Dear players.

As you will well know by now State currently owns all Bullet Factories in the game. The time has come to begin to release these out to players.

The schedule for releasing the bullet factories will be as follows;

• – 2 Bullet factories will be sold at auction to the highest bidder, these will be listed at midday today and last for 3 days
• – 3 will be given to the top 3 finishers in the this weekend’s Zombie Slayer competition (more on that later)
• – 1 will be dropped between now 08:00am 25/09/2020 and weds 23:59 30/09/2020

The remaining 2 will continue to be owned by State in order to keep parity and ensure bullets remain available to other players.

Weekend Sale

There will be a sale starting 10:00 this morning and lasting until midnight Sunday.

Zombie slayer competition

A Zombie slayer competition will go live at 15:00 today and as usual last until complete. The top 3 players will each win a city bullet factory.

Other updates

• – Turf damage repair costs have been reduced by 65% base on valuable feedback from players. It felt like the repair cost was too high for the defender.
• – SMS settings can be configured again at my account and you can test it works (although at this present moment actual SMS sending will not occur).
• – Passive account mode is activated but has no effect currently. Passive account mode can only be activated once per account and will prevent you from being killed or killing, owning city assets and becoming boss of a crew. If you are boss of a crew or have assets already you will not be able to activate the passive account mode. Anyone who has tested the mode already will have it reset again today whilst I release more of the supporting code for it.
• – Turf move has been updated to allow for turf moves to take place more regularly and be possible without using credit items. More details on that in the previous post.

Look out for more changes coming next week. I aim to deliver all the discussed features from the last post in the next few days.

Dear players,

I wrote at the beginning of the re-launch of kill that it was my intention to review the feature in stages, as we go along.
Many attacks and kills have now successfully taken place since the re-launch, which is great! And importantly the features are holding up well!

As some of you will know, I had a schedule of releasing a kill rank per week every Friday, which was paused about 2 weeks ago. Up until now, we have unlocked kills up to the rank of Bodyguard.
I paused this process to take a breather and reflect on the right path forward given our new perspective after 6 weeks since go-live.

The following will happen, commencing immediately;

– Re-commence starting tomorrow the release of the +1 weekly kill rank. Assassin will be un-locked tomorrow etc
– Passive account protection mode. Can only be activated once per account lifespan. Accounts in passive mode, cannot own city assets or be a crewboss, but importantly cannot also be killed.
– Increase the insurance options and cover each plan provides. This is being done to ease the burden of returning to a dead account
– Extra XP items. These items will be credit items only and available to players with a previous dead account only.
– Turf moves. Frequency allowed will be increased to once every 24 hours with credits, or once every 72 hours with cash & will not be limited/capped per month
– More account re-buff options available with both cash and credits at the Hell page
– Improved notification system to provide up-to-date information on your account. This will include the SMS feature. So that you can get advanced notifications of danger to your account. Giving you the best possible chance of survival.

PLEASE NOTE: there is no longer the option to purchase credits for your account at the Hell page. If you wish to improve the account re-buffs for your new account you must make sure you already have the credits to cover the items. In the long term this feature should return, but in the short term, please ensure your account already has credits left un-used on the account. My suggestion is for around 100 to be left unused.

Thanks

Good evening players,

I’d like to take this opportunity to catch you all up on what’s been going on behind the scenes since Monday the 13th of July when we relaunched. I’ll cover the following in this update: Opening up of Kill, a general update on progress, and short term direction.

It’s been busy, v.busy. I’m pleased to say I’m able to fix almost everything that’s come up so far, and as a consequence, the game is improving in stability and quality. I’m very happy with the progress we’re making together.

The incredible support players have and continue to show me, is very humbling.

Achievements have proven a specific problem & this is mostly due to the way in which I only partially reset the game, not fully. In hindsight, I admit it was an oversight and it may cause some continued issues with achieving some of them in the short term. Apologies for that. I will do my best to make some efforts to ensure they are rechecked over the coming weeks.

Bounty program plug: If you or a friend find a serious bug (involving cash, credits, items etc) then I pay RL cash or in-game rewards for the explanation of the bug in order for me to fix. I want you to feel rewarded for helping the game’s stability. More info can be found at the bounty page in the footer of Street Crime when logged in.

Kill

Many of you have been wondering what my intentions for opening out the limit on kill ranks are. Tonight I’d like to share that with you. Despite a promising start, I feel like opening it up very quickly would be a silly decision. Kill adds a lot of extra stress on the game, not just in game-play but in what can go wrong and what the consequences are when they do. I do not want to use loyal players who have spent a lot of time and effort as test dummies for the system. Nor do I want to introduce kill before attempting to advertise more heavily the game, and attract more players to make things more interesting, else we might end up with a short-lived gun sling between a few players which burns out quite quickly.

With the above in mind, I propose a phased opening up of the rank limit currently active on kill, in combination with further testing (further testing will likely involve select players being asked to access another server, in a deathmatch style setup to stress test kill).

My proposal is as follows. Every Friday (weekly) the rank limit will be nudged up 1. There are 8 increases in total. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that this is 8 full weeks until Godfathers can be killed. This would mean a Godfather cannot be killed by another player until 12:00 18/09/2020. However, they could be killed in backfire attempting to kill players of lower rank before that.

This phased opening will start Midday 12:00 24/07/2020. Unless met with huge community objections.

In short, this gives us more time, a timeline to follow, time to advertise, time to test everything to the nth degree.

The short term future

I will continue to very actively work on bug fixes and improvements to the game as they crop up. With the hope that this will become less intense and less time consuming as we move forward. Allowing more time for feature improvements/new features.

I will be working on monitoring & logging capabilities & improvements.

We are in talks to get the UI/UX of the inside game re-designed. This will be professionally designed and paid for by myself (and somewhat by some of the incredible credit/membership purchases we’ve had so far).

I will advertise the game more vigorously than ever before starting at the end of this week and throttling up into next week.

There will be some small time based weekly features added which make specific nights of the week interesting for certain things. More on this to come.

There will be a new feature named Kill Frenzy added within 10 days. This is a crew based feature & focusses on killing inactive accounts for sport/fun.

I will kick off building & designing the character selector/builder that has been promised for a very long time.

Thanks again, Dave

Hi,

We mentioned in the Attack + Kill blog post previous to this one, other features/tweaks that have taken place during. Here is a quick rundown. Apologies if we miss some off

Gameplay changes

• New Bodyguard code to handle bodyguards role in Attacks
• Bodyguards killed in Attacks now earn prestige and honourpoints
• Bodyguards Bug Fixes & costing re-worked
• Prestige & Honourpoints earned by the attackers are now also lost on the defender. I.E. you lose prestige + honourpoints for losing attacks
• Attack reports re-worked so that they now show more clearly information about the attack but also represent the prestige + honourpoints earnt for each component
• Various Attack + Kill UI bug fixes
• All attacks and kill now require energy. Kill + Attack = 20 & Carbomb & Loot = 14. Each member participating must have the required energy
• Prestige & Honourpoints are now earnt/lost when performing mugs on other players
• UI tweaks: airport more prominent, space saving on the left menu, and turf gets its own drop down menu making garage a little more accessible
• Smooth new signup process
• Returning from Hell although not too disimilar in looks is completely re-coded
• Turf has reverted back to a single button to collect all rent
• Turf Bug fixes to rent accrual
• Completely removed the random turf events. Buildings will only get damaged from attacks
• Bug fix: Chat windows correctly scroll accross the site
• UI tweaks in Turf
• Casinos and assets no longer have pickup licenses
• Increased % of finding items whilst performing crimes throughout the game
• Duffel bags + Hard case suitcase added as credit items (useful in loots)
• Pricing models re-worked for memberships and credits

Tech changes

• Migrated from a static server in AWS to Kubernetes in GCP.
• Introduced a fully automated deployent pipeline, allowing for seamless code bugfixes+updates without damaging the player experience at all
• Complete re-write of the foundational code (this was fairly dated by this point)
• Added a logging engine, to give us more awareness at any one time of the system & errors, whilst (as best we can) keeping those errors from user frontend
• Taken the time to containerise the stack, meaning that it is now very easy for other developers to work on this project.
• Seperated the various components of the game into microservices, so we can scale the crap out of any layer now!

Hi all,

As some of you may already know from following our social media accounts, and or, playing the game itself we have been discussing resetting the game and turning back on the major Attack/Kill features.

The thinking behind it is that the game is not fun enough without those features turned on, and those features, are so large and the outcomes/possibilities so vast, that it simply must come back!

As the owners, we had been forced to turn Attack/Kill features off due to issues way back in 2017 time, and then never re-instated them, please accept our apologies for this and the wait!

What we’ve done

New platform & release pipeline, new core code, bug fixes & extensive attack/kill testing, improvements to UI and game features, laid a foundation for future development.

It’s taken a little longer than initially thought, but that’s mostly because we have done much more than we originally planned to do.

What will happen

On Monday, July 13th at 15:00 GMT the game will be re-opened with a partial reset and all of the above new game code (version 6).

That same day from 10:00 the current game will be made unavailable. Allowing us some time to prepare the changes.

What does a partial reset mean?

A partial reset will mean that all cash, bullets, items, casinos, turf properties (& turf levels) will have been removed. Memberships, credits and un-used credit items will remain.

Kill

Kill feature will initially be released with 1 restriction in place. Kills will only be allowed on accounts of rank Gangster/Gangstress and below. This will be relaxed after it has been stress tested by you players for 2 weeks. After which there will be no restrictions on who you can kill etc.

The future

It is my utmost desire that we get to a point where the game code is completely stable so that we can then focus on tweaking the system & enhancing the features. I stress to you all the importance of reporting bug details and would like to once again draw your attention toward the Bug Bounty program. Where we pay a mixture of genuinely good rewards for your honest help, helping us fix the game. Ultimately it will make your experience fairer, and enjoyable as well.

I look forward to welcoming you all back to the game, thank you for your continued support, and I really hope you enjoy playing the game again.

See you on the 13th!

Dave

UPDATE:

All existing casino & bulletfactory owners who obtained assets through auctions will now have an expiry time of 7 days set on their assets. This was a bug in the auction code which skipped adding a Mayor license for asset when obtaining the asset through the auctions and not through pickups.

Casino pickup bug is now fixed. Here is a run down of the important new features summary.

• Casinos can be picked up and held for 7 days, after 7 days the mayor will automatically drop the casino/bullet factory unless otherwise sold before hand.
• The owner of a casino may not return to hold the same casino in the same city again for 14 days, after 14 days the mayor will re-grant a new license for this casino type.
• The mayor will grant a license for 1 casino of each type to a player, only if they do not already own an asset of the same type in another city
• A countdown to expiry will be displayed on a players profile next to the already displayed city asset (so that players may choose to come online and attempt to pick it up as it drops)
• If you sell the casino at auction and then attempt to re-buy you will not be able to.

In the absence of a kill system to displace long standing holders of casinos we needed to introduce something which would fairly give all players an equal chance to hold the most fought over assets in the game.

Small update, more to come soon.