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 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.

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):

We received some requests to delay the intergalactic tournament, essentially because of 2 factors:

1. Some players made their registration few time ago;
2. The tournament will have battles in the Christmas season, a time were people may not have time to spare;

So, the tournament will begin in January 15th. Meanwhile we will release a tournament without entry free or prize money, just for training.

AirDiogo was kind enough to put his photos from the lunch here.

You can see the full album here.

Sorry for the Portuguese captions. But you should match the players on the caption with the players on the photos easily.

The 2009 lunch were really nice, some of the habitual players and some new ones appear. We want to thank the participation of all players.

The players that went to the lunch were: tsousa, Pyro, Mawhrin-Skel, Air Diogo, Edgar, ElCapitain, Killiri_Kreg, MementoMori, Fluck, white.wolf, Danceman, ulisses, stoneage fan and zedascouves.

Soon we will publish some photos, and we ask Air Diogo to turn available his photos too.

Thank you all for the support.

When Orion’s Belt started, a year ago, almost every player were from Portugal, our home country. It’s with happiness that we see Orion’s Belt spreading around the globe, in the last month the game were played by people from 101 different  countries. Portugal continue to be the major country, but our expectations is that soon Portugal will represent just 10%-20% of all players.

The Orion’s Belt lunch will be in a week, and we are really curious to talk with the player and see the new ideas that will come.  We know that some new players that never went to an Orion’s Belt lunch will come and some historical players will be there to.

If you want to know our community and eat a great sushi (and not only), come to the lunch. Please notify us so we could know how many people will come.