Microtransactions! Free-to-play! We all love spending money, right?

... what do you mean, you don't?

This year's prank involved the fake addition of transactions based on donations, to "help support the server's costs". The idea came to me after seeing how well the donations have been working to support the Minecraft server, although that kind of contributions isn't really needed here. For the record, don't worry about this web server: the fees are minimal compared to the Minecraft server and have been stable for quite some time now. I have no need to ask for money to keep things running, nor do I need to add Paypal, advertising or anything of the sort.

The past few years often involved adding a semi-joke feature that became permanent; this isn't the case this year as the code to support said transactions has already been purged from the codebase. Back to normal operations!

And now, for this year's fun numbers:

• 4 players unlocked all the board's features and earned a permanent badge!
  
• 122 transactions (credits + unlocks) were done through the day!
  
• The most popular topic for unlocking was "Optifine for 1.7.2 available", with 5 unlocks!
  
• Right behind was "Expansion: Project Central", opened 4 times!
  
• 11 people unlocked the board's posting ability!
  
• 4891 registered members proudly wore a powerless "Admin" rank!

I've been accused by some of pulling a weak April's Fools Day gag on the forums this year. Fair enough. However, with only 30 people visiting on this April 1st, I didn't feel justified in sinking a ton of time making something very complex that would be lost after 24 hours. Instead, I'm focusing my energy on larger scale projects, such as Cyber Grid which is one year old as of yesterday!

Besides, players on the Creeper's Lab had it good, with 46 players being swept into the End. That'll be explained on another topic later today!

Edited by Dr. Cossack on April 2, 2014 at 13:47:03

I actually quite enjoyed the forum-side game, regardless of how obvious it was that it was a gag. Proud to say I'm one of the 4 with the badge, heehee~