[ANN] SatoshiGalaxy - Browser MMORPG + BTC Faucet {FOR SALE}

[toecutter]

Since we don't have a blog or twitter account and the primary outlet for contacting other players is right here on bitcointalk, I decided I'd post some updates and personal notes.


- Fog of war is on: from now on, you have to visit each sector for it to appear on your star map. We're going to give Squads some data-sharing benefits in the future, possibly a combined map.

This is bad news for players who already explored a vast portion of the galaxy: sorry guys, you'll have to do it again. We toyed with the idea of giving you some of the map pre-opened, but that's just asking for trouble code-wise. (Similar thing already happened with the Nav skill -- when we started out the skill wasn't implemented at all, so some of your jumps were "wasted").

- Jobs: we've started adding simple jobs to the game. Currently there is only one type of job available, but you can expect the list and variety to grow. This feature will be very generic for now -- 'deliver message to sector X', 'kill pirate X', etc. But from here it will hopefully grow into an interesting and dynamic quest system.

- No database wipe yet: we've been very careful with our database upgrades as to allow us not to wipe it for as long as possible. Despite our promise to actually wipe it every day ;) All players from day 1 still have their accounts and assets intact.

- Pending endgame: we're about 50% in our implementation of the endgame. The endgame is the situation where all players have maximum upgrades, maximum skill levels, best ships and equipment, etc. Once you reach that, there will something very interesting waiting for you.

- Code robustness: at the time of the initial announcement, almost no single operation was handled correctly in terms of DB transactions, and our programmer said, that "yeah, it's insecure, but the chances of any duping or item loss ever occurring are 1/10000 and even then you'd have to DoS the server and be very peculiar about how you do things". Turns out he was completely wrong! Well, we're fixing it. Just for the record: the way our code is structured right now, if a bug occurs, you'll likely see an item/satoshi dupe and not a loss. We could've easily turned it the other way around, but we believe we shall never punish players for our bugs.

Therefore, if you see a feature that was working perfectly yesterday, but is bugged today, it's likely the implementation was completely re-written. Please report any such bugs.


So far, a small fraction of people logging in quit immediately after mining their first asteroid. I guess they sell their first load, get something like 12 satoshi and think "meh"; most just start chugging on the asteroids, trying out occasional upgrades, and we have a small group of players who are literally tearing this game apart. I would imagine they are experienced gamers, who played many similar RPGs before. They absolutely nail down each new feature minutes after it comes out, they figure out they most profitable strategies, etc.

So how is the faucet part going? It's depleting too fast. Personally, I can't see this being sustainable at all :) I'd like to announce right away, that the rate you see now will likely be halved upon release.


I would also like to take a moment and thank all our alpha players again. You're making it a very fun experience!

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[toecutter]

Second, we're going to add a second microwallet service. Please tell us which one you think is good?

Looks like XAPO has powerful infrastructure and their servers ALWAYS respond to you. They also cover the TX fees, so neither the faucet owner, neither the faucet user has to pay those. However, their data-collecting schemes are very annoying.

Paytoshi feels very new and unstable at the moment, and they collect fees from users.

And if anyone is wondering what happened to this plan, we've added Paytoshi as our secondary payout method.



:) Paytoshi payouts are disabled if FaucetBOX works, but as soon as it runs dry or stops responding, they activate.

Note: referral payouts are always done to FaucetBOX for now.

[insargood]

cant register id
please fix site

[toecutter]

cant register id
please fix site

Hello, insargood

I'll see if everything is OK on our end, but could you please tell me more in the meantime? What exactly went wrong?

Update: thanks for your report, the signup form was indeed broken since the last patch. :/ It's now fixed!

[mavenraven]

I make some progress so new questions:

I kill pirate and get nothing in return?
do planets work already or not ready?

[toecutter]

I make some progress so new questions:

I kill pirate and get nothing in return?
do planets work already or not ready?

The pirate/loot issue is monkey-patched/resolved for now. However, please keep in mind, that the actual loot rates will be adjusted in the future, what we have now is a very rough draft.

Planets mostly work, yes. But you shouldn't bother with them unless you have some nice amount of satoshi to spend (~200k is good for starters), this feature is intended as end-game for veteran players.

[toecutter]

First time visiting your site...

Hello, BTCforJoe

Thanks for your report. Your IP was flagged by one of the IP-intel gathering services that we employ. (With a pretty high score, too. Are you running a botnet? And if not, do you have any ideas what could've caused it? You know, for science sake.)

In the past (see this thread), I have replied that our policy is NOT to whitelist IPs per user requests. However, I'm making a personal case for you/people like you. I hope it's not too intrusive, but I skimmed your post history here, on bitcointalk, and you look like an actual, reasonable person, not a bot :) The team thinks it's a bad idea; I'll personally be held responsible for all whitelisted IPs, so if something goes wrong, it's on me.

In that light of that, we're now accepting IP whitelisting requests.

The actual implementation is some hours away, but I'll make a post here when it's ready.

And to all/any humans blocked by this in the past -- please accept our apologies, it's just the way the system works.

[toecutter]

I have just recently encountered this problem where I am starting to see Cloudflare's challenge pages pop up before I an access a website. I checked Honeypot to see about my IP address, and it seems as if my IP is being used for sending out mail spam... I am on an internet connection in Belize, and apparently, the same IP is being rotated throughout the country, which means there could be dozens, if not hundreds, of other customers on the same IP.

This is unfortunate for me, as I am restricted as to which websites I can visit... Very annoying, considering that the majority of the bitcoin sites that I work with (including my own) relies on cloudflare for dos protection. I'll hit up my ISP and see if they can resolve this or issue me a static IP address...

Thanks

Thanks for the info, that was very insightful.

My personal take on this: some of your ISP's customers are infected with malware, which sends out spam. It's unlikely they are evil on purpose, as spammers rarely use their own (gasp) home IP addresses; if you contact your ISP and explain the situation to them, they might even track the infected machines down. I'm not up to speed with latest netiquette, but sometime ago that was the protocol for handling such situations.

Getting your own address is a good idea anyway! (Especially if you're in crypto "biz" yourself). Obviously I don't know your economy over there, but over here, I'm lucky to have such service for ~3USD/month. Hope you can get something similar.

Note: All of the above were just my personal comments. The "official" reply is

BTCforJoe, your IP address was added to the whitelist. Please report back if you still have any troubles.

[toecutter]

Some news:

Stronger security - now after you sign your BTC wallet, it's locked, and you can't change it unless you sign another message with the same wallet. Similarly, e-mails can't be changed after verification. You can unlock wallet via e-mail AND unlock e-mail via wallet, though. Due to those changes, we're now allowing weaker passwords during signup (as suggested by mobnepal).

Newbie tutorial - the tutorial is not in any way perfect, and even buggy, but it should introduce the most basic concepts of the game to the newbie players (as suggested by EXtremeAEX).

New bugs everyday! - please hang on guys. We're having some turbulence, and things will be a little shaky for the time being. As soon as we reach feature completeness (we're close), we'll slow down and work out all the bugs. Thanks for your understanding.

Referral payouts - at last, there have been some ref. payouts made. Hopefully everything works as expected and everyone is happy with them :)

We're still working out pirate spawn/danger/loot ratios, so if you're thinking you're not getting enough (or too much?) loot, just try again later. None of that is final and is in constant flux.

[toecutter]

Quick [ann], everyone.

I'm going to be unavailable for next 24-48 hours for personal reasons. So please don't expect support. In the meantime we've finally introduced rockets, but those are largely untested. And the FaucetBOX balance was recharged with 150k extra satoshi in case you guys go mad over those days (confirmations pending).

Play nice :)

[toecutter]

OK, I'm back. You guys did went crazy afterall, sigh.

And to the one player, who knows who I'm talking about: woah, dude :) Thanks for not drying the faucet, that's appreciated.

[toecutter]

Some news and progress reports.

Rockets are mostly working now. You still can't use them for mining, but feel free to use them for PvE, PvP and Planetary warfare. The costs to craft them will be adjusted in the future (likely going to be cheaper to craft).

Planetary warfare should now work too. There's still an edge case of you damaging the planet, and someone else claiming it afterwards; and the Orbital Cannon still doesn't work. Otherwise, it's all good and you can try stealing planets from other players :) (That is the end-game we promised).

We've received reports, that Referral locking is not as solid as promised. Upon initial investigation, we've found out, that sadly, this is true -- some referrals are not being registered correctly. Please do not be alarmed -- we're on to it. Thanks to HTTP Referrer field that we log, we can still reconstruct which users came from where and we're going to assign those referrals to you manually in the course of the next week. If you see your ref. count suddenly spike up, you now know why. But firstly, we'll make sure the locking is as solid as promised.

New year celebrations is something I personally hate in video games. I play MMORPGs for escapism, I don't want to see a giant X-Mas tree in Azeroth, Coruscant or what have you. However, I'm in a minority here, the team disagrees. So, while no snowmans or snowflakes will appear ingame, and nothing like that will be mentioned, all players signed up before Dec 31 will receive a random, yet valuable gift. All existing players too, of course. To claim your gift, visit the marketplace, but you'll have to wait till Jan 1st 00:00 (server time) to do so.

As always, expect new bugs to crop up, please keep reporting anything that doesn't work as expected.

[Nomad88]

Some news and progress reports.

Rockets are mostly working now. You still can't use them for mining, but feel free to use them for PvE, PvP and Planetary warfare. The costs to craft them will be adjusted in the future (likely going to be cheaper to craft).

Planetary warfare should now work too. There's still an edge case of you damaging the planet, and someone else claiming it afterwards; and the Orbital Cannon still doesn't work. Otherwise, it's all good and you can try stealing planets from other players (That is the end-game we promised).

We've received reports, that Referral locking is not as solid as promised. Upon initial investigation, we've found out, that sadly, this is true -- some referrals are not being registered correctly. Please do not be alarmed -- we're on to it. Thanks to HTTP Referrer field that we log, we can still reconstruct which users came from where and we're going to assign those referrals to you manually in the course of the next week. If you see your ref. count suddenly spike up, you now know why. But firstly, we'll make sure the locking is as solid as promised.

New year celebrations is something I personally hate in video games. I play MMORPGs for escapism, I don't want to see a giant X-Mas tree in Azeroth, Coruscant or what have you. However, I'm in a minority here, the team disagrees. So, while no snowmans or snowflakes will appear ingame, and nothing like that will be mentioned, all players signed up before Dec 31 will receive a random, yet valuable gift. All existing players too, of course. To claim your gift, visit the marketplace, but you'll have to wait till Jan 1st 00:00 (server time) to do so.

As always, expect new bugs to crop up, please keep reporting anything that doesn't work as expected.

Hi,

My account balance have been over 10k for more than a week now. I read on FAQ link that you transfer the payments usually every sunday, however I haven`t received a payment so far. Is there an issue with payment process? Your feeddback will be appreciated.

[toecutter]

Hi,

My account balance have been over 10k for more than a week now. I read on FAQ link that you transfer the payments usually every sunday, however I haven`t received a payment so far. Is there an issue with payment process? Your feeddback will be appreciated.

Hello, Nomad88.

I think you've mistaken us with some other game. Here's a link to the relevant question in the FAQ: http://www.satoshigalaxy.xyz/help/faq#how-do-i-cash-out

Our payouts are instant, via FaucetBOX and/or Paytoshi. To withdraw your satoshi you have to visit a "GPD Outpost" (or "GPD HQ" in Sol) space station and click on the "Bank" tab.

Please report back if that doesn't work for you.

[toecutter]

We've received reports, that Referral locking is not as solid as promised. Upon initial investigation, we've found out, that sadly, this is true -- some referrals are not being registered correctly. Please do not be alarmed -- we're on to it. Thanks to HTTP Referrer field that we log, we can still reconstruct which users came from where and we're going to assign those referrals to you manually in the course of the next week. If you see your ref. count suddenly spike up, you now know why. But firstly, we'll make sure the locking is as solid as promised.

OK, we've fixed the ref.locking mechanism. The cookie is now set for 2 years (similarly to what google does with their cookie). We've also manually assigned some referrals from the past.

It looks like some people remove the ref. part of the URL when they visit, out of spite. Not much we can do to help you here guys, sorry :(

I've also got some questions regarding the ref.payment and how it's made. The FAQ will be updated with this info, but in the meantime, the rundown is this:
you get percentage from every withdraw. Thus, players who reinvest satoshi into the game are not going to bring you much income. However, I assume they have a plan to start withdrawing at some point (?), so you just have to be patient. Another point is that if someone withdraws less than 100 satoshi, you get nothing. Sorry, we'll probably fix that in the future, but keeping decimal satoshi (i.e. 90 satoshi * 10% = 0.9 share) inside the system is something we really really don't want to do. Lastly, we accumulate your ref. bonus and send out every 6 hours. That's to minimize our hits to the FaucetBOX API, and the 6 hour interval was chosen for reasons I'll probably explain in another post. Hope that answers all the questions. Feel free to ask if something's still unclear.

Update: we've added all that to the help section of the site. Privacy Policy and the FAQ were updated too.

[toecutter]

No real news, but we've recharged faucetbox with 250 000 more satoshi as some players need those :) [confirmations pending]

[jackson51]

I started playing the game a few days, sorry if I say something wrong.
I bought the ability to make circuits (Blueprints in the game) 40nm PCB, it appears in the crafting area in the factory tab.
Then I bought the ability to make 30nmPCB circuits but it does not appear in the same tab as the 40nm PCB. is a bug or is elsewhere?

[toecutter]

I started playing the game a few days, sorry if I say something wrong.
I bought the ability to make circuits (Blueprints in the game) 40nm PCB, it appears in the crafting area in the factory tab.
Then I bought the ability to make 30nmPCB circuits but it does not appear in the same tab as the 40nm PCB. is a bug or is elsewhere?

Hello, jackson51.

Thanks for your report! We've checked, and indeed the "30nm PCB" item was bugged :/

It should now appear in the blueprints list along with other items. Please report back if there's still a problem.


Everyone,

The new year gifts will stop being added to new accounts in 30 minutes. In 4 hours, you should be able to claim your gift. Happy new year!

[toecutter]

Major updates.

All the planetary facilities have been implemented. In addition to quarries; refineries, factories and local marketplaces all work now. If you have enough resources, even a ship can be built.

Orbital Cannon is now usable too. This powerful weapon can wreck havoc onto planet surfaces and is essential for capturing established and fully upgraded colonies.

With that, we're approaching the Beta status. I'll post additional message explaining what that means for existing and future players.

[toecutter]

Alpha test is over. Thanks to all participants and, especially bug reporters.

Beta status approached.

That means that the game is feature-complete. Everything from our initial outline is in the game, engine-wise. That doesn't mean new features will not appear, we still have a list of about ~100 things we'd like to add into the game, not counting content. That does mean however, that what you see now represents the game fairly well (no more "but it's just an alpha" excuses).

During the beta, we'll focus on site design, user experience, graphical aspects, etc. We'll also tune the costs of all in-game things and will try to find the most fair ratio/rates for everything. There is one "stand-alone" feature planned, that'll likely make it in before the game is released.

Planet owners: expect mineral composition to unexpectedly change on your planets, those were half-assed before.

As always, please report any encountered bugs, and feel free to ask any questions.