We received a suggestion from Danceman, to upgrade the alliance ranks because they are only few. So the ranks suggested were: Admiral, commander, first mate, captain, sargent and officer.

Beyond this a new concept were suggested too, the concept of mission/role. The admirals could assign a role to each member of the alliance, like: trainers, raiders, group leader, first line, relic defender, resource explorer, tactics officer, watcher…

Any more suggestions or changes to this?

Like we said in our previous post, the gladiator profession needs to be stimulated. So we added 25 new quests to this profession, you can see all the information in the manual. Just notice the quests at level 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25, and you can say that we are really good guys.

The arenas on the universe don’t have much action. Maybe it’s the orion cost, or even the low rewards they provide. We’re thinking on changing that for something really more interesting. We’re considering adding a batch of quests to the gladiator profession:

• Add a quest “Own one Arena”
• Add a quest “Own two Arenas”
• …
• Add a quest “Own ALL ARENAS”

Each quest would give a very good reward, in resources and even in combat units. And we think this would make the arena wars pretty more interesting. The idea would be to really own X arenas at the same time, not conquering X arenas on a given period of time. The last quest, the Own all 25 arenas at the same time would give a huge amount of resources, and lots of combat units.

Several players have said that the best part of Orion’s Belt are the battles (and i have to agree with them). For that reason we made a section of the tournaments specially dedicated to the ones that love the board game.

Also, many new players that register in the game don’t have immediate contact with the battles and for several it’s very confusion the presence of the tournaments in the game. For others only several weeks after they began the game, they discover the battles.

The idea is not a new one, but i would like the opinion of the community.

WHAT IF Orion’s Belt was split in 2 games????

The first would be the known strategy game with the universe, planets and battles made in the board.

The second one would be only a game with the tournaments and the battles.

The advantages? the players would not be confused and we could make 2 types of publicity:
- one of the game itself (that is being made for several months now)
- the other to a game where the only objective is to enter in tournaments and play this fantastic board game.

Also the players could specialized in what they wanted. many players register in the game only for the battles (Of course, if they wanted, they could play both games).

Finally, the game User Interface would be a lot cleaner. There wouldn’t be so many elements and the players wouldn’t have to explore so much menus (and sometimes became a little confuse with all the things that we have available).

So what do you think?

Who wants to see Pyro taking a beating on the Portuguese international television? I bet we all do, it’s something that a lot of players would like to do themselves. Wait no more! Pyro is a black belt Taekwondo athlete and he went to a morning show to show off his skills getting beaten. You can watch it here (minute 31).

He’s the one making the one on one self defense demonstration. He’s the shorter one.

The Training Day Tournament is almost starting! We’re missing 3 players to reach 8 groups, and that will be the biggest tournament to date! Having so many groups means that you won’t get so much good players on your group, and that will be great for training and for increasing your ELO.

If you’re not registered yet, what are you waiting for?

The major cheating happening on Orion’s Belt, since the beginning, is the one where one player locks something into a battle. For example, players attacking it’s own relics with other accounts/players controlled by them. There is always something we can do, but there are always workarounds.  That’s because on the end of the day, nothing prevents player A from one alliance to attack player B from other alliance and agreeing on making the battle last for ever. We implemented measures that punish this, but even so, it’s not enough.

We can also see this on tournaments. There have been some cases of draws, and the administrators had to make something. The majority of times, it wasn’t clear who should win, and the game was restarted.

The fact is: there are no actions we can take to automatically solve this issue, because it’s impossible to detect. Not impossible, because players detect it and report the issues to us. And I think that is the only solution. Imagine a scenario where every battle has a report this button. All battles can be seen by everyone (example: relic battles). When a player detects something wired, he would report it and admins/game masters could analyze the battle and get a vote: Force victory to player A, Force victory to player B, Restart match, Force defeat to both players, Do nothing.

Several game masters would have to vote, and the majority would decide the course of actions. This is so that the community would auto moderate itself without the need for administrator intervention.

What do you think?

Our good friends of On RPG made a very nice review about Orion’s Belt.

Read it Here.

In conclusion, here are the prons and cons pointed to Orion’s Belt.

Pros:
- Graphics-centered interface
- Simple yet very addictive battle system
- Very accommodating community.

Cons:
- Not joining the competitive battles takes out most of the fun
- Some game systems are too familiar and is better done by other browser games
- Moving and exploring takes a lot of time.

I was very happy to see such a nice review of the game. All the Cons are being discussed by the team and we are trying to find solutions to resolve them ( and believe, we got some ).

Such a review makes me think that, if Orion’s Belt could reach a wider audience, if could be a huge success.

If you want to help spread Orion’s Belt, don’t forget that all the players have a referral link. You win by referring, we win by getting new players, and the community wins by getting new people to play with.

After the presentations that we saw in Frankfurt, we decided that it should be interesting for the players to earn orions with a system where isn’t necessary to pay with real money. Such services as SponsorPay allow players to earn credits in a game without having to pay real money.

The players just need to go to the Payment page and a new option is now available.

Now what you need to do to earn orions? Simple, you just have to register in some site, complete surveys, request information…

After that you can see the status of the process, and if you already receive the orions. Attention in some offers you may need to wait several hours to receive the orions.

This past weekend your beloved Orion’s Belt team was at the Browser Games Forum 2009. We met a lot of the industry’s leaders, learned a lot, and made a lot of connections, that may prove quite useful on the future.

We also got the time to travel a little and know Frankfurt. According to Tiago, on the Saturday’s afternoon we walked 15 Km. I believe we saw almost all Frankfurt.

While we walked all that time, we didn’t know that we had on the front of our hotel a special epic mount just for us (notice the license place):