TYLER Projects | the blog

1. 80% of ships given a new updated look
2. Manga-ish characters
3. new Explore/Expedition system
4. New combat client – the flash module that displays combat. More useful info, less clutter
5. New Hangar – which is part simulator, helps you to optimize your builds though not as comprehensive as Yeow Leong’s
6. New shop – also lets you view how new weapons, parts will their effect on your build
7. More optimised CW system
8. Island base raiding and defense
9. New crew/ship system – ships don’t require resources but require certain # of crew (details on the blog)
10. Equip you crew with outfits / decorate your cabin. So you don’t have to cross dress anymore
11. Instance Run boss mobs. Bosses will have epic HP, you can fight them with your friends.
12. Combat drops, mobs might drop loot after battles
13. Weapon/ part upgrading
14. 2nd Tier classes released!

With the removal of notifications (and soon invites too) by Facebook we’ve had to come up with a new way to “virality” market Battle Stations.

Tentatively here’s the plan:

The new crew system is alot like the old one, the really old one that no one really had any problems with. It’s sort of like the system a certain farm game uses.

Basically, to upgrade to a better ship will require a certain number of crew. The good news is upgrading to a better ship won’t cost resources anymore (just gold).

You get crew by getting them to click your referral link (did I mention FB said no more invites) or you post a feed item on your friend’s wall (which will contain your referral link). They click the link, add BS and accept your crew request in the game then you get them on your crew and vice versa.

It’s been suggested before by a few players (I think Michael Lee probably suggested this at least once); We’ll be working on a system for upgrading/grinding weapons soon. Weapons will be grindable to +3 and will be slightly stronger than their default versions.

This way we’ll have “more weapons” and we can:

- drop more weapons in treasure chests without upsetting the overall value (expected value) of the treasure chests.
- drop weapons and parts in combat.

Here is the DAU (daily active users) chart for Battle Stations (original English version) for 2009 taken from Facebook.
Since we switched to BS2 there’s been a huge drop in DAU. A further drop in  MAU after we introduced a new crew system to comply with new FB rules. Compared to the same period in 2008 the dip seems to be a seasonal effect though I’m not willing to assume that was the only reason for the fall in MAU/DAU.

The new FB rules are a joke: there are still many apps using forced invites to gate content, providing benefits for having 501 friends playing the game. This is going to be annoying but it looks like we’re going to have a new crew system again very soon.

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.

I got this idea from the trap cards in the Zendikar set (I don’t play MtG anymore but some of us at the office do): Skills could be triggered when certain preset conditions are met.

For example:

• Opponent attacks with at least 4 cannons
• opponent speed > 1000
• your HP less than 50%

The trigger conditions would have to be unlocked by performing certain tasks or by level. We’ll probably have to restrict certain skills to certain activation conditions for balance. Might also need a skill points system to ensure that skills won’t trigger all the time (e.g. HP less than 50% = activate Battle Repair + use multi to attack = auto repair?)

This won’t be an easy system to code….

We’re going to remove the 24 hour cooldown system and replace it with a clan war (rez) token system:

Token system:

• Clans can salvage their fort as long as they have a token. Let’s call them rez tokens (rez = Resurrect, a Tron reference)
• Each clan will get a rez token everyday so you don’t have to rez exactly after 24 hours just to maximize your clan warring (< that’s definitely an improvement)
• You can’t keep more than 1 rez token, spend it or lose it when the next one comes in
• If your fort was just sunk you have to wait 30 mins before you can use a token to rez
• On weekends clans will get tokens every 5 hours (current system has a 5 hour cooldown on weekends)
• Weekend auto-rez will remain

“Scheduled” CW system (this may come in later or not at all):

• Every clan must pick a preferred time slot (1 hour)
• You can change the timeslot once a week
• When you rez your clan fort you will also rez any other clan if it’s their preferred timeslot (though only 15 minutes later and the clan will get a notification).
• if a clan has already been rezzed once through this method it will not be rezzed; 24 hour cooldown

I’ll make updates to this post if we decide to change anything.

It’s a proposal I put forth to the Tyler Senate. More details as soon as we trash this out (if we keep doling out +1s we might need to revise Ocho package prices = moar rebates??!).

We may also award another +1 AP regen for something else depending on our objectives (*update: I just had the idea that everyone gets +1 if BS has more than 1M MAU. that’s not against FB rules. ). If so that would make the AP regeneration rate 1 every 4.6 minutes on weekends and every 6 minutes on weekdays.

There are some major changes to the Facebook policy governing apps coming Dec 16th.

“Don’t undermine the integrity of the social graph by encouraging the creation of fake accounts or inauthentic friend connections. For example, don’t gate content or provide rewards based on the number of a user’s friends who also use your application. (DPP V.2)”

To comply with the new FB rules, we have the following plan:

• All your crew will be removed on Dec 15th
• Only people who joined using your referral link will remain
• Crew != friends. Crew don’t have to be your friends (for compliance with Facebook rules)
• If refer you someone they will join your crew and vice-versa. You cannot be in more than 1 player’s crew
• “Main crew” renamed “Squad”. Your squad mates can be any of your friends but won’t count as crew unless they were referred
• Everyone who bought robot crew will get a refund and their robot crew removed (this may happen after the 16th)
• You can hire any player as crew for 1 million gold as long as they accept and are not already in someone else’s crew
• Crew usage will be drastically reduced:

1. Crew requirements for quests have been temporarily reduced to 0
2. 1 referral to get +1 regen, 2 more referrals to get the next +1AP regen
3. Referrals will only count as successful once the player has chosen their first Tier job class (level 11) and passed a PV check
4. New robot crew will cost 30 Ochos each

Ocho players (players who have purchased Ocho) will not have their crew AP regen bonus affected (will receive 3 robot crew members once their old robot crew has been removed and you have received your refund)

I understand that it does take quite long to level up at the higher levels so I’ll be making the following proposals to the Tyler “senate”:

- Improved returns from exploring
- New quests which cost even more AP but give higher XP per AP
- CW token system: CW anytime you want as long as you have tokens (bought using WPs maybe)
- Scheduled CW: discussed before
- Spread level curve over 300 levels: This means some top players will break the lvl200 barrier immediately. Levels above 300 only get reduced stat pts per level.
- Alternative means of getting stronger other than leveling: grinding for “skill points” used to increase the activation % chance for skills.

- minor AP regeneration upon level up (yeah this is from Mafia Empire and it’s really for the lower levels)