Steampunk Road Dispatch

We regret to inform you that Steampunk Road is going on an indefinite hiatus as another opportunity has taken precedence.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Unfortunately, Steampunk Road has been on the back-burner for the past few weeks as the real world has been making increasing demands upon our time. Details may or may not follow.

We bid adieu to many of our bot captains today. They should not return. This was an important step to take before bringing the Guild Wars online, because it is no fun battling a bot.

Generally, the more users a game has, the more enticing the game appears to potential new players. There is therefore very little incentive for removing players from the game, even if they are bots. Thus, we did not have a user deletion tool in place until today.

But we have it now, and we were not afraid to use it on those pesky bots. As much as we want everyone to stay a member of Steampunk Road, we do plan to add in the future an option for departing users to request deletion of their accounts.

It is Monday, so it must be time for another survey! Before we get started, here is a recap of our results from previous surveys.

• Mobile would be nice, but it is unessential
• The current model of travel is preferred
• We should keep the “jaunty top hat” logo
• Barter-only is OK, no currency is needed

Looks like what we have is what you want.

Today’s survey is all about turning Steampunk Road into a big money maker … or not. Please let us know how we should ask people to give up their hard-earned money by filling out this survey here. Results next week!

When we first decided to start a blog for and about Steampunk Road, we sat down and came up with a list of topics. It was not a long enough list to cover the whole month of August, but it was enough to inspire some confidence that it could be done. We managed to post something every day in August except for one, and every day in September up until we took some scouts into the mountains (beyond the reaches of online civilization) the last few days. Of those original topics, all have seen the light of day except for one still waiting on some programming to be finished and three posts about money. We have been avoiding the financial posts, until now.

Steampunk Road is essentially cost free to run. It currently piggybacks on another website, and the domain name is a nominal cost (pun intended). Unfortunately, Steampunk Road also generates no revenue. This was originally a requirement of the Google Maps API, but Google has since changed their terms, and it is now more a feature of the web site. We want to attract as many players as possible to the game by being available to all, free of cost and advertising. (More on this, and your chance to supply additional guidance and feedback, in tomorrow’s weekly survey.)

But one cost not mentioned above is time. As a web site with a staff of one, any time spent on Steampunk Road is time spent not earning money doing other things, like programming apps or teaching. So even though the cost to run the web site is minimal, the cost to actively develop it is quite high. That is one reason Steampunk Road has surpassed two-years old before its completion — we have been doing other, more remunerative things.

Although we do expect to continue to post here fairly frequently, it probably will not be daily, as we will be spending more time on creating the game and less time on the blog for at least the rest of September.

It has been a long (steampunk) road back to where we were a week ago, but the vessels are finally back on the map. Although there are no visible changes on the outside, there have been lots of positive changes behind-the-scenes which have greatly improved the system. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Members who are also citizens of the Floating City will remember the constant influx of “bot” captains in that game. It appears that the bots have found Steampunk Road as well. Fortunately, they are not nearly as aggressive here as they were there. (Also, they will not hurt your score here like they hurt our score there.)

We know they are bots for a couple of reasons, which unfortunately we will not go into detail here because we do not want whoever is responsible figuring out what tipped their hand. We will tell you that we have taken steps to secure the system, that we have previously taken steps to secure your data, and that we will continue to take steps to improve both the security of the system and the security of your data. In addition, you can expect to see a purging of all or most of the existing bots from the game in the next few days.

We experienced an unexpected server outage for important maintenance this morning, followed by a maintenance-triggered issue with our blog. Both of those problems have been resolved, obviously. We generally do not have issues like these, so we definitely apologize for the inconvenience.

Should you ever have a problem with Steampunk Road where you can not connect to the game, forums, or blog, then please head on over to the Steampunk Road page on Facebook and look for an explanatory post and/or leave a comment there.

Although war was expected to break out among the guilds today, last minute peace talks have silenced the hawks … at least for now. We will keep you abreast of how the talks are going and what this means for you.

What this really means is, due to the time spent fixing the Facebook^* registration issues yesterday, the Guild Wars are not quite ready for primetime. Great progress has been made, but a few wrinkles still need to be ironed out before we can declare all-out war. We hope and anticipate that the Guild Wars will be up and running tomorrow.

^*Twitter Login was fixed yesterday as well. We will have a detailed blog post about that later in the week.

If you tried to register using your Facebook login any time between now (September 1, 2013) and immediately after the guilds were introduced (August 15, 2013), then you may have been puzzled by your complete lack of a guild. That issue has been identified and rectified. New registrations with Facebook login should work fine now with no problems, and those of you who had registered prior to the introduction of guilds should have had no issues.

If you ever have an issue with the game, please report it in the forums or send an email to “Bugs” at SteampunkRoad.com.