OK, before I get started here, this is going to be a VERY big news update, there's a lot to get through and we like to keep our fantastic community informed on what's going on - so if you got a little time, grab yourself a coffee and get ready to find out what's been going on and what's coming up shortly!...

So..... many of you appear to have noticed how quiet we've been over the last few weeks. This has perhaps only served to fuel the various rumours surrounding the long term status of our service... so before I get started on our main announcement, know this:

FINAL BATTLEGROUND IS HERE TO STAY!

No... We're not going bust and YES... we've poured many, MANY thousands of Pounds (you can double that in Dollars) into the development and infrastructure of Final Battleground to build the very best possible service we can. Yes... as we also swiftly approach 10,000 registered Profiles across 720 clans and increasing daily - it's safe to say that we've grown much faster over the last 5 months than we ever could have predicted. Simply put, as a small team of enthusiasts with no corporate funding, the constant growth has lately affected the performance of our hardware (hence we suspended the battles).

Over the next 10 to 14 days, we are going to release a new FBG Supporters system. Essentially, it's a payment model that will allow you (the players) to contribute a small amount to Final BattleGround and hopefully, if enough players join the Supporters system, it will help us to pay for the increasing number of expenses that we continue to pay personally out of our own pockets.

Please be aware, the operating costs for Final Battleground are SIGNIFICANT, and until we receive a mega corporate sponsorship (if ever?), even if we get a substantial number of sign-ups for the Supporters model , we're still going to be paying the bulk of the expenses from our personal bank accounts for the good foreseeable future.

"So if it's costing so much, why are you doing all this?" Well - there's a couple of reasons for that:

1. We love our games.
2. We love creating and building innovative new ideas for a community we've known and loved for years.
3. If we can grow to a large enough size, the corporate monsters out there will start to see sponsorship and ad revenue potential out of our incredibly vibrant community and we may actually start to cover the costs of a growing, development team.
4. Most of you really seem to like what we've built and it's a truly satisfying experience to receive so much positive feedback so often!

It all starts here... with you!

So, firstly - what will we be doing with our FBG Supporters contributions?...

a. Upgrade our infrastructure: We're already looking at spending many thousands on some beastly servers so that we can not only run Battles again... but in particular: run the upcoming World Map. The World battle map is completed on a graphical basis, we have some work to do still on the territory data. This map is HUGE. We're talking thousands of territories. World domination will be no small feat on this juggernaut. We're having to shell out some serious cash to get these servers upgraded so any help we put towards this will be really good.

b. Sign up an additional developer. We've had many kind offers from Developers who would like to join us, but the reality is that nothing comes for free. To give you the very highest quality experience we can offer, we simply cannot rely on work that's completed during the evenings and weekends. Developing for Final Battleground is quite literally, a full time job - and we would welcome some assistance in our efforts to get another full time developer on board.

And finally...

c. Sign up an additional designer. Yes, we know that many of you would like a full site re-design and really you have NO IDEA what a mammoth task that is! Nonetheless, we have a large number of growing design requirements and we're hoping to get more design resources on board soon.

Now before you start thinking that the FBG Supporters system is just a simple donations system, you're wrong, because we're also going to give something back to YOU (the players). Each and every player that signs up their Profile as an FBG Supporter is going to get a range of additional goodies which includes bigger rep allowances, a special guestbook tab, 15% more Plinks for every kill, a larger avatar allowance, the ability to see who's visited your profile, a function for designating players and clans as allies and the ability to name their Favourite Server as well as various other features.

The Designation of the Favourite Server is going to be quite special for the whole community. It is ONLY available to FBG Supporters because it will literally create a regular (minute by minute) cash contribution to the communities or individuals that run the favourite server you nominate. Players will be able to change their designated Favourite Server at any time and naturally, poorly run and administrated servers will find that other better run servers are getting all of the financial help from the FBG users. We want to help support, fund and encourage the best servers out there to ensure they remain in place for everyone to enjoy. We know what a huge effort it takes to run a good server and hope this will be something really positive we can do for the community.

So, what we're going to do is give a small portion of every payment we receive back to those servers that have been designated as "Favourite Servers". Usually game server admins/owners get milked for everything and do not get the help they need or deserve, we plan on changing that!

End result?... Hopefully, we'll get help running Final Battleground, and in turn, we help the server admins pay for their servers, which (going full circle now) gives the players the opportunity to play on well administrated, lag free game servers. It should be a nice cycle.

Of course, you will be under no obligation to become an FBG Supporter. The current service without all of the upcoming FBG Supporter features will continue to run for free and you will be able to continue using all of the features and functions you have right now as normal... Not only that, but we've also developed a whole range of additional features and functions for our ENTIRE fan base (including all of our FREE players and the FBG Supporters)...

ALL of our players will shortly receive a range of new features including:
1. A total profile view counter to left hand column of their Profile.
2. The ability for a Profile to edit/ change in-game options.
3. The ability to Rename your Profile
4. A whole new Server administrator control panel (which will allow you to change server settings, change your designated server admins, and submit new maps for moderation).
These are just a few of the new functions we've added and there's many others as well (we'll be releasing a full list soon along with a long list of change controls and latest bug fixes).

We're also making good progress on the FBG Plug-in so Server Admins will soon have a choice between signing up their server over a simple web interface as they do now, or installing a Server side plug-in (which means that they don't have to give us rcon - a very small handful of people seem to take issue with that).

Now, some of you have complained about the recent performance of the in-game stats. (such as End of Round starts displaying in the middle of the next round). We believe we've resolved this problem for the most part by rebuilding several of our Stored procedures and let me tell you... this is no simple task. Our DB Server calculates MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of rows of data on a constant basis. In any case, we're working on it - and we're seeing immediate improvements already but it's going to take us a little more time - your incredible patience is (as always) appreciated!

Finally - everyone is asking about when the Battles are coming back up. Bart has been hard at work optimising the Battleground interface to get it running faster for our users. We're tempted to run one more European Battle and one more North American battle before we start up the Asia Battle - our only concern is that the demand for the battles is going to be higher than ever (we know you guys have been stocking up on Millions of Plinks!). We want to make sure that the battles are running as smooth as possible and this is definitely going to require new hardware. So, rest assured, this is at the very top of our priority list!

So that's the most detailed explanation we can offer you right now.

It's all happening guys - you've brought us to this point, and with your support, we can take Final Battleground to the next level. Look out for our new build with all of the new Free features to be released over the next couple of days, and our FBG Supporters model to follow not long after.

Thank you as always for your support, your patience, your ideas, your passion. An exciting new chapter awaits!

All the best,


D1gn1tY