As you have probably knew, we (the team behind GUNROX) is from Ukraine, and thus it is needed to clarify the situation we are in.
While the war with russia is going on for 8 years already, it's been two months since full-scale invasion on 24th of February 2022. Personally, I haven't been moving or running away since that invasion, working on updates for GUNROX. However, the instability of the situation in our country (continuous shelling, missile explosions, etc.) made it risky to deploy updates, because in case when we deploy an unstable update and the internet goes off for a long time due to line being cut, players would be left with broken game for a long time. Fortunately, at the moment the situation is relatively stable in our region (Kyiv) and today we have decided release an update.
On a side note I would like to thank all those players that have been supporting us for these 2 months. Your donations are helping us to pay for servers, continue working on updates and overall support our lives in these troubled times.
Today's Update
This update is a step towards bots and other substantial updates in GUNROX. In order to work on those, a lot of refactoring needs to be done internally and this is what we did. So what's new?
Visible Players
Now you can see all players on same email. This a step in the direction to combat fakes and spying. Now it would be harder for people to impost as someone else. Sure, you can still register a new email, but its not as easy as just making a new player.
New Relations System
Now friend and ignore list capacity is merged and the limit is the same for both lists. Also, friends concept is different now. You can add anyone to friends without their concern, but only when other player would add you too, you will become "mutual friends" and receive notifications about each other's activities. This is made to combat all those annoying popups with friend requests. All previous enlargements of friend and ignore lists has been removed, but now relations work on account-based level. If you are friends with some player, no need to add all of his accounts. Same is true with ignore.
Punishment System Revised
Now we will be able to punish all players on same account, including not yet created. Should help keep those annoying flooders and obscene players at bay. We have also made some undisclosed internal improvements in punishment system to combat fake players better.
Also now everyone can see punishment reason of silenced/banned players in player info.
GUNROX Birthday
GUNROX will be 13 years old on 9th of May 2022 and to celebrate that we are launching a birthday tournament for players of level 10-14 without arts or perks.
Also some players have been asking us to create a new clan. While we don't have plans to add new clans into the game, due to GUNROX birthday we will add an option available until 9th of May, so if you are that desperate to get it - here is your last chance.
The Future
We will be working on the game step by step, bit by bit, as much as the overall situation in Ukraine would allow. We still have plans to add bots in the game on low levels which would allow new players to actually play against someone and get used to the game a little bit. The fact that there are no players to play against on low levels prevents us from advertising the game, because there is no point in driving players in when they enter the game, see there is no one to fight against and quit. Having bots would allow them to stay for a while until they will be hooked with another player. After bots would be implemented it would allow us to try advertisement again and thus grow player base a little bit. However, there is a lot of preliminary work that needs to be done before we will be able to approach bots, so please be patient.
P.S. Ukrainian T-shirt is 1E until war ends.