Jump to content

Admin's Blog

  • entries
    37
  • comments
    606
  • views
    111,619

About this blog

A blog by game admin.

Entries in this blog

A Decade of Cyber Nations

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of Cyber Nations. I always like to look back on history and it seems appropriate to do so today, so here we go. I registered the Cyber Nations domain name in 2003 with the hopes of creating a web based nation simulation game but I was unable to come up with a working model and I quickly abandoned the project. I let the domain name sit idle for a year and decided to let it go in 2004 since I couldn't find a use for it. In 2005 my interest was sparked again and

admin

admin

Cyber Nations Logos: A brief history

So what's the deal with the logo changes in Cyber Nations? Well I was fiddling around with an image editor this weekend and I liked some of the effects that it was capable of producing. The biggest thing (for me) is that I was able to pretty closely replicate the current logo and save it as a true transparent image. The old CN logo was designed by a player way back in early 2006 but he sent it to me as a jpg image with a white background and so I've always had trouble putting it in front of anyt

admin

admin

Game Advertising and Referrals

In an effort to try to increase the player base in Cyber Nations I'm currently testing some new ad campaigns on Google and Facebook and a couple of other sites. Now, I've advertised heavily in the past, but over time I started to see fewer and fewer players actually stick around after clicking on an ad. I feel like the changes that I've made in the game over the past couple of months are exciting and I've even seen some long retired players say that the recent changes are worth them coming back

admin

admin

Tournament Updates: Behind The Scenes

As you know, I decided to go all out on the updates for tournament round 26. This round features the largest amount of updates that I've made for a new tournament round, and a few of the updates were minor and were not announcement, but were updates none the less. One of the big updates was the alliance announcement system, a feature that had been requested initially when the TE alliance system was first introduced and it continued to prevail as a common request throughout the tournament rounds.

admin

admin

Tournament Round 26

I've been hard at work the past couple of days making some updates for Cyber Nations Tournament Edition Round 26. One of the things that a lot of players have asked for is the ability to create alliance announcements, which has now been implemented. I included the ability for alliance members to post comments on an announcement as well as the ability for managers to lock down who can view an announcement and who can post comments. Another thing that was asked for were improvements to Navy. No

admin

admin

War Stories

The game has been collecting war destruction stats for about 3 weeks now and already some players have put up some massive damage totals. Cyber Nations as a whole has destroyed/lost 63,806,849 nation strength in just the past few weeks. What are some of your biggest losses in war going back before the war destruction stats were gathered?

admin

admin

I wonder if he regrets it?

With the new war details screen and the ability to see damage infliced by each side in a war, I came across this. Granted, stats for wars began on the 26th and there's still a few days remaning in this war, but I wonder if Momonishiki regrets declaring war on CubaQuerida at this point?

admin

admin

Where the players are from

I was cruising Google Analytics this morning and took a peek at the Cyber Nations visitors map and thought I would share. This is broken down by city over the last month. To my surprise, a city in the USA is not top on the list. That honor goes to London. Here's the top 5 cities: London 7,855 New York 6,858 Chicago 4,046 Melbourne 3,989 Sydney 3,354

admin

admin

Hello there long lost emails

This morning I received a report from a player that they had sent me an email some time ago but I never received it. So I started sending test emails to myself and I never received those emails either. I logged into my hosting providers site just now and found 242 rather important emails from just the last month that I had never received. Apparently the hosting provider for my primary site email address changed their spam filter settings on me. Looks like I have quite a bit of catching up to do.

admin

admin

iPad - What is it good for?

So after my last entry here, which dealt with getting a new phone (I ended up getting a Droid), I am now thinking about getting an iPad. But is this thing really worth buying? What can I do on it that I can't do on my phone? Is it just another useless toy? It would be larger/better for, say, reading...but other than that?

Atlas

Atlas

I need a new phone

I'm kidnapping the blog because I want the advice and wisdom of the community. I need a new mobilephone.. or maybe "want" is a better word. At any rate I believe that I want an android but I have no idea which one to get. I'm not looking for anything cheap, but don't need a "monster" either. Anyone got suggestions or knows a good site where I can find reviews?

Atlas

Atlas

Tournament Edition Prizes

What better way to spend your summer than by playing an online nation simulation game with the chance to win some great prizes? I've decided to give away some cool items from the Cyber Nations Merchandise Store to the top 3 players at the end of tournament round 12 which started today. Prizes (for 1st place) include a Tournament Edition branded Sigg 1.0L Water Bottle, a Gym Bag, and a Ringer T-Shirt. Players will also have the option to pick any other item in the Cyber Nations Merchandise Store

admin

admin

Do you Like it?

On April 21st Facebook released its widely publicized "Like" button feature for websites allowing developers to place like buttons on their content. I had heard about this a few days before they released it and I thought it would make for a good advertising tool so as soon as they made it available I went to work putting a couple of Like buttons around my sites. For a few days afterward I watched the little numbers beside the Like buttons, which indicates how many people have clicked on it, and

admin

admin

Most Destructive War In CN History?

I was looking at the game stats and as noted here Cyber Nations recently surpassed the highest global radiation level ever recorded in the game. The previous record on GRL, attained during the Karma War, was 47.47. Today the GRL is sitting at 55.93 and will rise again after update tonight. From the CN information index: I was wondering if this is really the most destructive war in CN history or if the smaller nation count in the game now, as compared to the nation count during the Karma war, h

admin

admin

The Dreaded Pit of Information

I took a stroll through the Cyber Nations information index recently to see if I could clean it up a little bit. I was looking to see if I could make it more like the Cyber Citizens about screen where you click on individual links to pull up an article rather than have the whole confusing thing listed out all at once. But when I stopped and really looked over the CN index I realized that there is really a lot of stuff in there. Lots of numbers, percentages, dollar figures, and oh the dreaded mat

admin

admin

Regarding the Blogs

I'm glad to see that the blog function is being used and that some people seem to have good conversations and debates in the comment fields. I'd just like to remind everyone that the normal forum rules apply in the blogs too, so use common sense when commenting/writing blog posts. Carry on!

Atlas

Atlas

Witty Wars

I've been entertained while this big war is happening with all the witty war reasons that people use. I scanned over the past 24 hours of war declarations and here are some of the ones that made me lol. Why use the generic 'A General Dispute' war reason when you can start with a bang like these guys did: "You sure got a purdy mouth!" - Reddragoon "your a TOOL" - Reoga to a nation in the alliance The Order Of Light "Declare war, I must" - NearX "Improved Foreign Relations" - bioakky "1 2 3 4

admin

admin

Atlas is in need of a signature

I've decided that I want to have a fancy looking signature. But I'm awful at anything that has to do with graphics and wouldn't even be able to work with Modern Art (That doesn't look like anythinf and is hideous, no matter what other moderators claim ).Thus I turn to the community. Do we have any bright minds out there who would like to give it a shot and create me a signature? You won't win anything besides the honour and glory, but hey, at least that's something.Either post your suggestions

Atlas

Atlas

New Forums!

After somedowntime, during which I hope our players got some fresh air and sunlight, we're back! Cooler and better than ever before!The Senior Staff is however really upset at having to learn a "new" ACP after just getting used to the last one.

Atlas

Atlas

CN Facebook Group

After it was reported to me that our old Cyber Nations Myspace group had been deleted (I think the owner of the group had his profile deleted or something) I decided to look into migrating over to Facebook because, really, that's were all the cool kids hang out these days. I looked at several of the existing CN related groups and managed to find someone to give me admin control over one of the groups (haha, sucker) so now we have an official Cyber Nations Facebook Group. There's currently 262 me

admin

admin

Staff Awards

The CN staff are pretty hard workers. However, sometimes we do big staff audits to make sure everyone is doing a spectacular job. These audits can cause changes in teams and how we're organized, to make sure we are doing our job to the best of our ability. Not very much changes after this audit, because such a stellar job is being done by everyone. Without further ado, Spock and Allan a Dale have taken on more responsibility and become global mods. If you don't know what that means, you may

Philotheos

Philotheos

Questions for the mods

I know some other mod had a blog where they answered questions from the players, and because I can think of nothing else to say that the players would find particularly interesting, if any players have any questions for senior staff, feel free to ask. No promises you'll get an answer however. This blog will also give me the opportunity to do another thing I like to do - Bash the other senior staffers. I kid I kid, we all get along pretty great.

Philotheos

Philotheos

The Moderator's Blog

I've opened this blog up to allow the senior game moderators full editor access to create and edit blog entries within this blog. With more editors this blog should stay more current with exciting news and information straight from the front lines of all things moderation.

admin

admin

April Fools

This morning around server update time there was a major security issue which mistakenly gave everyone access to the moderator's control panel in the game. There was a total of 3,129 moderator actions that took place throughout the night with most coming from the users Blacky performing 393 mod actions and TrotskysRevenge who performed 10 mod actions. We have patched up the security breaches and are preparing to file litigation against those responsible for the moderator actions and resulting da

admin

admin

Server Spring Break

CN was down for a couple of hours early this morning. I woke up and tried to load the CN home page in my web browser and the only I got was a network error. No connectivity to the server, I couldn't even ping it, nothing. Uh oh. I quickly contacted the host and requested a reboot and a few minutes later the server came back up and the site was working again. Hmm, hardware malfunction I thought. There should be something in the server logs to show what happened and when, except there were no erro

admin

admin

×
×
  • Create New...