Reset Announcement

We just finished the longest round of TMN since it’s in my hands, and although the end was more boring than any round before, the rest of the round seemed alright. When I got home on August 15th, it took more than “just a few days” to get used to being back in the Netherlands – spending 4 weeks in Africa really changes you! The next week I continued implementing feature improvements that were on my list. I am now confident that TMN can be back after (the semi-announced) 2 weeks, so it is time to make the actual announcement!

Here are the important dates: 

- TMN will go offline on September 7th at 18:00 TMN time (GMT+2*), 17:00 in the UK (GMT+1*)

- The new round will start on September 8th at 18:00 TMN time (GMT+2*), 17:00 in the UK (GMT+1*)

- There will be no pre-registration; when the countdown reaches 00:00 you can create your account

- Properties will be dropped on September 10th or 11th (when the economy reaches 400mil and the game houses 25 hitmen+)

- Property pickup fees will be like last round; 35mil for a BF, 15mil for a BJ, 5mil for other casinos (these may be changed later in the round)

- Minimum and maximum bullet prices will be like last round, and may be changed during the round as well

- A percentage of purchased credits will be returned on September 22nd or 23rd, more info on that will be provided later on

Some changes: 

- Rankup Requirements; no more scripting to legend using crimes or GTAs or jail, but OCs, DTMs, Killing, Traveling are also required!

- A new kind of scripttest; easier to complete than (re)captchas, harder to bypass using a script - wait and see!

- Cheaper credits in the credits store; roughly 35% more credits for the same amount of money!

- No more 10% bullets loss in the Artillery Bunker!

Of course there will be some more changes, but you’ll have to find these yourself during the round. We hope to see you then!

Marc

*: Note that we are currently in Daylight Saving Time.

TMN Launch

Some players requested additional information regarding the launch, and although it's not so easy to plan ahead at this moment (I'll be away on Saturday and part of Sunday), I'll do my best to update you guys.

The full launch date and time time will be 11-03-2012 at 18:00 in the GMT+1 timezone (which is 17:00, 5PM in the UK). Before that (a couple of hours earlier) the pages you currently see will be replaced by the 'regular' pages (including login and registration page) displaying a countdown.

There will be no pre-registration, simply because there's too little time for that. From 18:00 on you will be able to register your new account.

As for properties: Properties will be dropped when we believe the economy holds enough money, and enough players meet the requirements. We believe having 25 hitmen in a game economy with close to 400mil, the properties will fall in good hands. Before that, System will hold them with reasonable maxbets, but no bullet production.

Marc

Back home, TMN offline

Last Saturday morning I arrived back in the Netherlands after a fun (yet busy) trip to Brazil, where myself and 15 others were doing research in the field of IT. The trip involved many visits to research institutes, companies and university departments, as well as some places important to the local culture and history (and beaches are part of that as well, logically).

After some rest, I pulled the plug on TMN in the evening, and replaced the game by a static page providing everyone with some information. Because of a slight jetlag (and being tired in general) nothing much was done on Saturday or Sunday.

Right now I am preparing a test environment, so we (Devious and myself, for now) can test the updated features, so the next round will have a smooth(er) start (than last round).

Some questions that were sent to my inbox have not yet been answered, so I will address those here:
* The percentage of credits that will be returned has not yet been decided;
* Properties will not be dropped before some players are ranked hitman+ and own more than 10mil;
* Property pickup fees will be there at the start of the round, but may be lowered/raised/removed later on, depending on the state of the game economy;

Marc

TMN Reset Announcement

Rumors have been around since week 3 of this round, but logically we never took those seriously. Even in early January we didn’t take them seriously, but when the economy dropped from more killings (and more after that), we had to get thinking and planning. As mentioned before; those two activities aren’t easy on me (), and consume most time. My personal planning is not so straightforward either; I have to plan around exams, projects, visits to cool countries and other occasions of extreme workload. For that reason we only had one option for the reset, but as players last year really hated me for announcing the reset early, I decided to wait with the announcement. Now is the time to post it though!

So, what’s the date? Here’s a draft of the planning I have in mind:

• On February 14th I leave the country for a warmer place
• On February 25th I return home, and pull the plug on this round of TMN :’(
• On Saturday, March 10th Sunday, March 11th we launch the next round, with improvements based on suggestions made (more on that later)

Below you’ll find a list of accepted suggestions and our own ideas:

• Fewer cities and networks
• Artillery Bunkers: keeping some bullets after you die (credits store option)
• International Prison (possibly with minimum jail-times before someone can break you out)
• Losing health on numerous occasions (OC, jailbreak, GTA) to limit scripting a little
• Easier killing of people wearing protection (this seems to have been a bit extreme this round)
• A TOS update on “duping”; we’ll be more strict
• A TOS update on “scripting”; manual script tests may return

Marc

Due to another meeting on March 10th, the launch had to be postponed by one day, and will be on March 11th.

Pre-registration, more updates

Like last year, you will be able to register your account prior to the launch. This time, pre-registration will open on Tuesday, November 1st somewhere in the afternoon (TMN time, GMT+1). From then on, the communication platform will only be accessible from http://platform.tmn2010.net.

And as promised, some more updates:
- If you use a mobile device, or a (relatively) low screen resolution, you will now be able to switch to a more mobile-friendly layout.
- The TOS has been updated: Doing an OC with another player (1!) on your IP is no longer a problem, and interacting with others on your (mobile 3g?) IP is not a problem as long as amounts are reasonable.
- Profiles are a lot more customizable now, you can choose to show or hide avatar and phone, the amount of kills on your name, all kills (including name and rank) and other statistics.
- Bankrupting a casino now makes you the owner of the casino.
- The minimum casino bet has been raised to $1000, to keep casinos at least playable when the owners are away.

Marc

TMN Launch Date!

Ouch, has it been this long?! Yes, it’s been like half a year since TMN was replaced by a boring communication platform. I am however glad I made the decision to create this with top priority, as it’s a lot better than an empty page!

It is time to end the communication platform phase though: as of November 3rd 2011 18:00 (GMT+1 timezone) , the communication platform will be replaced by the good old (yet new) TMN again!

The final weeks before the launch will be spent on the new features as well as testing features we didn’t give testers access to (for security reasons). Like last year, pre-registration will be enabled a couple of days before the launch*, allowing you to reserve your name. From then on, the communication platform will no longer be accessible from the main website, but from another link instead*

*: Information regarding pre-registration and the new link for the communication platform will be provided later.

Marc

ps. If you applied for a staff position and were rejected before, please check your e-mail inbox again. We just invited a few more players to help us during the final phase of testing.

Killfest, Gambling and Reset

On the game forum as well as the in-game news page you'll find an announcement regarding the killfest, gambling day, and reset. It was quite difficult to schedule it, and I really had only two options; do it in January, or late March. I chose the first option.

The game will go offline on January 21st
There will be a killfest on January 22nd
There will be a gambling day on January 23rd
The next round will start on January 24th at 19:00 (GMT+1)

For more information, read the Game Forum or in-game News Page.

Marc

Update #1: Added launch time, which is 19:00.

We're back!

We're back! And to understand why I think this day was successful, you'll have to know my targets... Here they are:
- I was hoping to hit 150 registered accounts on Friday 27th of August (we did not get that amount until Saturday).
- I was hoping to hit 450 registered accounts on the day of the launch (we got roughly 500 accounts).
- I was hoping to get 10 credit purchases on the first day (we hit that about 2.5 hours after the launch).

Not everything went so great... I forgot to create a phone and plan for the first few hours (while only System has a phone provider), and found a bug creating them too. There were also a few smaller problems, and complaints about the logouts (that occured mostly because I was fixing these issues). A few hours after the launch it started to look like it was going alright.

At this moment, there are roughly 200 users online, including 2 mods, 2 forum mods (including DragonCurse, who offered his help too) and one admin (myself). OCs are starting to pop up, the forum is quite active, and more than once a player told me this is what he/she had been waiting for: TMN. TMN is back.

Altogether, it seems like this round will be interesting!

Marc

TMN Launch

I hope many people have been expecting this post, but unfortunately I've been more busy than expected. Here it is anyway!

Next Friday, August 27th, you can pre-register your TMN account for next round. That way you can reserve your name even if you aren't available at the launch day. This pre-registration opens at 16:00 in the GMT+1 timezone (10:00 AM in EST).
The pre-registration process works as shown on screenshots a few blog posts back, but the username + password combination won't log you in just yet.

Next Monday, August 30th, TMN 2010 will launch, and you will be able to use the login information from the e-mail to login to TMN. This will happen at 16:00 in the GMT+1 timezone (10:00 AM in EST).

I also announced that I picked two moderators already, their names are Devious and Mercer. Both have proven to me in the past that they are loyal members who are always willing to help. Devious during her time as a moderator (2007), and Mercer during his time as forum mod (2009). I wish them a lot of fun on TMN, and I hope the players will appreciate my decision!

Besides these two mods, the team of testers consisted of the following members: mama1971, PDX, InfernoRain, Stev, Stipe, Kazirem and RBG. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for the useful input as well as testing results they have provided me with. At the launch a few forum moderators will be selected from the testers team, I will ask them before I post their names.

I look forward to seeing all of you on TMN!

Marc

update, testing, IRC

Update
- Registration is now fully functional (although disabled for players)
- Double Up needs some more work
- I think TMN will launch before september 1st
- I set up a page where you can chat to others (including me, at times) using IRC
- I was unable to setup paypal at this moment, will have to do that later

Testing
Today I invited 7 (former) players to help me test TMN. As practically all pages have been updated, there's a lot of work to do.
I also asked 2 of them how they'd feel about becoming moderator (I will publish the name when they say yes). The others will probably become forum moderator at first (they may be promoted to mod later).

IRC
Rage and Silentbob host an IRC server that can be used for TMN. You can use the pjirc script I set up, or use your own IRC client (server: irc.g33kd3n.net, channel: #jail) to start chatting.

Marc

Ps. Keep advertising the TMN website, blog, twitter, facebook group. The more players we get, the more fun it'll be for everyone!

Help needed!

Since details related to weapons, explosives and protections were lost, I request the following:
If you have screenshots of the inventory page from last round (2009-2010) or the round before (2008-2009) please send those to my e-mail address or upload them and post a link in the comments.

Thanks in advance!

Quick update:
I opened up a twitter account for TMN, it's called TMNOfficial. I am not a fan of twitter, and don't personally use it, but for "spreading the word" and providing more updates than large blog posts, I think it's good to have one for TMN. On the right side of the blog you'll see the latest few tweets.

In the past few days I fixed about 14 pages and tested most of them too. Two important pages have't been tested yet, as they rely on data requested above (weapon, explosive, protection): Organized Crime and Killing.
I'm still having trouble getting registration to work, it seems like there's abug in reCaptcha (it was reported too), but I can't seem to fix it. I'm looking into alternative registration possibilities now.

Marc

Game and features

I announced that I'd provide a full update. Unfortunately the decisions I wanted to post about haven't been made yet, so I haven't posted that update yet either.

The most important thing is that I will be the one to host and run the game. For the rest there are a few things I don't know for sure yet:
- The name of thegame might change (by adding a prefix or suffix);
- The original domains (tmnx.net, themafianetwork.net) may be used (I'd prefer this, but DC is the owner of those domains, and you can guess they are worth a lot of money);

As for features, I heard many of you want Double Up back as casino game. No problem, except for the fact that I can't remember why we ever took it out! Could anyone answer that question? I still have the source code, so with about 5 hours of work I could get it back in action.

Are there any more (old) features you'd want to see back? Post them in the comments!

Marc

Ps. Thanks for the support guys, it's really appreciated!

tmn2010.net

Good news: I have registered tmn2010.net

Since I didn't receive any reply from DC, I decided to simply continue where I left off. The next logical step was to register a domain, order a hosting package (no more dedicated server, I hope it'll work out), and get something online.

http://www.tmn2010.net already hosts the "portal" used during the last round of TMN. Soon it'll be expanded with the rest of TMN, although there's still some work to do.

I don't have much more to tell you guys, just the fact that I repaired phones, phone plans and phone providers today.

Marc

Update: (28-07-2010)
For DC's side of the story, view the original domain.

Update #2: (28-07-2010)
DragonCurse replied to another e-mail, things are looking promising, and he'll be online somewhere today I hope.
TMN now runs on TMN2010.net but is not accessible to players yet, I still need to do a lot of repairing, but at least I got it working on the new host. I hope DC and I can come to an agreement so we can run TMN on all existing domains, and provide a fun game + community again.

Update #3: (28-07-2010)
I will post a full update tomorrow, but from the chat I had with DC, there's one easy conclusion to draw: The TMN2010 project (still need a cooler codename) will continue.

Offline.....

Wow, and this had to be the title of the next post!

I assume everyone who reads this already knows TMN is off-line, but the bad news is that I don't know why and for how long (though I could guess, I won't). After numerous e-mails and text messages, and even some messages on facebook, I still haven't heard from DC.

So, what's next? That's my question really... If DC's had enough of TMN, I'll buy the domains and cut him a deal as I'm sure players are willing to help and revive the TMN community. I'll be busy as always (although the 55-hour weeks of graduation are over), but with some help from people who actually communicate it might work.

For now all we can do is wait, sadly.

If you would like to stay updated, you could either join the Facebook group ("TheMafiaNetwork") or keep watching the TMN domains (themafianetwork.net, tmnx.net) and this blog.

Marc

Ps. The message below was posted on Facebook earlier this week:

Since TMN has been offline, I've been trying to contact DC to figure out why... I assume he just 'let it die'. Especially since he has ignored text messages as well as e-mails on all e-mail addresses I know, I'm afraid I'm right.

Anyway, if he responds, we'll see what we can do. The least we could do is get a website o...nline to explain things. As for now: the future is unknown.

Up and running

As you may know, TMN is back up and running. It doesn't look bad at all from my perspective; between 150 and 300 players online usually, forums are quite active as well, and overall TMN seems alive again.

Before we re-launched we already made a lot of changes, and it seems like we're not stopping yet! Unfortunately we didn't have much time to test the new layout, also because we're more focusing on this game round and its features. I think we'll eventually find a nice way to implement the new layout though! I can't share any screenshots yet.

As for me, I'm currently doing 5 courses at another university, and though I have to spend a lot more time on studying and traveling now, it's a nice set of interesting courses so I'm not complaining.

Marc

TMN Beta Testing

The TMN Beta Test is going very well. Most players I e-mailed about it were happy to help me test TMN on a 100% voluntary basis.

So far I've spent most time on a few improvements:
- Properties on Trading Center had a few bugs in it, those were fixed
- Business Names are now scanned for illegal characters (on creation)
- Replaced one crime with a pick pocket function, that will pick another player's pockets (you can type in the name yourself!)
- Added a Sell All Damaged Cars button to garage

Other improvements we have been discussing on the forums include:
- Sorting of garage
- Car Bombing
- Allowing players to update a topic they created
- Network invitation messages and slogans
- Drive-By Organized Crime
- MTAs
- Explosives Lab (entirely different than the way it used to be!)
- Bullet Factories

The above things are still being considered, but I'm hoping to improve TMN as much as possible.

Empty!

The game forum counts max 3 pages. Topics stay on for days. Online players 'list' is just a few lines of names, less than 60 usually. I get less than 10 messages a day.
All sad signs of one thing: The reset

People say we should reset sooner, but we assumed people would be pissed if we'd announce it later. It seems like this wasn't such a great step to take after all!

Should we change the announcement? I think that decision requires some insight in donation records (which I don't have myself). I should have a chat with Huy within a few days that could help us. We could possibly do the killfests earlier and bring TMN back up earlier as well.

For now, I've set up another server (besides the regular test server) to test TMN with about 10 players. The forums there will be used for discussing new and improved features for next round, and to test these features as well. I hope that'll save the trouble we had with tmnX, and I hope that will make next round a little more exciting.

Marc

Things to do, performance, scripting

Many many many things to do. I decided to go for the Post-It method of remembering thing: Writing everything down on small post-it notes. It works nicely, but the pile really is growing... Every comment on TMN is written down, so I can look at them tomorrow.

Tonight I handled my TMN inbox for the first time, and was amazed. Not just by the IQ of the people messaging me (read: No "plzzzz mke ma bruv mod plzzzzz" messages), but by the game's performance. Every time I clicked a link, it'd think for 0.2 seconds, and it'd be done! Not bad.

How is it this fast? Because of the coding. We're using a less good server than we used to, but the coding is all updated, better-looking, and more tuned for performance. It seems like it's working!

Everytime I looked at online players, I'd see between 220 and 260 players online, not bad if you ask me. But... It seems like people are already using scripts to get there. Pathetic? Yes, but it's how things go on TMN. We'll probably spend a few hours limiting it, but we won't eliminate scripting.

Testing

Last night and this morning my time (so till about midnight TMN time) we have chosen about 15 testers, and added them to the test environment of TMN. If you were not contacted, you were either not chosen, or you were too late.

So far we have found a few bugs already, and a few things that influence gameplay in a general way.
We will now try and fix all these minor things, and let the testers find even more, before we launch.

We have thought of who to keep and hire for mods, but haven't really concluded anything. This means DragonCurse and Marc will just look on gameforum often to see what players would be a good addition, and look at their pasts as well.

Earlier today DC e-mailed me asking me about credits... I gave him my opinion:
- We could give credits for donations in the last 3 months of tmnX
- We could give credits for 5% (or anything reasonable) of the donations in the last 3 months of TMN
I don't know what we'll do, but we haven't been able to discuss it any further yet. We'll inform you guys.

Countdown Until TMN Launch....

You may have seen it already, but we're actually counting down!

TMN seems to be ready, and DC and I are currently testing it, to make sure everything works. I noticed a few changes so far, but those are minor ones:
- Text color and buttons look a little different
- City names
- Login page
- One feature from tmnX added (but don't worry, you'll like it)
- Drive-by button on OC page is gone

There'll be more changes, but I personally think, and hope, they're improvements to the game.

Update #1:
- It will be a total reset
- Scripting at this moment is possible, but if it's up to me, it'll be script-checks on login page and auto-logouts
- DC and I haven't discussed credits in detail yet, but I'll see what's possible there.
- Credits sell & buy will be concidered
- If you need me, get on IRC*

*:
Server: irc.themafianetwork.net
Channel: #jail
My username: marc