It's finally here!

First of all a big THANK YOU to everyone who has helped us test Raves.

It has taken a lot longer than expected but that is often the case with development isn't it! But this Friday we will switch Raves over to paying rewards in SWAP.HIVE and also subtract the stats of any FA cards you send to raves from missions as was always intended (but was switched off during testing).

Tip: The "rave" in the stats popup will be clickable and take you to the current rave.

Raves Reward Pool

As we have mentioned before one thing we learned in the first couple of years of running Rising Star is that any rewards we pay out must be sustainable. What we don't want to do is provide a big payout for Raves only to have to reduce it in the future so there will be a modest reward at the beginning and this will grow over time.

The initial reward pool will be 10 SWAP.HIVE per day PLUS 1 SWAP.HIVE for each of the (up to) three VIPs in the winning rave.

Strategy

There have been some comments during testing that everyone will just send their FA cards to the winning rave but that is not always the best strategy. As you can see from the results of the rave below "atomcollector" got a larger reward for being in one of the losing raves than "skunk-smoka" did for being in the winning rave with a similar number of remaining fans. This was because even though a much smaller percentage of the reward pool is paid out to the losing raves if there are a lot of different players in the winning rave the rewards are diluted more.

Also we hope that a few of the big guns who hold many "RV1 Police Raid" & "RV2 Hoax Call" cards will get competitive and deploy these cards strategically. It will be fun to see how this plays out but as always we will learn from watching to see if any changes need to be made.

Bonus

Obviously the point of testing is to find and fix bugs and identify anything that may or may not be required when going live. As we have now started designing the new "PRO" map, which adds a lot of value to many existing cards in the game via blending, we realised that having the bonus for holding certain cards in raves is not really needed as it was a bit of a "kludge" just to add value to certain cards. In reality we would only have been able to use a small number of cards for this anyway so it would be a bit pointless.

Let's Get Raving!

I hope you are all as excited as us for Friday and we look forward to seeing you at a rave soon!

P.S. There will be a section in the FAQ about Raves in the near future.

Cheers from Jux and the Rising Star team.