Fellow GoVenture entrepreneurs, we have some big upgrades that will require a full game RESET. This means that all player, business, and game data will be deleted. All companies, sales, inventory, bxp, logins, … everything will be gone.
As soon as the RESET happens, we will all have the opportunity to start fresh. You will start from the point of creating your login and holding company name, then proceed to the tutorial and continue into the full game (just as you did when you first joined). You cannot skip the tutorial, but you can go through it more quickly if you are already familiar with it … but we recommend that you take it slow and capture as much wisdom as you can.
New Features & Bug Fixes
Business Features
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MANUFACTURING businesses will now have 3 EFFICIENCY UPGRADES that can be added. The upgrades increase production capacity so that more products can be manufactured each day.
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RETAIL businesses will have a MAXIMUM STORAGE CAPACITY. There will also be 3 EFFICIENCY UPGRADES that can be added. The upgrades increase storage capacity so that more products can be held in inventory. Retail businesses will not be able to purchase new products if they will exceed the storage capacity. If products are already ordered and shipped, retailers will be allowed to exceed the storage capacity available, but will be charged and off-site storage fee.
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Monthly Operating Costs for several business types have been changed.
Miscellaneous
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You can now cancel a PRODUCT ORDER, under certain conditions.
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Separate volume controls for Music and Sound Effects have been added to the bottom of the Smartphone.
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Leaderboards are now visible to everyone on the Internet. This means you can share your achievements with friends and family. We’ve added the public links to the bottom of the home page at www.GoVentureWorld.com
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Chat window now plays a sound when new messages appear to make it easier to monitor activity.
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A number of bug fixes have been made to accounting, mini game sales, and more.
Multiple Accounts and Email Validation
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Our Terms of Use has been updated to explicitly not allow the same player to create and/or manage multiple accounts. We think this will provide fair gameplay. Accounts will be monitored.
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When you create a new account, you will receive an email asking you to click a button to verify that you own the email address used to create your account. You must follow the directions in the email or your account will not be enabled.
Frequent RESETS
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Originally, our plan was to have GoVenture World run forever, while new players could join the game at any time. But the Beta has helped us discover that many players particularly enjoy the startup process. The first few weeks of the game are the most exciting and then players settle in to grow and manage their businesses over time.
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As a result, we now are thinking that we will do a reset every 3 or 4 months. And, not just during the Beta, we will always do it. This will allow players to frequently experience the excitement of the startup process, and it will also allow new players to start with a level playing field, and repeat players to try new strategies.
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New players will still be able to join at any time.
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We are going to explore ways to allow repeat players to keep their logins, achievements, and bxp so that they can be differentiated from newbies. The extra bxp won’t necessarily provide any advantages as that might unbalance the game, but we don’t want players to lose their earned bxp and achievements. For example, if you earn 50,000 bxp in the game and start new, you will have 50,000 bxp, but you will still be required to earn more bxp (the same amount as any other player) to start additional businesses. We will explore ways to provide benefits as well.
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Further to the above, we will create a second set of Leaderboards where repeat players will have their metrics aggregated. This means we will have our CURRENT GAME Leaderboards and the ALL TIME Leaderboards. We want to give our repeat players as much exposure as possible.
We hope you will enjoy these new features and we look forward to your feedback below!
2 Likes
As one of the players on the opposite side of the spectrum, I’m not very fond of full game resets because that ruins all of the effort that was put into building your corporation. I believe that there should be 2 servers where one gets reset and another one that stays continually running because for players like me, we don’t like to keep restarting over because we like to make progress and restarting makes you lose all the progress you’ve made.
1 Like
@ Lifeline - that is true and it is harder work, but it does have the big advantage of knowing that your efforts are on equal terms - not trying to catch up to established businesses.
I am curious to know if other businesses are able to produce BXP too?
LIFELINE, we totally know what you mean and it’s why we originally planned to have the game run without reset. And, you may be right that the best decision may be to run two servers … that’s something we will have to figure out as we go. For now we will have to continue to do resets for a while because it makes it easier for us to upgrade the game and clear out any exploits.
If we are able to keep adding deep features to the game, it may provide longer-term gameplay, but if we discover that players end up doing too much grinding after a certain number of months, then that would worry us as we don’t want to build a game experience based on grinding.
PB CORP: Yes, all businesses produce BXP. All major and most minor actions in the game product BXP.
1 Like
I mean I understand if a reset HAS to happen because the update broke another portion of the game. Example of this would be the switch of Open Market orders going through the invoicing system as well which screwed up the totaling of the liabilities (which worked fine up to this point). Since it broke something that a lot of businesses rely on for increasing equity, I’m okay with a full reset so that it gets fixed. The loss of progress is better this way as it improves the game. Just to reset because some players like the experience of opening a new business up from the ground floor isn’t a good idea for other players because it’s more along the lines of a 50 - 50 split and would (especially for me) 1) annoy me knowing that I will always lose my progress every 3 - 4 months and 2) probably end up quitting after 3 - 4 restarts because it just gets boring restarting over again. Plus keeping it running simulates the real world more where new businesses may be at a slighter disadvantage but they are still able to make it with putting in the work. Just like in the real world, established businesses just don’t clear out to allow new businesses to take over. Keeping it running has the same principle as the real world. Is it fair to new players? No but there are possibilities to make it a little more fair for new players likes:
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Setting some kind of profit boost activate up to a certain equity/cash amount (where which ever one is reached first would then disable this boost).
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Have the customers attract to new businesses by 10% more than older businesses. (just as people tend to go check out newer businesses that open up close to them like restaurants, stores, auto retailers, etc).
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Give new players an extra $500k - $1mil after the first 50 GT days to help them get their first business upgraded a bit to be more in competition with the more established players.
These are just some ideas that could help balance the playing field for new players against those who have been playing since the start of the reset. Being a software/web developer myself, I see the advantages of resetting it constantly, but on the other end, you have to think about all the players which this is more along the lines of a 50 - 50 split or close to it. So if players REALLY want resets every 3 - 4 months, a second server should be set up for those players that want to do both or one or the other. This is just my perspective on this because I know Vanguard doesn’t like the any restarts but I know they’re necessary to make the game work correctly as in my previous example.
But as for game exploits, it is best to continue running one server and at least when it’s finished with exploits and game fixes. That would allow you to fix common issues that aren’t just server specific issues. I wasn’t saying to open a second one yet, but rather it should be thought about once exploits and major bug fixes are done. 
2 Likes
LIFELINE:
Your have perfectly captured why our original plans were to keep the game going with no resets, while only doing resets during the beta when something signficant was broken or needed upgrading.
What changed our thinking was noticing that many players liked the reset process. And, that it seemed like after a few months of playing, there was a lot of grinding happening and we are worried that players will get bored of the repetition (if we are unable to add big new features fast enough). So, our choice is to lose players because they are bored of repetition, or to lose players because they are not happy about resets. We are thinking repetition is worse.
Another consideration for us is if we do not do resets, our data management challenges become significant and will slow down the game and make it less fun. We can eventually solve this, but since we are only a small team, our choice would be to work on improving the scalability of the game, or to work on adding new features to make the game even more engaging (like adding more business types). We think it is a better choice to work on new features rather than the plumbing (for now anyway).
With all that said, we don’t have enough data from players to say for sure what the majority prefer, so these are the types of things we will try to figure out over the next number of months (and we will probably do some player surveys too).
Your suggestion of, at some point, running two servers is a very good one. One that resets and one that does not. It causes us more work with upgrades and such, but having one server run a long time may just be a good idea for testing our scalability … even if we cannot guarantee how long it will run.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
