So it’s time for me to once again look back on the last month of running Omerta Deathmatch. This time I have to do so with more than a touch of hubris.

For you see it turns out that things were going far too well for the last few months, no major disasters in either design or development. Oh sure there were a few tweaks here and there, and the odd feature that took a little longer to develop than expected, but nothing major.

However this month we had our first true failure. We got over ambitious and that came back to bite us in the ass – big style.

This month saw us in an unusual position, where we had to do what is known as a reset on the main international version of the game. A reset involves shutting the game down temporarily and resetting everyone’s accounts back to a starting state. The reason we do this is that after a while, as is the way with the mafia, one family becomes so powerful that they have complete control over the version.

When the game gets to this state, the family in dominance stops all new families forming and on the whole makes the game unplayable for anyone not in their inner circle. So over the years we have performed these resets, which declare the version over and a new one begins.

Now when we do this for the bigger versions of Omerta, such as the International, Dutch & Portuguese versions, we like to use that opportunity to roll out gameplay changes as well.

This time we were planning to roll out a whole new family system, which would bring new elements to the gameplay of families. This system would have replaced the current static family sizes with an expanding family system that relied on the activity of the family to progress.

However this left us with an issue – we had a date set for the International reset that was closer than we imagined it would normally take to get the changes completed. But we were so drunk on the confidence of the past few months we thought that, if we organised ourselves well enough, we could get it done in double time.

Unfortunately, as you will have no doubt have already realised, this choice was very much a mistake.

There were complications with the development, some of the features proved a lot harder to make than anticipated and all round things took longer than imagined.

We were left with two options: reset the International version without the changes promised, or push back the reset to finish the changes. We decided to ask the players which way they would like us to go.

In the end the International version has restarted without the new family system, but does have a bunch of the changes we’ve trailed over the last few months on Deathmatch. Suffice to say that we will not be making that mistake again if it can at all be avoided. We’re going to try to work to more realistic development deadlines in the future.

Due to them all being busy with the start of a new version, there was no time for our players eye view of this month’s goings on. That will return next month, along with better news on the design front (hopefully!).

So, I’ve been in charge for a while over at Omerta Deathmatch. Over that time I have been closely looking at the game’s features to see where I think it can be improved.

While the game does have a lot going for it, as a result of the way some features work it has become a little regimented. This is after all a game that has run for over five years, so it’s only natural that over time things would head that way.

So one of the first things I wanted to try and do was to add a little more of a random factor into the game. Not so much as to break the existing dynamic, but enough to add an element of surprise to Omerta.

I Recently thought of a potential change to one of the existing in-game features, Smuggling. This system has the users buying contraband in one city and shipping it to other cities for a profit. Once the players get to a certain rank they are only really trafficking cocaine, morphine, and whiskey, because they were most commonly at profitable rates in the same cities at the same time.

What I wanted to do was shake this up a little and add a bit more of a random factor to it. We had tried to do this once in the past by trying to unlink the drug and alcohol prices, so that they had to make more of a choice – do they go to Detroit to get the high booze or Chicago to get the high morphine? Unfortunately this did not go down too well among the player base, because there was too much randomisation for them to work with on a day to day basis. Smuggling needs a pattern to it, hell; even the real world drug trade has set routes (or..so I’m told *whistles*)

So how could I add a random factor to this without it being ‘too’ random?

The answer, in my mind, was not to impact on the system, but to randomly pick a specific contraband and affect the profit margins on that one alone. This way if the profit margin was good enough, the players could choose to change from their normal smuggling routes, but the key fact here was that the standard routes would remain largely unaffected.

Now I wanted to give this a trial, so I implemented it as one of the event weekends to get the players view on it. After the weekend ended I got the players opinions, which were for the most part positive, and have made changes to make it a permanent feature.

Their only issues with it turned out to be that they couldn’t clearly tell when the Oversupply, which alters the profits, was in effect and that they felt the windows of opportunity were too small. So taking their input into account, I will be trying the final version of this change shortly.