Andrew Busey: My Musings

Check out the first ever Duels comic:

It’s really cool and gives a great overview of the backstory behind Phyrra, the world of Duels.

Duels continues the long tradition of cool tower defense games.  You can check it out Duels Defense at www.duelsdefense.com.  Or you can play the embedded version right here:

Come Suited for Battle at Duels.com

Speaking of WoW (as in World of Warcraft), I’ve quit playing.  I’m having more fun playing (and working on Duels) and I just haven’t had time for WoW.  I was getting tired of it even before Duels fully consumed me.

Here are my issues:

1. Takes too long to do anything.  2-6 hours to do any dungeon?  And for anything good, it was closer to the high end.
2. To get any good gear takes 10 people and that’s Karazhan.  Got everything from there.  Which leads to:
3. Nothing to do.  I’m in a top guild, but I’m a social member.  So I don’t get to raid much.  I don’t want to join another guild or raid every night, so there is pretty much nothing left to do.  Except:
4. PVP…  I’m a hunter.  No one likes hunters in Arena.  It’s hard to find a good team as a hunter.  And I’m sure not starting over.

Many of the reasons I started Duels are encapsulated in that list.  I love Duels because:

1. I can jump in and out.
2. Play when I want across whatever time increment I want.
3. I can keep it open in the background while I’m working (which in my case is on Duels, but still - there is a lot of work to do.)

Duels is still growing like crazy. In two weeks we’ve already crossed 13,000 registered users. Today we’re bringing up some new database hardware - should kill the last of our performance issues - and making some cool changes:

• New Set - Duels Core Set II. We’ve gone through 250,000 packs in the last two weeks so we’re putting the next set up today. We will also be introducing a new expansion set soon as well.
• New UI improvements:
• An inventory management page which will make it easier for you to buy/sell items and manage the items you have.
• A new challenge management page that should make it easier for you to keep track of manage your duels and skirmishes.
• A myriad of smaller tweaks.

This should be a nice step forward on serveral fronts.

I should probably be posting more. But I’ve been so busy posting on our message boards. So if you want to know more about what’s going on check that out.
In our first week we’re already over 8,500 registered users and we’re averaging over 2 duels a second. It’s crazy.

Oh and we are in the Wall Street Journal: A popular new site allows coffee-break dueling

First on Techcrunch: Ready To Kill Some Time (And Some Enemies)? Try Duels.com

- This resulted in a ton of traffic. It brought the servers to their knees.

Second, the article shows up on Digg: Duels.com - New Free Online WOW-like Game and Social Network Launches

- It became popular on Digg, eventually making the homepage. It currently has 500 diggs. This finished the servers off.

We doubled our server capacity.

- There was still tons of traffic coming in. We had to tune MySQL.

Meanwhile it also made the home page of del.icio.us (on the hotlist) and got picked up on a myriad of other blogs.

Next I’ll post some graphs.

You can read the article:  Ready To Kill Some Time (And Some Enemies)? Try Duels.com

This has resulted in a huge influx of traffic that has caused some server hiccups for us.  I think we’ve managed to tweak things enough that they running smoothly (although more slowly than we would like).  I’m hopeful we can get some additional servers up today, but that is not entirely within our control.