History of Freethedice.com
The Creation
In September 2006, two friends were discussing Internet Gaming and how online communities can be so depressing. All kinds of behaviour made both people no longer enjoy online gaming, so the man now known as Kal was challenged by his good friend to build an online game for the two of them to play together. During a weekend in Amsterdam, he designed an online version of Yahtzee that they could enjoy together. When he returned, he built the website and also allowed a registration screen to allow others to join if they felt like it.
During the next six months, hundreds of people registered and a community started to grow. It was decided at this point to lay down some rough guidelines that the site would always strive to stick to:
- To prevent bullying
- To ensure that playing yahtzee online for free would always be possible
- To encourage new players to join-up and to fit-in easily to the community
- To discourage the forming of private groups, so that everybody is always equally welcome
- To maintain an independent moderation of the site and community
- To encourage people to accept their own losses without throwing tantrums aimed at the other players
- To keep games running smoothly, allowing players to continue their games without waiting forever for the other player
- To encourage people to remember that GAMING SHOULD BE FUN!!!
The Death of Free-Online-Yahtzee-Game.com
Eventually, the server became over-loaded and the server hosts shut down the site because it was using up too many resources on their server. They had actually sold the hosting package under the premise of being an independent stand-alone server with no restriction on usage, but this was obviously not true. Kal immediately rewrote huge sections of the site to use less resources and sought out a new server host. This took some time and created some new teething problems but thankfully, this allowed the community to grow and to continue, rather than die out overnight (as it would have done without any changes).
The Birth of FreeTheDice.com 2009
This new website was entitled freethedice.com and made a super difference. Tournaments were being run once every now and again with up to 200 participants and were largely a huge success. Players began to create their own alternative rules and Kal retired as admin, instead employing a team of volunteers, mostly from The Philippines, to aid him with moderation of the site. The main rule for the moderators is that they do not participate in any way in the community.
Free The Dice.com, The Second Coming 2010
Once again, the community has out-grown the server and after more than three-and-a-half years of running on more or less the same system, it is now time for a complete re-build. Kal has dedicated all of his FreeTheDice.com time to developing this new system and it is a vast, vast improvement on the previous system. It is much more user friendly, allows for much easier expansion, introduces new game types and uses far less server resources, once again allowing for the community to grow.
2011 Tournaments
2011 saw several new features added, most notably daily tournaments. This has revolutionised the site and has created a vibrant and competitive daily atmosphere!
2014-2020
During this time Kal had to take on other projects and had less time for freethedice.com. The site was a bit stagnant in terms of development but quite a few new features were added during the years: dice buckets being one of them! A handful of other people joined the admin duties and did a very good job, especially Lara who ran the site for a couple of years. During this time a mobile version of the site was made and several other styles that players could choose from were added and a new graphics designer took over responsibility for designing dice for the dice shop.
2020-2022
Covid struck! Ironically, that led to a bump in the community and also several new features were developed during this time, including buzzer alerts, improved connectivity between the client and server, quick-type dictionary, etc, etc.
2022!
Kal is back to full time development, well...nearly. Loads of new developments have come out during the end of 2021 and 2022. Subscribers receive free gifts on their birthday and are automatically entered into a new tournament: Head-to-head. Monthly awards! And Farkle was added!
2023...
For now Kal is working on marketing but a lot more features are due in coming months. watch this space...
Keep On Rollin'
Kal