Too busy to write a blog post...

Wow, it's been 22 days since I last wrote a blog post, you can guess the reason for that: I've been busy!

On the player side things seem to work out nicely, I've seen players from 2005-2006 return, and the online players list is steady at more or less 300 players (max was 421 players). People are reporting possible improvements on a daily basis, and I've already updated over 25% of all pages since September 1st (and over 50% of all pages since I gained control).

As for my side of things, I've been seeing a lot of good numbers, I'll list a few:
- Direct traffic to TMN has gone up to 81%, where linking websites take roughly 14% of the traffic, and search engines the remaining 5%;
- Google Adsense reports that 15 million ads have been displayed on TMN (an average of 555,000 a day!);
- Most TMN players are from the UK, USA, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Canada, Finland;
- We're still consuming roughly 11GB of bandwidth each day;
- We have had roughly 6400 unique visitors since September 1st;

Bullet Factories
Yesterday was the big day for anyone wanting a Bullet Factory; everyone ranked hitman+ had a fair chance at winning one. Although my alarm didn't go off at 10AM, and I wasn't awake yet at noon, I did manage to complete the entire process before 12:40.
The next few hours were very interesting; anyone who held a BF seemed to have a cross-hair on their heads, and most of them died. It was a very interesting day (for anyone who didn't get shot).

Two players haven't claimed their BF yet, they have one more day to collect it (or the 8th and 9th winners of the lottery will get it). The 4th winner violated the TOS (just a small violation, but still) so he didn't get his BF.

Marc

Properties, Performance, Bandwidth

Properties
I will start dropping properties on today (September 6th), but this process will take at least a few weeks. That way players will get a chance to rank to Hitman too. I will use a random order, and I will not drop (for instance) London before Amsterdam or New York. Messages regarding the dropping of properties are not answered, as it's unfair to give one player a bigger chance of getting a property than others. Please don't ask me (or any mod) what time the next property will drop, or what property is next.

Bandwidth and performance
Being Dutch, saving money is in my nature. That's why we are running on a (cheap) hosting package with only 300 megabytes of space, and 6 gigabytes of bandwidth each month. Of course the possibility of reaching the 6GB limit crossed my mind, but I didn't expect it to hit 6GB each day!

At the moment we are consuming betwen 10 and 13GB a day. This results in over 300GB of bandwidth each month. Going with the 'official' prices, this will make the hosting package about 8 times more expensive (still reasonably priced though). A somewhat surprising fact is, that the traffic is not caused by images; it's simply the pages that are loaded (16,353,539 in 5 days)! Although I am trying to improve this, it seems like we'll be upgrading big time soon. I'm thinking a VPS is probably better than the hosting package. The hosting provider offered to discuss it by the end of this month, so we'll have to wait for that...

Marc

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

Domains....

Unfortunately I will not be using the old domain themafianetwork.net for TMN. This because DC wishes to keep that domain himself, for possible future projects. I am trying to convince him to update the announcement and add a link to tmn2010.net, so players know where to find TMN.

I am allowed to use tmnx.net, another domain we've had in the past. This domain is the one I always used when browsing to TMN, as it's nice and short, and easy to type.

Marc

ps. No status updates at this time, have a look at the twitter page for the latest news.

Screenshots

Some players on IRC asked if I could upload some screenshots, so I did. The registration process has changed somewhat, and the cities page has had an upgrade as well (although that one isn't finished). Screenshots are below.

Update #1:
This is the new Cities page (old screenshot can be found here)

Update #2:
Below you'll find a screenshot of the new Bullets Factory page:

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!