It only took about 6 months and various name revisions...

.... but Van Hijack, Truck Heist or now Delivery Heist has finally made it into the game. Lets call it an early (or late?) Christmas present.

This feature is based on the old "Van Hijack" feature which we saw in the previous version of the game. There are various differences between the two though plus it's not quite as simple now as it was before (select an old banger, throw it in, hope for the best). It's a group crime which sits below Armed Robbery in the group crime menu and is considered to be the easiest, or simplest one. There are three members - the leader who has to pay a fixed start up cost and two drivers who each have to turn up with a vehicle. The drivers select their vehicles, the leader can then take the heist forward and in around half an hour you'll have you results via an event.

What's important to improve my chances of passing?

The most important thing here are the two vehicles. The better the vehicles, the more chance you have of passing - it's that simple. The best thing is that the feature has been developed to inform all members via the completion event of which vehicle caused the failure if it goes wrong. This means that a bad vehicle choice can be pinpointed to one specific member.

If you travel away from where the heist is happening then it is guaranteed to fail and this will again be mentioned as the reason for failure in the completion event.

How many bullets can I earn? How do I make sure I earn as many as possible?

We're not going to reveal any hard figures, we'll let you figure out what kind of bullet amounts to expect from a successful delivery heist. The amounts should be reasonable and there is the possibility to earn some much larger amounts on occasion. The difference between this features and others is that your level is not involved - players from level 1 to level 50, if they get away with the heist (which is harder at a lower level as you have to source good vehicles), have the chance to earn the same amount of bullets. Of course higher level players will have had a longer time period to stock over too.

Y U NO LET ME PASS? Y U GIVE ME LOW BULLETS?

The feature is brand new so whilst we've tried to make sure that it's balanced and working well from the start, only real world usage will allow us to tweak it to work as well and fairly as possible. We'll be monitoring the results a lot in these early days and whilst we welcome feedback or constructive criticism, lets not just have a load of CAPS LOCK spamming in chat about how you hate the feature. Let the feature live for a little while and see how it goes, it's bound to change at least slightly in the first week or two. If you're in the camp that thinks everything is a 'fix' though, you might as well not even attempt a heist!

I think that's about it. The feature is live from the time of this blog post, so enjoy it and we'll be watching for your comments in the forums, chat, this blog post, on Twitter, on Facebook and on Google+. We do hope you like it :)

P.S. Please report any bugs to us immediately via the Help Request system. Thanking you very muchly ;)

(Group) Armed Robbery changes

Hi everyone!

I wouldn't normally put out a blog post for small updates, we usually post those to Twitter and sometimes Facebook but I feel that we need to make sure everybody sees this one.

It is apparent that the group Armed Robberies really need some tweaking. There was a big rush initially to get those out last round and the calculations used for passing etc really wern't thought through with a pretty much straight 2 in 3 chance of passing (assuming you choose best equipment) and the vehicle having no effect on things - as an example of two problems.

We recently fixed the issue where people could be in the wrong location without the Armed Robbery failing and now we're ready to start tweaking the calculations so that it works a bit better on the whole. Over the course of this week (and possibly weeks to come) we will be tweaking the outcomes on a day to day basis. Perhaps you will pass more often, perhaps you will pass less often, perhaps you will be paid more or maybe you will be paid less - these are the things that will be changing as we work to make it more balanced. At the moment, higher level players basically have the same pass chance as lower level players. In fact, as said earlier, it's a 2 in 3 chance of passing and the upper cash outcome limit is based on your level points. It's time to mix this up and have the feature work properly, more like it used to.

Please don't bombard us with complaints about how things aren't going the way you would like them to go. We will be monitoring the community for your reactions but most importantly we're tweaking this to work well for the game overall. There is far too much money in the game, although we can't do much about that for this round we can start to improve things for future rounds.

Thanks for your understanding with this.

Update: One of the main things you should take from this is that vehicles will shortly start to have a play in things so you should start perhaps trialling different ones. In future I would like to show in the 'failed' event exactly what caused the robbery to fail ;)

P.S. Family points were recently tweaked too as per our tweet, check out your new points score ;) It now includes bullets and family businesses in the calculation, as well as some other changes and fixes.

Double Level Points Day, Game Day 79

Our first ever double level points day will run:

Saturday 19th May, Game Day 79, 8 PM

- until -

Sunday 20th May, Game Day 80, 8 PM

That's 24 hours to have all level points earnt doubled!

There probably won't be another double points day this round, so take advantage.

You will receive an event at the start and the end of the double level point period.

Good Luck!

Introducing 'Double Level Points'

Most of us are familiar with the 'Double XP' weekends we have on Call of Duty, plus similar fun days or weekends on other games (including browser games). The request for a similar feature here on Gangster Nation has been in high demand over the past couple of years with the Call of Duty franchise growing bigger than ever and today I'm happy to announce that we finally have the system in place to run 'Double Level Point Days' (or any other time period of choice should we wish).

It's actually quite a big feature and one which can really boost some fun into the game, especially if we run these special days at the right time in the round. Having said that, there's nothing interesting for you guys to see visually, it's purely a backend thing apart from a small area on the 'Your Stats' page which appears at the bottom during a 'Double Level Point' period giving a bit of information on it.

So, how does it work? Well, we can enable the 'double level point period' for any length of time we like, starting when we like. Usually we will go for a 24 hour period, giving people from every timezone a chance to get a fair piece of the cake. Whilst the period is active, you will earn DOUBLE LEVEL POINTS - every single point you earn from any source will be doubled (this is done every minute due to the technical workings of the feature)!

We are planning to run our first 'Double Level Day' around day 75 - 85 but will make a blog post at least a week prior to let you all know of the exact date and start / end times, in fact we will even go as far as to e-mail you all for this... we want everybody to come online and join in the fun for this one ;)

Don't worry - we're not going to go crazy, we won't be running this every weekend or anything like that. This special event will occur strictly 1 - 2 times per round max with perhaps another sprinkle of double points during the deathmatch period (or maybe we'll go as far as triple during the deathmatch? ;))

We hope you are all happy about this, let us know what you think and ask any questions in the comments below. I apologise if I wasn't clear enough in this post, the announcement for the first double points day will be simplified and read very clearly.

Note: I did mention in chat something about having a one hour test run tomorrow evening, we are no longer having this test run as it's no longer needed plus we want this to be fair to everybody (give each player the chance to be online at some point during the double period).