Bitcoin Forum

Over the first weekend of February 6, Dragon’s Tale, the Bitcoin-powered Gambling MMORPG, will host a party to commemorate our forthcoming Beta release with a Grand Opening Party… by giving away one grand in Bitcoins!

We will be giving away 1000 Bitcoins to readers of the bitcoin.org forum (and of course our current players) who sign up for the party and show up to help demo all our new features.

For newcomers or those of you who may not have been by since our Alpha party in October, you’ll find:

    * A modified world design with more games and more to discover.
    * New PvP (Player-vs. Player) games with no house advantage: Smart players can expect >100% return.
    * Multiplayer strategy games with no house advantage.
    * Micro-stakes games with wagers of 1/1000 Bitcoin. Play for hours with a single Bitcoin.
    * Many more skill games in which using a smarter strategy than other players have will give you a big edge.
    * Dragon’s Treasures, bundles of 100 Bitcoins, awarded based on your play.
    * A greatly expanded Level system: Completing Level Quests increases the rate that you earn Dragon’s Treasures.
    * A new mentorship program in which experienced players get rewarded for helping out new players. Even if you don’t gamble, you can still earn Dragon’s Treasures by introducing new players to the game and showing them around.

And on the day of the party, in addition to free coins, expect:

    * A world-wide treasure hunt for hidden prizes.
    * Bonuses for the biggest winners, and even a 100 BTC consolation prize for the biggest loser!
    * Scheduled raffles, giveaways, and other surprises throughout.
    * A chance to own a piece of Dragon’s Tale. Depending on turnout, we’ll be giving away ownership of a single game for a 3-month period. For that game, you are the house.

Why are we doing this?
Obviously we’d love for you to try Dragon’s Tale, fall in love with it, and tell all your friends, but we’re throwing this party because we value the input of and feedback from the Bitcoin community.

We’re trying to create something never before seen with this game. With Dragon’s Tale we’re striving to create a platform that simultaneously embodies the social recreation that MMORPGs provide as well as the excitement known to the casual - and advantage gambler… within the context of this new cryptocurrency that has caught all of our attention.

Are we trying to be something for everybody? Absolutely not. We’re trying to be something novel, exciting, and, most importantly, fun for a select group, and we while we believe that many of bitcoin.org’s readers will be among that group, we know that bitcoin.org’s readers won’t bite their tongues when it comes to giving us useful feedback.

As such, a significant portion of the giveaway will go to those who provide us their comments and critiques in the days after the event. We’ll be providing bounties for the best suggestions, best critiques, and more.

What’s the catch?
Simple – we want your input. This is a no-strings-attached giveaway. You will not be required to deposit any BTC whatsoever to participate, play, or win. But since we’re after your feedback, we need our partygoers to be familiar with the basic operations of the game – anyway, we hope to be way too busy entertaining to answer your questions during the party itself!

So, in order to be invited to the giveaway party, all we ask is that you log in to Dragon’s Tale sometime prior to the day of the event, and learn enough from me (Di) or one of the game’s current Mentors (Ramapithecus, Kat) to explain them to others. We’ll then flag you as eligible for the main giveaway on the 6th. We will schedule game tours and Q&A sessions over the next month, but often we’re online anyway, and are happy show you around at odd hours. We can’t offer tours 24/7 while we gear up for the party, but suffice it to say we’ll make every attempt to accommodate anybody who expresses an interest. We’re a small company but we’re fortunate enough to have volunteers from around the world, so we hope to be able to accommodate everyone’s schedule/time zone.

To sum up:

   1. This February 6th, we’ll be giving away 1,000 BTC to our current players and to bitcoin.org members at our Beta Test Celebration.
   2. No deposit is required. You  don’t need to give any personal information – the surveys will be conducted in-game so you don’t even need to provide an email address.
   3. In order to get invited to the party, all we ask is that you first learn the basics of the game by logging in to the game ahead of time, and get familiar with some of the games.
   4. Orientations will be scheduled as demanded, and we hope to create a schedule that will accommodate absolutely everyone.
   5. Everyone who attends the party will get a party-favor (in BTC of course), and we know that the night will see some big winners.

We’re working around the clock to get ready for our party, so we’re still hammering out the fine points, but please don’t hesitate to ask me any questions in the meantime.

To download the client software, visit:

    http://www.dragons.tl

Hope to see you there!
Teppy

Count me in!

I played a long time ago with a friend and it seemed like you had a good concept.   Good to see you've done more development.

Obv., I'll spend the hour to get free bitcoins....just hope nobody else does, lol.

I'll schedule for any evening Eastern Standard Time.  If it helps if I'm more specific then I'll take a tour at 7 Eastern on next Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.  I'll have to install my own computer!

How do I sign up officially?

Prompt please what's the licence of the game client?
I'm also interested whether there are non-IA32 builds and these for other operating systems (*BSD for instance).

Bandwidth and graphics requirements for the game are ought to be clarified too (I, for one, experienced huge lags on a 2Mbps connection on a machine with integrated graphics (running GNU/Linux) )
Otherwise, game looks quite interesting and novel, I wonder what it may evolve into

Cynosure - I see you've logged in, and I think Ramapithecus flagged you for the Feb 6 giveaway, but you can check that by clicking on your avatar, and then Utility/Feb 6 Party Information.

Pegasus - It's a closed source server/client. I've considered open-sourcing it, but to reap the advantages of open-source requires some resources (documentation, increased project management) that I can't spare ATM. It may eventually happen, or may happen with the next client/server architecture that I'm developing. We do maintain a PPC version of the client for OSX.

I'll be in game most of today for anyone that wants a quick tour and flag for Feb 6.

What about GPU and bandwidth requirements?
As for resources for opening the project up, I bet that such an innovative game would attract flocks of developers. I personally would like to help with documentation if you would be kind enough to free the engine at least.

So how do we get entered into this? I downloaded the game trying it now.

Pegasus - pretty much any GPU will work, and bandwidth (once you have downloaded all resources) is around 5kbps. So (not counting the initial download), it will actually work over a modem.

So far just 5 people have signed up, so 200 Bitcoins each on average. I'll be online all day for tours.

http://www.dragons.tl

Right, it's on Feb 6, which is a Sunday. I'm still working out the prize pools, but I'm thinking something like this:

500 BTC split among those that have logged in beforehand and been flagged by an existing mentor. We'll give this out as those on the list log in. So far, 5 people in that group.
100 BTC bonus BTC to the person that wins the most Bitcoins.
100 BTC consolation prize to whoever loses the most.
50 BTC bounty for the best suggestion for the game
50 BTC bounty for best bug-find. (If no unknown bugs are found, I'll roll this over to something else.)
200 BTC worth of other giveaways. I'm creating a bunch of mini-quests, and maybe we'll do giveaways based on who completes the most mini-quests.

Hi folks...  I've lurked for a while but I figured since the party's coming up I'd drop in and say hi.

I know that Teppy mentioned setting up organized tours and for those who express interest here I'll be happy to respond, but so far informal tours seem to work well (I just met two of you in the game today!).  I'm on with some regularity when I'm not busy at work and then again with some frequency in the evenings.

I've been playing at Dragon's Tale for several months now and have really grown to enjoy the game and all its social aspects...  It's been great to see more people come out in advance of the party - I have a feeling it'll be a blast when all the interested bitcoiners show up!

Anyway, Teppy's obviously "the man" when it comes to design, development, etc., but having played for a while and volunteered as a mentor I'd like to think I have a pretty good knowledge of how the game works as well as how to introduce new players to its various facets...

I look forward to seeing you all in the game and at the party in particular!

Rama

Looking forward to it. Nice mix of luck and skill games in Dragon's Tale, gambling with bitcoins is fun. My handle there is EvilSteve.

count me in, my handle is fabianhjr.(registering right now) Must I be a grownup to participate or be a USA resident?(Just making sure :P )

Hey, I got this great idea: A shooting range with some balloons.(Skill + luck) One basket has nothing, the second one has 50%, the next one has what you inserted , and the last one has 2.5x multiplier.(Statistically players should not lose a bitcent, you might want to change it a bit xD) They move in a circle(Clockwise or counter-clockwise) and they can switch direction on average each 3 seconds.(And never less than 1 second) The dart itself will take about 0.25 seconds to reach the target and your hand shakes a little bit.(Though, it will still go exactly where you aim) Some testing should be done for the appropriate speed of the wheel. Hope you like it. :D

Bug report
Title: Screen turns black and freezes on resize for a considerable moment.
Type: B
Num of times tested: twice
Steps to replicate:

• Open the client and enter the game
• On Win7 click on the resize button on the top-right corner

Specs:
ATI Radeon HD 5870
i7 930
6 GB DDR3-1600
Win7 Up-to-date
Client fresh install.

I am newb on bug reporting so I hope this is readable enough.

Hi,

I'm trying to get the game to work on GNU/Linux. I was really happy to see that you have a build for my platform!

However, I think that it might be 32bit only? Because when I try to run elaunch, I get this error:


Ideally, you could put up a 64-bit version of the game as well as the 32-bit version. If you can't build 64-bit, then it would be really good to note that the Linux version is 32-bit only in the requirements section!

I'd really like to try it out, and was hoping to make it in before the celebration, but I'm not sure I can! If you can make a 64-bit build, I'll be happy to test it.

A 64 bit Linux build is on our to-do list. It probably won't make it in by Feb 6 though. I know that (at least in Ubuntu) it's possible to install the 32 bit libraries to get it to work, but I don't recall which ones are needed. (I use Linux on my desktop, but I'm not a Linux expert.) I'll ask the guy that maintains the Linux distro what is involved.

Ok, good to hear! I do think that you should mention on the Linux download page that the download is for 32-bit, lest you confuse more people like me. If I can figure out how to get 32-bit libraries working, I'll join the celebration, but if not, I guess I've reported my bug and wont be able to report more  :(

Count me in too. FYI Kat is a great mentorextremely helpful and kind

I managed to fool around and figure out how to get 32-bit applications to work on my amd64 Debian system. In the end what I had to do was to install the ia32-libs package, and then the game would launch!

I logged in tonight and wandered around, tried to get familiar with the interface and such. It doesn't seem like I can do that much, without some bitcoins, but I explored and got familiar with how to move about.  The game is really interesting, I'm excited to play it more!

I looked for someone to give me a tour, or how I could sign up for the celebration, but it didn't seem like anyone was logged in at the same time as me.  :(

I'll be online today until at least 5:00PM EST. If, say, 3:00PM works for you, log in then. If others want to do a tour at 3:00PM today, just log in and we'll get a group together.

Teppy

Ahh too bad, I wont be able to make it by 5pm EST. If anyone will be on later, or tomorrow, i'll show up!

***PARTY UPDATE***

I’d just like to update everyone on the state of the Dragon’s Tale Beta Party / 1000 BTC giveaway.

We’re still scheduled to have the party on Sunday, February 6th, from noon until 6:30p.m. Eastern (GMT-0500). 
So far twenty-one players have gotten a tour and consequently an invitation from either me or another mentor.  So as of right now, if everyone shows up, each player will get approximately 24 (500/21) Bitcoins to play with. If some don't show up by, say, 4:00, I'll consider those coins unclaimed, and will distribute them in some surprise way. There's still plenty of time to take a tour.

Now, some updates about the game and the party structure I outlined earlier (we’re still working on it so this is subject to some small changes, but expect nothing substantial, perhaps just small tweaks here & there – the structure will be finalized and published before the party).

First, we’ve officially introduced games based on BTM & BTU as well as BTC.  A BTM ("BitMill") is one-thousandth of a Bitcoin, and a BTU ("BitMicron") is one-millionth of a bitcoin.  This will to allow players of varying bankrolls to play the different games as they like.  Look for the soldier statues holding spears of Bitcoins, Bitmills, and Bitmicrons to find the higher- and lower-stakes games.

Regarding the 100 BTC “biggest winner” bonus (and the consolation prize): we will award those based on the largest winning (and losing) streaks. So if you have a big loss and a big comeback, or vise-versa, you could win both prizes.

We’re keeping the specifics of the 200 BTC in “other giveaways” secret until the party, but I’ll give a few teasers here: at random times throughout the party we’ll be giving away coins in the form of coin-showers… we’ll make system-wide announcements a short bit before the event and then everyone who gets to the area can try to catch the falling coins.

Also, we’ll have “party challenges” – tasks for you to attempt to complete during the party.  They range from very simple to very difficult.  Some require you to cooperate and play with others; others will be tasks you can accomplish on your own.  Completing the party challenges serves two purposes.  First, every party challenge that you complete earns you a raffle ticket into the game-lease giveaway.  Secondly, we’ll be giving away bonuses based on completing as many  challenges as possible from a special “Party Quest” - leaderboards scattered around town let you track progress vs. other players.

After the party, you will have the option to fill out a survey, in which you will be able to stake your claim to the two 50 BTC bounties… the 50 BTC bounty for the best game suggestion will be awarded by a panel of eGenesis staff and Dragon’s Tale volunteers; if any previously unknown bugs are found, we will award 50 BTC to the most critical bug submitter – this will be determined by me (the programmer) alone.

I hope this starts to address the questions I’ve been receiving and, as always, please don’t hesitate to ask me here or in-game about anything else.

I look forward to seeing everyone on February 6.

Good Luck!
Teppy

Cool!

I'm still looking for a tour and registration, but every time I've been on, I haven't found anyone. Is there a specific window or timezone I should be shooting for?

I'm online now, will be here for 30+ minutes.

Hi Hacim...

I'm surprised I've always missed you...  What's your username?

I've been online shortly after you posted the last couple times and haven't seen you.

...also to others who are getting into the game, Teppy asked me to write something up about what I've learned as a Mentor - a FAQ of sorts, and was kind enough to post it online here:

http://www.dragons.tl/mentor-blog.php (http://www.dragons.tl/mentor-blog.php)

Hope you all find it helpful!

(Oh BTW - if you want to schedule a time Hacim, just send me a PM!  I'm sure we can work something out.

I won't be able to assist. My parents decided to "gift me", <- in their own words, for their anniversary and they are dragging me to an ecological reserve. Sorry guys. :/

'hacim'


arrr. I keep missing people.


cool, pm sent

I've just made a cool little addition to Dragon's Tale - the in-game equivalent of the Bitcoin Faucet.

Any time you see a soldier statue, you can click on it and see if it's hiding a gift. Like the real Bitcoin Faucet, gifts are sometimes 0.05 Bitcoins, and sometimes 0.50 Bitcoins. And as a little tribute to the original Bitcoin Faucet, occasionally a soldier will have a 5.00 Bitcoin gift.

Statues are hidden all over town - the more remote ones may tend to be visited more often, and so may tend to have larger or more frequent gifts.

You can withdraw any gifts immediately if you'd like, though we're hoping that you use them to explore some of the games within Dragon's Tale. There are just a few low-stakes games at the moment, but filling those out is our next major push.

There are some restrictions - you can't just click the same statue repeatedly for multiple gifts, but discovering the rules and figuring out a way to maximize gifts is considered part of the game.

I finally got in and got an invitation to play! Thanks to Di who showed me around and showed me some of the games. I was really unlucky today though!

I played a while today, it's pretty cool :) nothing amazing graphics wise, but in total I was in the black by 10 btc, so it's pretty good :)

And the berries game is fun - I highly recommend it. The berries who's name starts with a J are good for me usually too, that's my tip  ;D

ptmhd: good idea - I've lowered the costs on many games (installed lower-stakes versions, or implemented mixed-stakes wagering):

There's a new area southeast of the Palace with a Bitmill (1/1000 BTC) based Rice Pond fishing game, some 1 BTM and 100 BTM plants, coconut trees, etc. Also, 1 BTM and 100 BTM Bamboo Ponds.

Silly Monkey and Beetle Downs now allow wagering in any denomination from 1 BTM to 1+ BTC.

Berry seeds now come in Field (1 BTM), Island (10 BTM), Wild (100 BTM), and Garden (1 BTC) strains. Not all species of berries come in all strains, because berries are a skill (discovery) game.

Finally, there are two new Fire games: "Element Fire" is east of the Palace with some really nice fireworks for 1 BTM per launch, and Gem Fire is on the hill west of town for 100 BTM per launch.

Remember to check soldier statues for free Bitcoins - the ones right near the entrance tend to be dry, but there are a ton of statues around with 50 BTM gifts, and you can hit as many of these as you'd like. I even see several statues with 500 BTM gifts right now.

this is a awesome game - my username is Steven - i hope to get a invatation soon i will be playing this alot.

Di is idle - and i have not seen anyone higher then a member online - hmm thanks for the suggestion :-)

Hey, Steven - I see that you've figured out a bunch of games on your own - I've flagged you for the party - see you there!

Teppy

thanks so much - about 1 hour left im thinking till the party starts - i cant wait :-)

aww - 20 minutes to the party and im the only one logged in :-(

its 12 - and no ones here - i thought the party started at 12 eastern time lol

How many BTC is  BTM?

Sunday the 6th I think.

I think he said 12 noon EST, not midnight.

Final prize pool and schedule, all times EST:

500 BTC to be split at the start of the party among those who learned the game and got a party invite by either Kat, Ramapithecus, or Di, and who show up during the first 4 hours. (12:00 Noon)
100 BTC prize for the biggest gain in Bitcoins during the party. (So biggest low->high swing). Awarded at 5:30 PM.
100 BTC consolation prize for the biggest loss in Bitcoins during the party (Biggest high->low swing). Note that the same person could win both prizes. Awarded at 5:30PM
50 BTC for the best bug find - Announced here sometime tomorrow
50 BTC for the best game suggestion - Announced here sometime tomorrow
200+ BTC prize pool split among the top 21 party challenge scores. We'll do this at around 4:30 PM. Any unclaimed BTC from the pool of 500 will be added to this pool.

Looks like you're having some tech problems. When I go to log in it accepts my user name and password but where it would normally load up the world the screen just stays black. My BTC balance reads 0, and the checklist for leveling is back to the list for level 1 which is incorrect. Under the "people" tab there is another list of activities to complete that I assume are related to the party. There is no fourth tab. I can type in chat but I don't think it goes anywhere.

I'll try again later. Hopefully it gets sorted because it was all working fine a few hours ago.

Same problem here. I'll try again later.

Should now be fixed, sorry for that bug. Confirm here once you log in.

I can get in now!

It's working for me now.

About to give away 300+ of unclaimed Bitcoins - if you got a party invite but haven't logged in yet, do it soon!

Teppy

Bugs: In the time I've used this I don't think I've run into any bugs other than the login problems I mentioned above. There is a spot where there is a strip of blue sky like stuff in the grass which doesn't seem quite right.


Suggestions:
- Folders for Placemarks would be nice.
- some kind of map view. I can use F8 to get really far out which is good, but you still can;t see the whole area. You also can't scroll around the map without moving and it would be nice to be able to do that so you can figure out where you want to go.
- It would also be super helpful if your Placemarks would appear on the map. Or if the map had some labels or something.
- Being able to move using the keyboard. Camera controls with the key board would be good.

That's all I can think of for now.

I think I found a few bugs.

#1 - When playing the fishing game (where you collect 4 fish on a rack) stink lines appear before the 4 turns are up, took me a while to figure out I could hold on to the fish longer.

#2 - When playing most any game, if you spam bets by holding down the hotkey, it seems bets repeat themselves, and you are locked in the animations until all of your bets are done. Kind of a PitA.

#3 - laggy on my 5870, seems like an unoptimized engine.

Besides that, pretty good. If I had more bitcoins to gamble with I'd be all over it ;)

Hey guys....

Sorry I was only able to check in a few times during the party (Superbowl Sunday interfered alas)  but when I did I saw a lot of you coming and it was truly great!  (So great that I actually snuck away from my guests a couple times to check out the scene - oh and please don't tell my guests :) )

Anyway, although I couldn't participate for the whole 6 hours, I got a great vibe from everyone who showed up..

As the unofficial "grandmentor" (makes me feel old) in the game I want to thank everyone who showed up and I hear that several hundred dollars were given away to the players.  (Also as a mentor I was, alas, not eligible for any of it - grrrrrrr.....)

But each time I checked in the party was rockin' and I, albeit briefly, really enjoyed the scene....  So whether you came to just hunt through the faucets - getting just .5 BTC from only one statue is pretty big these days - or whether you actually played and won a lot (looking at you, Eris), I was really psyched to see my favorite MMORPG turn into an honest-to-goodness social scene....

So I want to start a petition:

Teppy/Di, MORE PARTIES PLEASE!  I don't care what theme or what occasion you want to celebrate - please organize another one soon!

(Of course, in the spirit of fake web petitions, if you agree, respond YES! or whatever else...)

Anyway, thanks for the good times and I hope that next one will show up when I have some free time....

Sorry if this is a hijack but I wanted to post about how cool it was for Teppy to give away so much money and to entertain so many bitcoin.org'ers on a day when people might have already had some plans....

Thanks, Teppy!



Good luck everyone!

-Ram

I'm not glad at all that this Intel thingie was so laggy that I couldn't participate, but I just hanged around in hope that once I kill this Chrome beast, it'd be OK, and in spite of that, I've got 10 shiny new BTC to gamble here, thanks! :-)
I hope that you'd actually consider opening the game as it should have been. If there's a lot of code clean-up to be done, may provide you with good coders and several grand BTC if licensing is a problem ;)

It was a great party. It was fun playing and competing with everyone...

I haven't found any bugs per se, though there are a few issues with the game for now that could be improved to make the experience more enjoyable, I think.

First off, the movement and camera controls are not very comfortable to use, and the game experience would be greatly improved by a more responsive and intuitive camera/movement system. Clicking around the floor will often make you click the leaf of a bush or some other random thing instead, bringing up a window rather than making you move. Using the WASD keys is not ideal, since the keys interrupt each other at times (if you want to see what I mean, move diagonally with W and D at the same time, then let go of W to try to start going just right instead, and the character will just stop).

Being able to swing the camera with a middle (or right) click and drag would be great, as putting the mouse to the edge of the screen is far from quick 'n' easy, and you can't even change the pitch of the camera, only zoom in and out at best (without changing camera mode entirely, that is). The combination of not being able to change the pitch of the camera and being stopped every time your character reaches a vaguely steep slope makes it sometimes difficult to see how to get down from a hill or mountain.

Aside from the controls and camera, I'm pretty happy with the game itself. If you can add more and more games to make the world seem a bit less 'huge barren landscape with a couple of things here and there', that would be awesome, I think. In a real casino, you have different games and interesting things everywhere, and it helps make the place seem more lively and fun, especially if there are a fair few people around, but even if there aren't too many people, it still feels alive and exciting - same goes for amusement parks, flee markets: the crowdedness of the objects and places of interest, to a large extent, is a good thing. Right now in Dragon's Tale, everything is so spread out that it's easy to not really feel like there's much to do or many people around, even if there might be. I understand bringing in new games will take a lot of time and effort, of course.

Thank you very much for hosting the event, and I look forward to seeing how the game evolves, especially as more and more people join in! Keep up the good work.

From where i get invitation about events?
The http://www.dragons.tl/casino-games.php shows 2 events which was a test.
Also the feb 6 2010 was shown no where.

How to find events?
& in which webpage it is posted?
Thanks.

Count me in on this please.How do I signup to future giveaways for this game? If someone on the admin taem is reading this for the game,then please add me on the giveaway when available as well.As I missed an oppourtunity to celebrate the games dev stage.

Did this ever happen?

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I wish I were here 2 years ago :'(. Just found this topic during the search... Nowadays it seems to be as crazy as famous pizza purchase...