TYLER Projects | the blog

There was a lot of player frustration with the new crew system.

I have some observations about the complaints:

• Most of the complaints are from players level 45 – 80 non-Ocho
• Some astute players pointed out that offering rewards for referrals might be a violation of the FB rule against encouraging multis
• Many players misunderstood the system and thought they absolutely HAD to pay the 1,000,000 gold to hire someone even if they referred the player
• There was concern about the possibility that your crew might leave (even after we increased the leaving period to 90 days)
• +2 AP regen is viewed as a penalty (the loss of the +2) for not having enough crew instead of a bonus (+2 over base 5 AP/hr) for hiring sufficient crew.

IMO the argument that this was a move to force players to Ocho has no merit:

• There hasn’t been any option to purchase robot crew in the Ocho shop since last week.
• The average number of friends a FB user has is 164 and the median is 132. 3 crew is 1.8% of that.
• Many players argued that they’d already asked most of their interested friends to play. 1) If they were referred by you, they’d be in your crew. 2) BS has changed quite a lot now that it’s BS2.0. We’ve spent a huge effort to make the game friendlier and easy to learn for beginners. Try again before insisting that you won’t be able to get even 1 friend to try it out now.

Anyway, here’s the plan:

1. To dispel any remaining association between crew and friends, we will remove the option to hire friends as crew
2. All your friends playing BS will be in your crew but crew will not be used as the benchmark for giving out the +2 AP regen
3. “Squad” will be renamed “Crew” (again) and you’ll be able to assign friends to the 4 main crew roles we have on the main page
4. Quests do not require a certain number of crew.
5. In the future, quests may require specific crew (must have/be a pirate of level 10+ to do this quest) < idea contributed by Morten Løvaas
6. Instead, you will need 1 fuel generator to get +1AP regen, 2 more generators to get +2 AP regen
7. You can do a referral instead of paying the generator’s cost

You’ll be able to build a fuel generator for:

• 500K gold (10 Ochos value)
• 2 Plasma rocks (10 Ocho value)
• 100 Ore (14.3 Ocho value)

Yes, that’s more before but it’s permanent and it’s about the same as what we were planning to charge for robot crew (30 Ochos). Those crew you hired so far, you get to keep as generators (and no, generators can’t be sold).

New players who purchase Ocho will get +1 AP regen and 3 fuel generators (+2).  Existing players who purchased Ochos will not have their AP regen affected (we’ll give you 3 generators). Ocho players who hired crew will get a refund. Non-Ocho players who hired crew will have their crew converted into generators.

Ok so what about referring encouraging multis? For starters, the fact you can build the generators will reduce the need to badger a friend into accepting your crew request and hence reduce the “encouragement” to create a multi. There’s still incentive to create a multi for those who all of the following:

• don’t want to pay the cost
  
• don’t want to make a referral
  
• don’t want to buy Ocho

We’ve made a decision that the way we will not “encourage” these people is to actively seek them out and ban them. Furthermore we may do periodic checks on the referrals to see if the players are still active. If they are inactive and have a low PV score we may remove them.

For those of you who insist that this is still encouraging multis, you are also insisting we remove the +2 AP regen for non-Ocho players. I have argued with the board about this ad nauseum, there are no 2 ways about it; either we have the option to refer for +2 OR non-Ochoers have their AP regen slashed to +5 per hour.