gamble

Edit: not going to derail anymore with arguing Good luck all with project and claims!

You have copyright completely wrong and you have no legal grounds to demand a takedown just to be absolutely clear. Copyright strictly means everything is made by the team working on it. NOT mechanics or features. Those would fall under trademarks which must be applied for and shown to be unique and vital to your project. If he stole your code directly, any images, uses your name (Fifth Family), and similar DIRECT use of your work then that's copyright. Copying features is not. Similarly colors (with few exceptions such as Reese's and their orange), layouts, and words can not be trademarked or copywritten without a multi million dollar lawyer and even then it's damn near impossible to defend

If the custom TLD doesn't appeal fifthfam.com is available! Could be a good middle ground. Just to play devils advocate or whatever here: What makes your game different than let's say torn? You seem to have territory wars, similar load out strategy, bosses (torn has Duke and all those), same 4 stats, same crime mastery, etc. what makes it not a torn clone with makeup?

Good luck with the launch! Couple things I can see happening (just a fair warning) - The classic "Great another Mafia game" - Lack of retention. There doesn't seem to be anything to keep you playing. There's 5 things to do judging by the post and previous screenshots. What's the point of training there's seemingly no attack outside territory wars maybe? Along with that there seems to be no player to player interactions outside of territory wars and a chat. This issues compounds with the family system being locked behind player activity as you stated. I assume boss fights are also multi-player based so that's functionality is effectively dead until a player base is built, so 2 key features from your post are dead on arrival - I understand what you're trying to do with the mccodes comparison but that's only going to harm you. I'd just leave that behind as it gives more fuel to my point 1 above - URL is terrible in my opinion. "The" in a URL is silly but I understand fifthfamily.com is taken. In my mind I'd never type the in the URL when trying to get the Fifth Family. Mostly because id just call it fifth family. I'd suggest maybe going modern and trying a special TLD so a good example for you fifth.family - Be prepared for the iOS app to be taken down or not accepted. They typically only allow native apps (things like flutter and react native compile to native just to clear up confusion there). They specifically mentioned in TOS and the Developer license that PWAs are not accepted or allowed. If you have a native app awesome! I am just making assumptions on it being pwa only. Even using a wrapper to publish the pwa is typically taken down pretty quickly since it falls under their "web browser" rules. I could be wrong on all this and please don't take this as hatred from me. I have just been around long enough to see players with the above complaints. I hope you succeed! It's a dying genre of games and I hope you find success in it! I'll be playing myself to see what it's all about! Sorry if the came off critical I'm just trying to give some constructive criticism based off the information I have.

Looking good from the screenshots! Keep up the good work!

Connection resets are 90% of the time a bad connection locally. The other option is pay attention when the server seems to go down, because connection reset could also be caused by server overloading (which would cause a very slow response from server causing connection timeout/reset). If it happens to be every hour or something I'd start at hourly crons if you have any. Could have an infinite loop causing a server decay over a timeframe or some sort of cleanup is failing to work thus taking up memory and causing a degradation

Never ran ads on reddit but have posted on the pbbg and webgames subreddits which have still to this day been the #1 player bringer Ads have been a pretty big dud in general but I'm probably just bad at creating attractive ads. 99.99% of my impressions were from one country and after some research were all bots. Just click farming costing me money. That was about a $300 experiment. Meta and Google ads

Isn't this way over thought? Couldn't you just have a basic users table with just username, email, password, whatever other basic stuff. Then it's done since both would have completely different data outside that? So essentially it's just one master login shared by both sites but they use whatever tables the engine did originally. Hell you could even prefix tables with gl_ or mc_ to guarantee uniqueness

Stripe is by far in my opinion the best. Supports so many languages and it's easy to work with. Webhooks are easy to set up. The testing stuff is a lot simpler, no dev account needed.

So I actually use docker too and on almalinux. You can install with through dnf the same as apt. The two package managers are basically a 1 to 1 conversion

For those of you have released a game, what did you find helped most to reach new players? So far my thoughts would be: Voting Websites On this topic too, is there a list anyone has of voting sites? Advertising Meta Ads, Google Ads, etc What other options have you explored to help your game grow?

Active players? Engine? Price? Literally any info?

Personally I still work on my projects and have a blast. Still love developing text based games BUT. If we are being honest I think losing marketplace here completely defeated the purpose of this forum. There's no updates to GL, MC, Spade, or anything because there's nowhere to publish them or even download them here so I think a lot of people gave up. I know there's the second site that's just a marketplace but that doesn't feel the same. I miss the one stop for everything that MWG once was

First just because it's driving me crazy: please please please check or clear those discord notifications ROFLMAO Second: if you're doing a SPA and worried about data refreshing (which is what I'm interpreting you are struggling with) I would suggest a websocket. This will make it stupid easy to keep data live in 2 ways: 1. You can either use a ping pong system and use that to get live data every second or whatever 2. You can use a message on the websocket to update data anytime anything changes. So for example. I have a user class that has all the getters and setters then whenever a setter is called it send a message to websocket to update. This works for both user driven actions and other player driven actions. 3. (This is what I actually use and recommend) A mixture of 1 and 2. The message that sends data on change (#2) will reset the periodic check (#1). So specifically I have a periodic check every 10 seconds but any live data message resets that timer Hopefully this makes sense. If you need any help let me know

Did you create a database and user for the database then update the config?