Dominating 12
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New website

By now you have currently noticed that we're on an all new website. We already announced that this would happen, but in this announcement we will go more in depth of some of the new features and the current state of the website.

We are aware that there are still several things that don't work as expected, work differently, or feel more slow as before. The programmers have been working as hard as they can to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. You can report any issues you have in our feedback forum, but please keep in mind the programmers are extremely busy and have to prioritise issues. Thanks for your patience!

Live game limitations
One of the most influential changes is the introduction of a limit on how many live games can be played per day by free members. We have members who prefer to play long term games, but due to the limitation on the number of games you can play simultaneously, they can only play very few. On the other hand, we have members who only play live games, and play dozens if not hundreds of games every day.

Live games also form the largest stress factor for the server. For the server upkeep, Dominating 12 depends entirely on the income from premium subscriptions, and we felt it was unfair that some members could play thousands of games without ever paying -- while other members were very restricted -- making up for a large portion of the server resources.

To make for a more fair distribution, we decided to introduce a daily limit on the number of games you can play as a free member, while also relaxing the limits on long term games:

The first three live games per day (resets at 0:00 server time) are free. You can also play two more duels (2 player games) for free. After that, creating or joining additional games requires 120 tokens per game (note that if you play 6 games on a day without missing turn, you also receive 120 tokens from finishing games). Premium members are not affected by this change, so if you want to continue playing unlimited live games, you should buy a premium subscription.

The limit of five simultaneous games has not been changed, but it is possible to join a 6th and 7th game at the cost of 120 tokens. This gives players who prefer long term games more room to join games with friends.

We understand that these changes will have a huge impact on the site. We hope that people are discouraged from ruining games -- because they can only play a couple a day -- so that the overall game quality is improved. Additionally, by reducing the stress on the servers and boosting the income from premium memberships, we can work towards becoming an even better Risk community. Even with these new limitations, we are happy to still be the Risk site where free members get to enjoy more live games than any other competing site.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be carefully monitoring the effects these limitations have on the site and the number of games played. If required, we will revisit the limitations and adapt them to create the best possible balance for everybody.

Note that making additional accounts to get around the live game limitations is against the site rules and will lead to disciplinary action.

Because there were problems after the server migration, we have temporarily disabled this limitation to make up for it. The live game limitations will be re-enabled on Monday January 25.

Interface changes
The interface for doing turns has been changed. The changes were made according to testers' feedback that it was unclear in which stage of the turn you were. We have taken notice of the problems you have shared with us and we agree that we want to make a couple of more changes to it. We have already started to gather feedback, so if you want to join the discussion, check out this thread.

Other parts of the website have also been given a bit of a makeover. All these changes were met with positive response by our testers, but we are aware that the changes temporarily make it more difficult to find things. We are convinced that once everybody gets used to it, everybody will agree that the changes were for the better. Of course, if you have any suggestions on how to improve things then share it with us on the feedback forum.

Friend/avoid lists
Friend and avoid lists were among the most commonly requested features of our players, and we heard you. You are now able to add other players to your friends list of avoid list on this page. Free users get five slots each and premium users can add as many users as they wish.

You can use these lists to decide who you want to play with using the also new account settings page. You can turn off invites for live or long term games, or make it so that only friends can invite you.

If you don't want to play with somebody, you can add them to your avoid list. People from this list can't join the games you created and you will be automatically removed from games you have joined if they join as well. Note that this means that you can get kicked from all the games you have joined if an avoided players joins them; this is an intentional choice, so that you don't add people to your avoid list if not necessary. If you choose to avoid people, then you should bear the consequences, not the avoided player.

Other changes
The list of changes is too big to describe, but I want to quickly mention some of the security improvements we put into the site. The site is now server over the HTTPS protocol, as can be seen by the green lock in your address bar. This means that the communication between you and the server is encrypted. We also have made it more clear when a url points to a website that is not Dominating 12 by giving them a blue color.

The easiest way to find out what the other changes are is to go exploring for yourself. If you have questions, do not hesitate to ask on the forums.

Why we moved
We have received several comments from members who find that the new site works slower than before, or do not like how some things look. The reason why we had to move the site is because the backend used on the old site was old and badly supported. To keep up high standards in quality and security, we had to move Dominating 12 to an entire new backend.

Several programmers have worked on the new website full-time for several months, so a lot of work went into making the Dominating 12 experience as good as possible. Despite careful testing, it is impossible for a small team like Dominating 12's to find all the bugs in advance, so issues when launching the new site were to be expected. Overall we are satisfied in how well things are going, and we hope you agree. We are working around the clock on improving the website as we go, and soon you will be able to enjoy Dominating 12 even better than before.

The new website is a majestic improvement over the old site, and hundreds of hours of manpower went into it. It is not possible to move back to the old website, and it is disrespectful towards all the hard work put into maintaining this website to be enjoyed by premium and free members alike to ask to undo all the changes.

Ever since the launch of the new website, we have already improved many things based on your feedback, including but no limited to:
  • many fixes to for example the game interface, reinforcements in team games, fog of war games, dice rolls, slow pages, and more;
  • a user setting to switch the default lobby display between box and list view;
  • the possibility to mark forum threads read or unread.

The future
The new website has been built in such a way that we can add new features and improve existing elements even easier. This means that we will be able to incorporate all your feedback even sooner. Of course, making sure that playing Risk on Dominating 12 is the best experience possible will always be our first priority, and we will keep working on bugfixes and optimizations whenever necessary.

We hope you will enjoy the new website and we are looking forward to meeting you on the battlefield. We apologise for any inconvenience caused during the server migration and thank you for your patience.

The Dominating 12 Team

Comments

  • Thanks for all the efforts, because they are appreciated, and the site is much improved because of your hard work.
  • Thank you programmers, the new site is truly an all round improvement. It is also nice to see it being refined day by day.
  • Today we had to make some pretty complicated changes to the way cards are stored. This meant migrating all the code and data that deals with cards to the new system. Sadly, this did not go as smooth as expected and we had several games affected by that, followed by some general downtime. With the small programming team we have, it is nearly impossible to prevent these situations (especially with a codebase as complex as ours). If you feel that your game has been negatively affected, please use the help request feature in-game to ask a staff member to return points and statistics. Using the live game lobby, the forum, or messaging a staff member directly does not guarantee that your case will be visited, so please use the in-game help request feature under the support tab!
  • Awesome job on the site all,haven't had any issues yet..running smooth..really like the new ranks in the ranking system and the new rank graphics.. Nice touch !!
  • the dice are very irregular recently i lost 15 men killed one 13 on one space even at a crap table they do not run like that
  • Re dice:

    “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
  • This isn't 15 X "6" on one die, it can be anything from 1 to 6 depending on what you roll in attack, the defence dice simply have to be coincidentally aligned with the attackers poor rolls where e.g. defence die is a 2 and attack dice are 2,2,1
    I wrote a huge post about this somewhere at some time... If the defence high/low rolls happen to be aligned to your attack rolls by coincidence, you could potentially lose 100 troops without killing 1 troop.