round here). During the time that the game is closed between Thursday and Friday, there will be a chat room available on our website. As usual we will start off on a very small scale and then go a bit crazy as we reach towards the end of the deathmatch, where free bullets and money are normally available.

To start off we have the following:

• 50% extra free on all deathmatch credit purchases.
• Cheap bullets available in the Auction House in 1,000 and 5,000 amount packs.
• Double speed detectives, allowing you to search and make kills more rapidly.
• Protection time limited to 24 hours (going into hideout or choosing a higher protection time will be reduced to 24 hours).

Monday morning (early hours) we will drop all families - deathmatch should be every gangster for themselves! Before we do this, all bank money will be paid out (in the same way as 100% bank distribution). You are free to change members around, distribute bullets etc prior to this happening.

Update: We aren't going to drop families, instead we will no longer accept new invites and let the families fight it out for now as the detectives level rule increases :) Further updates via Twitter.

At some point we will also put up a score board showing the top players of the round (kills, kill points, ranking etc). As the deathmatch continues we will add more bullets to the auction house, remove or lower timers in certain places such as travelling, lower pricing in places such as detectives.

Please remember that the first stage of the deathmatch is designed to give the good players, gamblers or savers a chance to spend their well earnt money. So if you have a fresh character you may find that bullets in the auction house are quite expensive still however as the days go by and people spend their money, you will find see the pricing go down.

Remember to use the "Find Gangsters" functionality to find some of the best kills! All updates to the deathmatch from now on will be posted to Twitter, you don't need a Twitter account to view our feed which can be found here: http://www.twitter.com/GangsterNation

If we have any major developments or news between now and the new round we will post here on the blog, otherwise see you all in the new round! Be sure to tell all of your Gangster Nation friends about the fresh round coming up with kill in place from day 1 ;) Thanks for a brilliant round, it has been very bumpy given that we've been running an entirely new version of the website but overall we're quite happy - now lets see some further development and growth this year.

Mike

The new round will begin Friday 2nd March 2012 07:30 PM

The new round will begin on a Friday. We promised this last time but with the new version and new hosting provider, there ended up being some problems, pushing the start of this round to a Saturday. We're all stable now and can promise you a reset on a Friday again :)

Me and Blondie are both away in the middle of February, so the new round is actually going to be a short while off still. This is due to us needing and wanting to be here for the start of the new round (not just opening a new round and then leaving a few days later... that wouldn't go down too well) and also needing a bit of room to run a deathmatch at the end of the round.

In short, the next available but reasonable Friday is the one when the new round will start.

The new round will start:

Friday 2nd March 2012
(Day 126 of the current round)

07:30 PM Game Time

07:30 PM UK Time

Find the time in your location

We wouldn't normally announce a reset this early on but it has been a weird round and I know a lot of you were expecting the reset a bit earlier than it has now been planned for.

The current round will likely end the evening before (Thursday evening, Day 125). Due to limitations on when we're around, the deathmatch will begin February Fri 8th Day 119 / Sat 9th Day 120 (depending on circumstances at the time). This is just short of a one week deathmatch, still plenty of time to have fun... plus we've had a kind of deathmatch anyway recently with all of the shooting going on!

In the time between now and the new round, we plan to get as much more functionality into the game as possible. Recently the silencer, long range kills, bounties, general game stats and basic vehicle auctions were added amongst many bug fixes and of course kill. There is much more to come in terms of new features and improving existing ones where necessary (such as showing vehicle information in the auction house).

The round is not over yet, there is a good five weeks to go :) Thanks for testing everything out, next round is going to be so brilliant because of this. Look out for more to come ;)

We will remind you of this at the time but please do not create a new account for the new round. Simply login to your existing game account or login how you would normally (Facebook, Google etc). No new account registrations please.

Happy 7th Birthday Gangster Nation

It has today, Wednesday 25th January 2012, been 7 years since the domain gangsternation.net was registered back in 2005! I can't really believe it myself, it has been a long, long time and we're still here :) The game was in fact started a few weeks prior to this, I remember still now being sat at the computer in my attic and trying to mimic other browser games whilst learning PHP (the primary server side language which drives the website).

I never thought that anybody would play Gangster Nation, it was created purely for my own interest but even riddled with bugs the game quickly caught on across MSN etc (before social networks were the big thing!). To this date, we still have some kind of playerbase and it's great when I sit back and see people from all areas of world enjoying themselves playing at the website which I've created :) Of course, without the players, the game would be pretty boring, so more than anything you lot make the game what it is and make it so attract to people to play. We have one of the most vibrant communities that I've seen at any browser game and I thank everybody who plays for that, I thank everybody who plays for keeping the game going for 7 years and hopefully many more!

Whilst the very early versions of the game were written with inspiration from similar games, Gangster Nation has become a brilliant and unique game in its own right thanks to everybody's great suggestions. This year we're now finally starting to see the end product of the whole new version which I've been working on for many months (dating back since at least April last year) and it is now that people are starting to notice all of the small changes which make the game so much better. Little things which wern't in the old version (and wouldn't have been easy to bring in due to the structure) but are here now making the game more enjoyable.

A small selection of our home screens over the years...

You can find more old screenshots of Gangster Nation here

This eighth year, whilst being busier than ever in terms of my position with work elsewhere and such, I want to grow Gangster Nation to be the size it was many years ago and perhaps larger (we're talking 150 - 200 players online concurrently during the peak hours, more if we can do it). By all means this may not succeed but I'm going to really give it a go and hopefully you guys can help as detailed in a recent previous blog post. Don't get me wrong, the game is great as it is with you guys but it will be much more fun with more people playing. I'll be bringing the game to the state it was in previous rounds in terms of completeness over the next couple of months and then starting to look at fresh ways to get the game out there as well as obvious traditional ways such as advertising. In line with this I will continue to develop and expand the game further than ever, now that we're on a new code base I have the ability to bring some really interesting features in.

Once you reach this stage, 14 years doesn't sound too far off, so here's to the next 7 years!

Even as gaming advances further and further (3D gaming in the browser etc), I believe there will always be a niche area for this kind of browser game and I hope all of you guys who play now will be around to enjoy it with us (me and Blondie)... it won't be much fun on our own. Hey, there are even some players who have had kids during their time at Gangster Nation and those kids are growing up fast... nearly old enough to pick up a gun perhaps in a few years? ;) Gangster Nation - 7 years old with many more years to come!

An offer extended to everybody for the next 24 hours
To celebrate Gangster Nation's birthday, as the best gangster game online, we are offering you 50% extra free on all credit purchases today (Day 89 12:00 AM - Day 89 11.59 PM). These credits cannot be taken to the new round as they are part of a special offer.

The date for the reset is looking to be Friday March 2nd (this is in about 5 weeks). There will be a blog post  with more information on this and the reason for choosing this date shortly.

We hope you're all enjoying the excess bullet stock in the stores, you should purchase your bullets whilst you can because we will be going back to normal stock soon!

Today's Issues

Hello. I just wanted to make a quick post and apologise to everybody for the hours of boredom at Gangster Nation whilst the game wasn't working properly today.

The problem was caused by me changing some code last night to speed up the website and then not testing it out entirely. It was indeed entirely my fault. Thanks to Twitter and a few stalkers from GN having my phone number, I got on it as quickly as possible and fixed the problem within 10 minutes once I had access.

It is a testing round, stuff does happen unfortunately but I'll do my best to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again - it only just happened quite recently with open fire a couple of days ago. I guess we can put it down to my rush to get changes out ready for the next round, so they can be tested live during this round. I should test more locally even for the smallest of changes to make sure everything is functioning properly.

Once again, I am sincerely sorry for the inconvenience. Everything is working normally again now following a reload of the page if you haven't already reloaded.

Not much more to say really, enjoy the game guys, updates are on their way... hopefully non-site-breaking updates if all goes well!

Mike

More bullets for everyone!

As it's Gangster Nation's birthday this week (on Wednesday 25th), we're going to allow you to stock more bullets through the bullet stores for a few days :)

Well actually, the real reason if you want it...

Following all of the killing over the past few days the game has only 10,000,000 bullets in it right now, which in comparison to usual rounds is quite low. The issue is that there is $5billion game money in the game, a lot of this acquired earlier in the round prior to tweaks etc being made. The result of this is that bullets are being sold for silly prices. Supply and demand etc.

To help the situation, to bring more bullets into the game and help more money leave the game, we're going to sell a few more bullets in the stores. This will also make things feel a bit better whilst Truck Heist's aren't here (those are coming in soon though!).

Remember as well people that the stores restock every 30 minutes not every hour.

We will choose how much excess to stock and when to stop stocking it, so please don't pester us about that!

Planned to come soon:

• Silencer and long range attachments on kill
• The Times (with a special first edition from our resident editor Joey)
• Truck Heist

Enjoy the game folks and keep spreading the word :)

Please help us to grow Gangster Nation

Quick update: you can now place vehicles in the auction house, right from your garage. Stats on the vehicles in the auction house are coming soon.

This year we really want to grow the game so that there are more active players and such, this makes the game much more enjoyable for everybody. The beginning of this was with the new version, this is of course still in progress but we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Following this, we're going to be going heavy on some advertising campaigns to get more players through the door. In addition to these things, we've been doing some work recently on player retention (for example, a notification e-mail if you haven't logged in for a few weeks - just one mind you, we're not spammers!). However, you can do your bit too! There is nothing like a recommendation from a friend to get us more noticed and more people playing. Here are our top methods to help grow the game with us this year.

Voting

This really does not take up that much time. I do it myself now daily and it takes me only a few minutes to vote at each site. This doesn't mean opening the pages then closing them, this means actually voting (we've been noticing some people not voting properly on the ones where votes cannot be tracked, these people have been warned about the consequences of doing this from now on). We have hand picked our top lists to make the voting as easy as possible for you guys whilst ensuring that we will get as good as possible of a return.

Even if you just vote every few days, this would be great for the game. The higher in the listings we are, the significantly more people there are to notice us. There has been some cases of players recently who have revealed that they arrived through top lists and are still around today, which is great.

Go on, do it right now, vote for us at Browser Game List just to be nice :)

Referral Link

Have you checked out the "Player Referral" page at the bottom of the menu before? We give you free bullets to refer people to the game. In fact, we even give you bullets if people just CLICK on your link. Imagine posting that to your friends on your Facebook etc. You receive 15 bullets for each unique click from a non-player and then a further 5,000 bullets per player if they sign up and reach level 5.

It's well worth it if you ask us, so if you're really serious about helping the game grow and want to earn some bullets at the same time... this is the one for you :)

Facebook

We now have a Facebook Page since app profiles have been migrated to proper pages, it's only just hit us what a great tool this is to update everybody on things such as resets, ask you questions and such. As with any other social platform, Facebook is a great way to help grow the game too.

So please Like our Facebook page here:
http://www.facebook.com/GangsterNation

Once you've done that there is currently a question on there we'd love you to answer but we'd also like you to get involved in future activity on our Page so that we get a better understanding of who are players are, what our players want etc :)

Joey's page is still around and you shouldn't leave that one, he'll still be keeping you upto date in other ways on the game as usual :)

Google+

This one probably isn't for everyone but still, we like to have a presence anywhere our players may be now. If you're into Google+ (or perhaps even if not), please +1 our page and add us to your circles!

You can find our Google+ page here:
https://plus.google.com/108704495592740911443/posts

If you are a Google+ user we would love to see you get involved, giving us feedback on our updates etc. It's a bit quite over on Google+ unfortunately :(

Twitter

Last but not least, Twitter. We post even the smallest of updates and sometimes bug fixes on here, given the fast pace of Twitter. Even if you're not a Twitter user you can easily see our profile and update to find out what's been going on. If you are a tweeter, then you should be following us already! Twitter is probably our busiest social presence at the moment.

You can find our Twitter profile here:
http://www.twitter.com/Gangster_Nation

Thanks for reading and we hope you give some of the above methods a go or get connected with us on these social networks :)

Finally, kill is back in the game

We took our time. We thought through dozens of different ways of building it. Finally, kill is here again but... it's the same as every other round!

You can't beat it, our original kill algorithm and such was just so great that there is no reason to change it right now. We're going to continue thinking of different ways to make kill that bit more interesting however right now the best thing to do was just to keep it as it was previously.

There are some cool changes in there though, mostly based upon feedback from players over the years. Lets quickly run through the changes so far.

• Firearms must be purchased one by one in order, however the overall cost is still equal to that of the previous top firearm.
• Firearms have minimum levels on them, however this only goes up to level 18. The reason for this is to make low-level kills more difficult, people should have a chance to get into the game properly before being killed.
• The level rule when hiring detectives is now 10 levels up or down.
• Detectives now have the "follow" option to stick with a target to one further location if they travel whilst being tracked.
• Detectives now send events in different circumstances, such as if your target dies before you get to them or if they travel to another location and are no longer being tracked.
• When you kill somebody in backfire you can take over their bullet stores, blackjack tables, family businesses and their cash.
• When you kill somebody in backfire you receive level points and kill points (less kill points than you would if you killed them "properly" though).
• A player killed in backfire is tagged as being killed in backfire.
• Each kill or kill attempt is recorded with the amount of bullets fired etc. This information will be used to show you records of your kills or attempts on your life. In future we will also use this data to build an automated family war feature.
• The "last words" feature is back, it works slightly differently but I won't go into detail here.
• Targets no longer have to be typed out when firing at somebody, just select your target from a list of available targets to shoot at (based on those being tracked by detectives).
• The hitlist is now "Bounties" (this will be coming into play soon).

We still have gaps to fill in, such as showing kill points and kill counts on profiles etc but at least we've got to this point. The game is really progressing now and before you know it, everything will be back to normal. From there we can only build upon things and improve it further based on your feedback as well as grow the game to be bigger than ever.

At this point we hope you all go and test out your guns etc so that we can make fixes and tweaks then continue developing the rest of the game to get as much working and functioning properly as possible for the new, fresh round. There has been so much developed this round already, so many bug fixes made (even ones you wouldn't be aware of) and so much tweaking going on... next round is just going to be so much better :) Thanks for holding on for this and being patient, it's much appreciated :)

Now go and get shooting! Bang bang!