Never made it far (in General)

http://www.carnageblender.com/shared/community-member.tcl?user_id=273684

Maybe some people just don't like reading battle logs ;)

almost did the same till i saw people buy and sell for RL money...

48 active users from the past 7 days

can't imagine why...

Yes but the question is why did he only got 20 fights in

Though outdated, this game is still considerable strategic fun... I'm bewildered by its painful, slow death.

I think its death is stemmed from its lack of development. Anything not maintained, no matter how grand, will slowly decay with time.

I completely agree with you EoD. Regardless of how amazingly in depth and complex this game is, the fact that no one has taken the time to keep it alive save for a few dedicated members, just means that it will eventually dwindle away to nothingness. Very sad considering how much time was put into development of all the facets included herein.

wish i knew coding. Maybe i can take advantage of being laid off and learn to code lol!!!!

Coding isn't difficult, but as a whole someone would have to have an idea on where to take it. That and someone would need to get permission from the site owner to make any changes. Would you try to add graphics, make the text a little more interesting... Where would you change things to make it appeal to more people?

No graphics, haven't had any since the very beginning.

As Dani said, it is less about someone coding and more about someone being passionate about this game again, as a developer. Someone needs to have an image of what they want to game to look like and develop the game towards it.

Once you have something like that, coding is less work and more fun as that person is creating their world. And if things get too hectic/busy/hard/etc, there is tons of people who would be more than willing to give advice, answer questions, debug code, and even developed code.

Sadly, CB no longer has such a developer, and I doubt it will.

Well, it may not even require a ton of coding to increase traffic here. If we had enough people, and permission, we could join it with a site like Kongregate. I don't know the specifics on what it requires to put a game like this on a site like that, but chat would be covered by kongregate and that site's traffic would be a big boost to traffic here. It's just an idea, but it could work to CBII's advantage.

I think the game has to be coded in a specific language to be put on Kong. IIRC it has been talked about in the past.

CB is coded in the very odd and not widely used (at least as far as I'm aware) TCL language. Very few here know it, even less would like to learn it.

In all honesty I'd love to see a resurrection of this game converted into a more modern/flexible language and see where they can run with it from there. The hardcore community we still maintain have plenty of ideas collectively to help kickstart the game in a new direction. What we need is a coder who is dedicated and has enough time (having the time being the biggest thing required) to do just that.

As EoD stated, anything that isn't being actively developed will inevitably die out. CB is a rare breed in that people keep coming back (even if that includes multiple accounts over time) but it's still been on that slow decline and none of us truly want to see it go.

I've personally been outrageously busy with work, as are many of the other notable CBers who have been missing. I still check in on the game every day, even if I don't fight often/if ever anymore, but I really wish I had far more time then I currently do to devote my time to improving this game and actively helping with it's development.

Hell if we as a community can come up with the funds to hire a full time coder, we can all essentially throw our ideas into the pool and just say "Hey help us do this." and feed them ideas for days.

Another problem is marketing. This game isn't actively being marketed to a large number of new people (again as far as I'm aware and have been able to see) which is a shame because there is definitely a market for it, however in its current development freeze I really don't think many new people will bite.

I completely agree that CBs strategy and "meta-game" for lack of a better term is definitely interesting. While some don't like all the battle logs and number crunching, I personally love it, and I know others do as well. It allows for very precise levels of detail within your strategy that can literally win you a normally lost fight by one round if you do your calcs right and your base strategy allows for a big enough adjustment to actually influence the battle.

The idea of being "unbeatable" is actually not possible in this game as it's currently coded, making the only real contributing factor time invested (I'm talking about hitting the current NW ceiling and only allowing ones stats/tattoo to grow after that point).

I rambled a lot, I forget what my point was.

CB will never really die... Even if I'm the last person to ever log in.

- Xenogard

Well, i am one of the CB'ers that always comes back and i love to be here when i am. With that said i would also love to see the game renovated to a point where it would be marketable and fun for everyone. That "bite" that Xeno talked about with the number crunching and calculations and gobs of different strategies is exactly why i got so into CB1 and now here.

Personally i would gladly offer support in funds towards a coder.

My first question would be - What kind of funds are we talking about to get an image of what we all would like to see? Not a per person number, but, an overall this is an approximate amount we'd have to spend to get things rolling.

Next, I bet if we were to put up some money and hire someone to start this, and then, eventually, start seeing his/her progress into what they are creating, i guarantee there would be far less hesitation to acquire even more funds if necessary. I've seen some pretty spectacular banners and theme ideas that would be magnificent if they were implemented giving the old and new players alike their own variety making the game more personal.

Another idea that i seen was images. Not graphics in the sense that there will be animation but an array of pictures for the various armor and weapons would be so enticing! Could you imagine what a mage wearing a Corn, TSA, AoI, CoI, DB's, NS's, and an SoC would look like. It'd be spectacular. Giving an image to a tattoo would be brilliant as well. These don't have to be interactive (I imagine that is a lot more coding than just importing images) but it would make the game more "real/tangible" in a way.

My own personal ideas would include the already talked about numerous times updated chat which would be an absolute must. It could bring us back to the days of talking to each other like friends that see each other everyday with the childish banter and nagging and whatnot :) Most importantly. bring it back to what the game was years ago, entertaining and not just mindless clicking. Literally, from what i've seen lately it's mostly just log on, click 160 times, exit. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Updated/New items for supporters back on a regular basis (be it every 4-6 months or sooner if we have that big of a calling for them again). The Item naming could be updated as well making it 1 for 6$, 2 for 10$, 3 for 12$ or something similar.

The reference page could be updated and that entire system overhauled for new payouts, varying between x number of references that acquire x MPR can get free supporter status for one year etc. (These are just ideas.) This would also change the way the supporter status works as well obviously. Ideas for this can vary greatly so feel free to throw them out.

In the same coding fiasco, we could finally overhaul the bot check system and make it more user friendly, image and number captcha's and the like are ok but there are other things out there that accomplish the same thing with less accidental error. My first suggestion when it came to this would be to make it three strikes you're out instead of two. Second would be what i had mentioned in an earlier thread about making it so that you are checked before you begin any action requiring BA and then not again for x amount of time or until you log out or something like that. In that regard we would have to implement an auto-logout thing that logs you out after 10 minutes of inactivity etc.

The number of available characters to fight would increase because of the influx of new players and with the NUB they could make themselves formidable in no time which would make it that much more interesting for the old-timers.

Honestly there are dozens of things that "could" happen. What i and i think several of us want is for it to finally after all this time, stop being just "talk" and come to fruition.

So in conclusion "How much?" That's what i want to know and from there i can give a definitive monetary value to what i'm willing to put forth to at least get something started!!!

--Twisted Fate--

How much?

I'm not too familiar with the field but my excellent Google searching skills tell me about $30 - $40 an hour for a good programmer.

http://sivers.org/how2hire

That blog is a few years old but most importantly it links to sites that are dedicated to hiring programmers which is where I pulled the hourly rate from after a quick search for tcl.

Progress is what this game needs, as others have stated, a non-java chat and occasional new items would be enough and perhaps a mobile application as well. Recoding the game to a more common language probably isn't something that would ever happen - tcl may be an old language but there are still plenty of programmers for outdated languages, COBOL comes to mind.

TCL? how lovely! That gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and bring back some good memories :)

Notice that TCL is among the perl/awk/shell family of languages, for which a coder familiar in one, could transit rather painless to another. A good system administrator should be familiar in one of those.

Anyway, I'm willing to throw in a few hours now and then, for free ofcourse.

*bump*

sadly anyone that has the ability to give you access to the code source hasn't logged on in a long time