The long dark nights of January are drawing to close. But we haven’t been in hibernation; we’ve been making changes behind the scenes, the following tweaks which you’ll notice right away:

1. Heroes have developed a sense of camaraderie, and a touch of compassion. The main consequence is that they will spare the life of those they defeat in skirmish duels.
2. Gods no longer lose their godpower when their hero dies and quest progress is also preserved.
3. Influence of the opposite type is less harmful to the hero’s personality.
4. Evil heroes are now less likely to die in battles with monsters.
5. Healing potions in the inventory are now written in italics.
6. In order to make turns clearer in duels, your opponent’s actions will be highlighted.

All these changes are already available in the browser and our iPhone app will support all of them with the next update.

With another awesome game update Godville closes this year by opening its very own newspaper – Godville Today. This brand new, online-only limited edition features various news from all around Godville, as random and unpredictable in their nature as Godville itself. There is no doubt that with time the newspaper will get better, smarter and will be read by virtually everyone in the world, but until then please enjoy it just the way it is. And just as usual, corrections to the “not so breaking” are greatly appreciated.

Moving to the next point in our agenda… The Godville iPhone app has just been updated to version 2.3 that includes, yes, the “Godville Today” newspaper (congratulations to all twitter followers who’ve got a special prize for finding it), a better view of the clouds from your divine window and a small pack of special holiday bug fixes.

And the last, but certainly not least point in our list. Today the holiday spirit has finally come to our towns and villages! Hordes of Santa Clawses are spreading throughout the snow-covered paths with the mind-blowing speed of their ultrasonic sledges. Don’t let your hero miss out the special presents that those creatures have with them. Let the treasure hunting begin! Happy holidays everyone!

Local squirrel reporters say that people are rushing into the newly built temple, eager to take a closer look at this work of art. Some even saw other heroes sneaking inside among the others and furtively giving prayers to the mighty god. Temple monks predict that the large influx of pilgrims will provide a regular source of godpower, strong enough to charge the accumulator from time to time. This steady replenishment of charges will come in handy. Since the temple provides a new earthly residence, the god has a direct conduit to provide true miracles for his greatest admirer and other city dwellers. This new and very special kind of influence allows the temple’s owner to make things happen in ways that have never been seen before. The full list of the temple’s benefits can be found here.

Our congratulations to the first temple’s owner and to all his friends and fans, as we celebrate this wonderful milestone in Godville’s history together. We’re off to celebrate, and then we’ll start preparing for the next great chapter in our history.

An essential element of any RPG is some sacred places, imposing lengthy and often interesting effects on the players. Sure enough, it sounds like a cool feature for our wandering-here-and-there heroes. So let there be shrines all around Godville! They will give special auras to our heroes, making their travels even more interesting – at least for a few hours.

Another feature we’re adding today is an ability to report offensive or inappropriate language written by some naughty gods. To do that, click on the small triangle next to the hero’s name on one’s personal page and select the item which has inappropriate language. The same can be done for the forum posts, using our new post menu that you can find next to the post author’s name.

As some of you may have noticed, we’ve been experiencing some problems with server access, starting early yesterday morning. This post is intended to shed some light on the situation, explain what happened and what was done to address the issue. Yesterday, our servers were not accessible due to the DDOS attack on our DNS provider, which led to errors accessing the site from both web and mobile clients. Once we discovered the problem, we switched to another DNS provider, and during that process some of you may have experienced difficulties with GodWiki access as well as with data update latency on the iPhone. As of now, all of the problems we know about have been resolved and everything should work as usual. However, if you’re still experiencing some difficulties, please let us know in the comments. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Since the early days of Godville, we’ve been accepting various feedback sent by you guys. Unfortunately, it turned out to be hard to process all of the ideas in real-time and, as things stand today, some of the types have been delayed for several months. We’re certainly not happy with that situation, but while we are working hard on it, there have been some improvements to the ideabox process that should make things a little bit better.

Starting today, the ingenious pieces section (available after level 15) will also mark rejected ideas, giving you better information on its state once voting by the community is completed. So, accepted ideas will be highlighted blue, rejected ones – red. If there is no red or blue highlight, your idea is still awaiting its destiny. We’ll be working through our catch up plan, hoping to get back to you with more good news on this soon.

If your idea got rejected, don’t hurry to get upset. If you believe that it matches the game’s spirit and is actually really awesome – bring it up for discussion in the special forum topic. We’ll be monitoring the discussion there, and if something great shows up, it may find its way into the game.

It is time to shed more light on your hero’s friendships. Friends have been joining the heroes occasionally and now that they are close, they may be stopping by more frequently. Specifically, whenever the gods of two befriended heroes watch over their champions, they increase the chances for those heroes to meet somewhere in the wilds of Godville. Friends can lend a hand during a perilous fight, provide companionship on sick-leave in a city, share a drink together, or just sit and chitchat near a campfire. Either way, the presence of a friend is usually helpful, and, starting today, there’s going to be more of it.

Another piece of good news is the creation of the Taming pantheon (we’re not sure about the name of this pantheon, so if you have an idea – go ahead and share it with everyone in the comments. New names and types of pets are also very much welcomed). The most active and high-level animals as well as their owners will take their hard-earned places there. The oracle has foretold great things for pets upon reaching level 30, but oracles are notoriously difficult to understand and it will be a while before anybody figures out what will happen. It is very likely that pets will die several times in the process, but a grieving hero may offer prayers in a city (with a solid amount of gold) to have some chance of reviving their beloved companion.

And finally, iPhone app for Godville 2.2.1 is out. It addresses some stability problems and some issues in the ideabox. Hope you’ll like it.

Today’s game update comes with several nifty features. The new iPhone app (2.2) now has cozy visual turn separation in duels, that has been available for a while in the browser. Meanwhile, browser-powered gods can now take advantage of the highlighting in the diary that’s been available for a while on the iPhone. For further convenience, your influences during the duels will also be highlighted. These small touches to the user interface are going to make playing the game a bit better.

And probably the most exciting news – starting now, everyone can accumulate up to three charges from godpower (instead of one charge like it was before). This should make controlling your hero easier and more reliable. To make it even better, everyone who has been watching over their heroes recently is awarded with three additional charges for the accumulator. Give your champion some fun!

According to some unknown laws of the Godville universe, every hero should have a little company on his dangerous adventures. Traditionally, heroes look for like-minded creatures with a similar IQ level so they feel comfortable around each other. Once they find one, they will gladly start spending their time, nerves and money for a beloved pet, occasionally getting something nice and worthless in return. Despite their utter uselessness, personal brutes are becoming incredibly popular among Godville’s inhabitants. The trend is really taking off since heroes finally learned some basic animal training.

Once the hero reaches adulthood (level 18), he begins to look for a critter to domesticate among semi-defeated monsters. In theory, the older and more experienced the hero gets, the better pet he could tame. In practice, however, it’s very likely that he will stick to the first appropriate one he meets. Still, it can take a while to find that appropriate one among the gazillions of monsters out there. It’s important to note that it is up to the hero to tame the pet, not to the god. The hero finds the one he likes, bridles it, and even gives it a name – all by himself. The god has no control over the pawn’s brute whatsoever, so just relax and leave it to your champion. Like their masters, pets can level-up, get stronger and become even more useful. And just like the heroes, sometimes they die.

Depending on the type and class, pets can have different abilities. Some of them can quickly perform urgent in-the-middle-of-the-battle surgeries, restoring their master’s health. More aggressive ones may prefer to give the enemy a hard time instead. And some very special ones can be strong enough to quickly grab the owner and escort him in some random (and hopefully right) direction. It’s also worth noting that pets are quite reluctant to help for most of the time, which doesn’t really matter that much, because true heroes are going to love them anyway.

Besides the pets, here are some other smaller changes that got into the pipeline:

• PvP duels now have better visual separation of turns, which should make it easier for gods to understand what’s going on.
• The issue with overlong duels has been addressed as well. Somewhere after turn 50, the damage (and heals) inflicted to the heroes in the duel will slowly start to increase.
• For easier troubleshooting of Turbo and Super-Turbo update modes we are launching a special website, where you can test if it works for you or not. More on this in the turbo-mode FAQ.

The results of numerous fights and other sport events in the arena should be preserved for the forthcoming generations. Besides, no matter what people might say, there just has to be a leader board of the best fighters. So, here it is – The Pantheon of Gladiatorship – the place where Godville’s best fighters can measure their success. The new pantheon turned out to be a big one, so other pantheons felt jealous and decided to enlarge themselves as well.

The next change is to the ideabox. We wanted to make sure that people get the idea of the game when they get access to ideabox voting. It’s hard to say how long it should be, but it just felt that unlocking it a couple levels later than now will do more good than harm. From now on, the top menu link to the ideabox will be available starting from level 15.

And last but not least, a few of you might know that we have a twitter account. We’re not quite sure how exactly it will be used – maybe we’ll post some micro-updates or share some internal godville-related stuff. If you have any brilliant ideas of how it can helpful to you – let us know.