Well, that downtime between rounds was a bit longer than expected! To boost security, we recently changed our authentication methods when the game connects to the database. Everything went smoothly, and we've actually been using this method for a few months now.... until we tried to post the stats and reset the game. A lot of frustrated searching later, we were finally able to fix the issue, but it delayed us by about 12-14 hours, which actually snowballed into most of Saturday lost. Luckily, that's all behind us, and we can talk about the changes in this new round.

• The first change is pretty major, and will require some serious rethinking by most alliances. Trickle is now subject to diminishing returns if you have more than 5 officers. You'll now receive 50% trickle at 5 officers, and only 25% at 10+ officers. Combined with the gem CPM buff changes, the idea will be to field multiple large accounts in order to grab the top spot. Teamwork has always been an important part of RoC, and now it'll be even more so.
  
• The second change is subtle, but required a lot of work in the back. We've now changed how events work by moving them out of the code and into the database. As part of this change, we changed the values on some of the events, and more importantly, events can now run simultaneously. Currently, we're not planning to intentionally schedule them to run them at the same time, but especially around the Baby Boom events, they've been known to sneak in on their own. This should also make adding new events, and maybe removing some, a lot easier.
  
• We also removed Industrious temporarily. Part of the scope of work that didn't get completed was that Respec was meant to only allow you to change your account up, not to sell off for full value or create magic gold from the ether. Once we finish fixing Respec, you'll only receive full value for the gold that you reinvest into other weapons. Any gold leftover after would be subject to the normal 10% loss. While this is not currently active, it's expected this will be fully active in the next week or so.
  
• Fourth, gem buffs are subject to diminishing returns as well. We love your support, and want to reward it, but you shouldn't need to be a millionaire to compete. The first 5 CPM buffs will give you +10, the next 5 will only give you +9, etc. The max CPM buff purchase will always give you at least +3 CPM boost, so it'll never completely fade away, it just won't be so overpowered that alliances will feel they need to spend hundreds of dollars to be competitive.
  
• Gold stored in the wallet will now expire after 24 hours. If you don't claim your gold in a timely manner, it will be unceremoniously dumped into your on-hand gold the next time you perform an action. To help prevent this, a warning will appear at the top any time you have gold in your wallet.
  
• Sixth, gold is now subject to a 10% market tax. Again, the market wasn't supposed to completely trivialize the sell-off process, there's no strategy to putting 75 credits up and asking for 850 billion gold. Unfortunately, that means that all market listings just got 10% more expensive.
  
• We rebalanced the spy building upgrades. All tiers are now 25% more expensive, and we added two more tiers (950x and 1000x). The number of bonus points available remains the same.
  
• Respec cards are now twice as rare.
  

Whew, that was a bit of a more serious overhaul than we were expecting. We're still around on our discord every Friday at 4pm EST for open discussion about the game. We've really taken community advice into account with this round, and we're excited to see how everything plays out.