So, I wanted to revive the bot and had no idea how. What better idea than to make a huge Christmas event, that includes new updates and rolls back some old features to bring people back, surely it'd be easy right??
Wrong! This update was probably the hardest time I've had updating the bot as of recently as at first I was counting on only myself and a "fuck it ill fix it later" mentality. Lets just say, that mentality does NOT help you in the dev space. Its been a while since I've actually been super invested into the bot as I've been busy with school and work.
However, I'm not sure at all what sparked it but I randomly got the motivation to make a huge update that'd bring back OG players, and improve the bot so there'd be even more new players!
What can bring OG players back?
I started by thinking what could bring back OG players the most, and what was the most complained about feature? Upgrades. I thought making upgrading more simple was the way to go a while back. In reality, I was just making it more boring to upgrade and personalize your car. I didn't realize that until I thought deep and hard about how the old upgrade system worked vs the new one. I wanted to push customization and personalization for cars, but I was only gatekeeping it heavily with the new upgrade system.
So I sough out to roll it back to the old version. Now, actually coding the old version to work again was the easy part. The hard part was thinking "what do I do about the cars that are on the old system?". I turned to the community and they felt as if they got refunded for their upgrades, they'd be happy. I was certain that I was going to do exactly that, but in the end, it didn't work in my favor. It deleted the upgrades, and it didn't refund the users. I didn't know what to do at that point because I didn't know who spent what on upgrades and didn't wanna open another backup of the database because of how many users use the bot now.
In the end, I decided that I would just give each user 20K per car as compensation in general for the upgrades, AND how buggy the bot has been. Not the best decision of course, but its all I COULD do without surfing through thousands of users data, which I did not have the time for.
Struggling with self doubt
Another highly requested feature was the item shop to return. I was hesitant because of how buggy it was and was doubtful in my ability to make it work properly. Self doubt is a huge part of the development process. I struggle with it in a lot of things, not just development. The only advice I can give is try it first. See where it goes. I had a lot of self doubt due to all the bugs on the bot, but I was mistaken as I actually made the item shop work? I started by thinking how I would improve it vs the old item shop. The #1 problem was it wasn't updating the items properly, and it would have duplicates. I solved this by looping through the array of purchasable items, and choosing a random one. After that item was chosen, I would remove the item from the purchasable items array, so its fast AND reliable.
Conclusion
The update saw a lot of old users return, and a lot of new users join in on the fun! I learned a lot from this experience, especially about knowing my potential. If I can work hard enough, the bot can grow to exponential numbers. The one thing I am working on now is fixing all the bugs, which is tedious and boring but it has to be done to ensure the future of the bot.
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