GangWars upcomming release

GangWars Launch!

GWRP 31/10/2023 Release date is locked in. You’ve all got 2 months to book off as much annual leave as possible for the official release of GangWars for the 20th time!

What makes this one so different from the rest? Almost every part of the game.

We’ve spent over a year working in the background between our real life commitments and work with a good chunk of investment by @Ape in both his own money and a lot of his time, followed by a ton of dev work from the team and brainstorming to get to where we are now. With just over two months till release, I'm here to give you all an overview of all the changes we’re bringing to GangWars, and our ambitions for this release.

We’ll start with a very very brief TLDR:

• Gangs are heavily buffed.
  
• We are shifting the gameplay away from AFK printer farming/sitting in bases and rewarding raids, kills, and general gang action.
  
• Upgrades can be removed from items for in-game $ at a relatively cheap rate, and all gear has been balanced to give a smoother power curve.

What does this mean for the gameplay? Excellent question. Let's dive into the meat of things.


For almost the entirety of GangWars’ existence through all iterations, there’s been a massive disparity of power between the playerbase. We’d all wait before using any of our hard-earned upgrades as no one wants to waste credits on removing level 2 upgrades from your rare 4 slot tank top or ibix frame. This caused a ridiculous situation where you’d have gangs of full level 4+ upgrades at a minimum vs others with at most one epic tier armour piece and zero upgrades. Players knowing this would just sit in their base and hard grind printers so they could finally get decent enough armour to actually commit upgrades to. Which leads to gangs who have finally reached that point either having very low or no competition. Which leads to resentment when those gangs raid others and steamroll because they actually want to play the game. How did we fix this?

A lot of maths.

Rolling max-tier armour + reinforcement stones is the problem. The difference between an average armour set vs a maxed out set could be up to a 50% hp/armour jump in some cases (excluding upgrades!). Pair that with a jump to a next tier of armour + committing upgrades to a good set would mean it would be practically impossible to win a 1v1 no matter how many headshots you flick.

It’s a careful balance, as we still want to reward the grind for a good set of armour. Allowing for upgrades to be freely removed and added at all stages for the game will be a huge change for the health of PVP. Coupling this with reducing the amount of reinforcement stones that can be added to higher-rarity armour smoothes out the power curve while still rewarding the grind of armour.

This WILL be something that gets balanced over the course of release, no doubt about it. I’ve done as much maths as I can to make it theoretically sound, but theory can only take you so far.

We’re balancing numbers to lower TTK, as the general consensus seems to be that it's more enjoyable and skill-rewarding.


We’re starting off the new PvP buffs with an all-new official raid system. Walking up to a door and pressing F8 or typing /raid will start the new raid mini-game.

All defenders (names on the door) and attackers( in the party as the command was sent) will be highlighted to each other, and each party gains a set amount of lives. All defender’s entities are frozen in time and are invulnerable.

The goal of the attackers is to make their way to the base’s capture point and successfully capture it before all lives are lost. Defenders are to stop them. Base defense and attack rules generally haven’t changed.

On successful capture of the base, all entities' values are calculated (including their contents) and are given equally to attackers. If you’re rivals, a % bonus is given on top.

On successful defense of the base, a smaller reward is given to all defenders and you gain a 30 minute grace period where you can’t be raided and can repair base defenses. If you’re rivals, a % bonus is given on top.

The aim of this new system is to prevent the extremely common situation of defenders blowing up their entities once they know a raid is lost, while also encouraging more raids in general.
In a future update, we’re hoping to make raids more inspired by Rust; utilizing planning and crafting and resource-commitment to start a raid. These are still very early thoughts, so keep an eye out and give us your own thoughts.

We’re making gangs extremely cheap to start now, with the goal of having every player in a gang. Upgrades will be changing and tweaked to allow better progression opportunities when inside gangs, and also better rewarding gang vs gang activities.

Gang bases were never worth it previously due to how much you could lose for not a lot of gain, so we’re introducing some buffs. Every hour, your base entities gain a 10% boost in xp and $, up to a 50% cap. This boost is also rewarded to an attacker if they successfully raid your base. For this reason, defenders don’t gain as much from a successful defense as the main bonus is continuing this massive boost in resources.

Gang base raids reward bonus gang points, money, and xp.

A lot of the values above are subject to change in balance phases.


We’re introducing a new currency to GangWars: PVP Tokens.

On killing a rival gang member or someone on a ! mission, you’ll gain 1 PVP token. These tokens are exclusively used with the new PVP Vendor NPC. Current categories for the PVP Vendor are:

• CHESTS
  
• CRAFTING
  
• BARS
  
• RAIDING (Future Update)
  
• BLUEPRINTS
  
• QUEST ITEMS
  
• COSMETICS

We’ll leave the specific contents as a surprise but expect this to change up a lot of things in a good way.

You’d think with the name being GangWars, that’d be the focus on the game-mode. To the disappointment of many new players, that ended up being the rarest thing you do in the game. And a big contributor to this was printers.

The need to sit in your base pressing E for 80% of the gameplay causes the streets to be empty of gangs, and for opportunities for pvp to be sparse. So we’re changing how printers work.

Launderers are being removed, forges don’t give XP anymore, and printers/forges have a new interaction window. Upgrades last until the entity has been destroyed, so you’ll no longer have to constantly worry about returning to base to stop everything from exploding. We’re hoping this allows more people to be out on the streets doing PVP activities.

Due to the new Raiding system and the following changes, you won’t be able to buy/sell printers and forges anymore. We’re hoping the new raid system makes up for this change, but will be keeping a close eye on feedback once closed/open beta commences. Make sure to let your voice be heard if you don’t like it!

“But what about having to come back to obtain what was in my printers/forges?” You ask.

One of our new VIP Features (more on this later) is an auto-collection of your entity contents once they max out. Allowing your printer to max out rewards you with an XP and $ bonus, which we hope further incentivizes people to stay out of their base (and also adds a big risk/reward factor to raids!). This auto-collect feature will be stackable (yet to confirm how to obtain more) to extend your game-play out of your base.

Holding E on a printer/forge to bring up the new menu and you’ll see the brand new upgrade system: (edited)

We’re making it very obvious what upgrades actually do number-wise, so you get a good idea whether you want to upgrade or not yet.

This leads us to our new infuser system & resource: Rubies.

To infuse a printer, you’ll need one ruby. Once infused, your printer will randomly drop between all blueprint types, rather than being able to select a specific type of blueprint. This lets us balance upgrade rates much easier and naturally gives people better chances of obtaining higher-rolled armour/weapons.

Rubies are obtained through a rare mining drop (0.1%) or a ruby smelter which requires X of every bar type.

All jobs are removed except for banker and cop, which are obtainable through relevant NPC’s.

Talking about mining, fragments are no longer a thing. Bars are dropped straight from the ores themselves. Mining tool is a default purchasable blueprint/weapon from quest so everyone can mine at all times.

All other job-specific tasks are doable by everyone at all points. We felt jobs were too reminiscent of DarkRP, and we’ll talk about what we’re replacing with this later on, which I think is way better.

The Terrorist job is getting a bit of mini-rework. We’re shifting it into a gang-based activity. It’ll be a heavy gang-based investment to infuse the rods like usual, but will give much better rewards. Numbers are still being figured out for this.

There’s a new bank deposit box by the bank NPC that stops bankers needing to go through the entire bank to deposit money. (Also a nice little cosmetic change to the cash registers!)

Downtown now has the mines! A couple of tweaks to the map have been made to make this possible, so look out for some new routes around the map.

Uptown has had a couple tweaks to make the map look nicer, ladders to most rooftops and a couple other paths opened up to allow better access to parts of the map.

Casino is being moved from a job to a permanent fixture on the map. You’ll have access to all gambling methods here via NPC’s on both maps.

Parkour is harder now, as people got way too good at it + it was made easier at some stage.


If you wanted to play GangWars competitively, you had to spend money. It just wasn’t viable without it. This has always been a massive sore point for me, and I could always comfortably afford the necessary credit items. We’re removing all pay-to-win credit upgrades and moving towards both QOL upgrades & brand new cosmetic options to fund server hosting & development costs.

We’re still working on what the VIP package contains and will share more information soon, but the value will heavily exceed the cost. It’s not a necessity though, you can still progress to the same level as someone without it at roughly the same speed.

Due to these changes, we still need a source of income to support the server hosting fees & its development. Cosmetics have become a huge thing in the games industry, so we’re leaning heavily into this to bring a whole new level of customization to your gang and character. To do this we’re introducing:

• New Armour Paints
  
• New Armour Skins
  
• Weapon Skins
  
• New Hats
  
• New Wings
  
• Trails
  
• Kill Sounds
  
• Melee weapons

These will all be in a rotating shop, with a crate system also included for the gamblers out there. Limited edition/seasonal cosmetics will also be included!

We’re hoping this is enough to fund the future of GangWars, as pay-to-win always brought in a solid amount of money (as many of you probably guessed), but it just wasn’t healthy for the game at all.

Love them or hate them (I hate them) mechs are being brought up to scratch. A lot of balancing has been done to make them much easier to get into at the early levels, plus buffs to make them a more viable method of progressing through the game. We’ll be developing them more in the future, but for now we think they’re in a good place.

Arc has been postponed in favor of reworking a lot of the core mechanics of GangWars to make the game healthier. We’ve not forgotten about it, it’s just not the right time for it yet. It’ll be here in time.

Countless bugs and exploits have been fixed, we have a new extensive logging system in place(so play fair, some of you have kids now so act your age ), new community rules to help expand the player base and bring new life into our small world we’ve cherished for so many years, and we’re hoping to get the hard work of our devs and owners out there for Halloween 31/10/2023.

Keep an eye out in the discord for more regular updates up to launch, I'll be going more in-depth about changes we haven’t talked about yet and replying to community feedback regularly. Closed beta will be happening very soon, with an open beta hopefully within the month before release.

We won’t cover our long-term goals yet, as we’re very focused on the short-term and all the balancing that’s coming up. But we definitely do have plans for the future.

Happy ganging