Thanks to all who participated in the October 2013 Q&A! There were 92 votes on 9 questions from 19 people. Here are my responses, in order of question popularity:
1. (+13/-1) "Okey. What can you tell us about the tournament? Things like cat´s, rewards? And of course... a delivery date would also be nice :)" - Benny
Nothing is 100% final, but here is how things are looking for now:
- Trophy awards for individual bots, including platinums.
- Trophy awards for clans, including platinums.
- Historical results on your bot profile.
- No level-adjustment formula. High-level bots rejoice!
- You won't be logged out while the tournament takes place.
- The categories are already decided/implemented. Details can be found here.
Astute readers will recognize this answer as being mostly the same as what I said last year when asked. As for a delivery date, there's nothing I can commit to because it'll just make me look bad if I miss the target, so I don't want to put that pressure on myself. I don't want to give the impression it's delayed indefinitely either though because I very much intend on finishing it soon Tournaments are my next major project to complete.
2. (+11/-1) "Why are profile settings for Age, Gender, Occupation and Homepage still TODO after almost 3 years?" - Shoegazer
Check again. :)
3. (+11/-1) "When can we expect you to begin work on the Showroom overhaul? And will we see it take as long as tournaments before it gets done?" - Nosferatu
By showroom overhaul, do you mean adding/changing item stats or do you mean updating its ancient interface to something more intuitive? I'll assume you meant the latter because I see a question below that's clearly about the former.
This is in my "nice to have" bucket. The current interface works for most players, with completely new players being the biggest and most important exception. Once I start closing in on bigger parity items like tournaments, I'll start moving onto things like interface improvements, which this would fall under. So don't expect to see this anytime soon, but it will eventually come.
4. (+11/-3) "When can we finally(!) see NC gone?" - Nosferatu
Sooner than tournaments! For those that don't know, I plan to get rid of NC as part of simplifying the codebase for tournaments. This will get rid of a handful of edge cases that I didn't want to have to deal with in new code. It will also (in my opinion) make clan management less cumbersome for clan leaders.
5. (+5/-0) "Will we see new weapons anytime soon?" - DNM
People that have been on the forums for awhile know that my position on game balance issues like this is to stay away. The bots2 balance seemed to work reasonably well, but there are some areas for improvement. I've shied away from patching things up because I want to make sure I do it right, which will mean lots of simulation and testing. The good news is that the implementation of tournaments will yield some reusable components that I can use to test things. The bad news is that I'm still not sure where this stands in terms of long-term priority once tournaments are complete.
6. (+10/-4) "when will we be able to control our own perm star transfers?" - Default User
I'd like to do this very soon actually. Moving stars manually is a drain on everyone. You guys have to wait for me to login and do it. I have to deal with the basically daily chore of manual database updates, which cuts into development time. There are some checks and balances I'll want to implement alongside this though, so I'm unsure of the size of the project. That being said, it may or may not come before tournaments.
7. (+4/-2) "What do you think about the current state of the game? I think activity is decreasing, can you tell why?" - Esvrainzas
Things look pretty healthy from my perspective. None of the metrics reported by Google Analytics indicate a long-term decline, though some months definitely see more or less activity depending on whether there's a close clan race going on. And IRC activity has definitely picked up by at least an order of magnitude ever since ^Jane^ started stocking showroom items. That addition has had the wonderful effect on the level of activity in there.
8. (+1/-0) "The ability of having multiple email's on an account. which reduce the stealing of shared bots. originally thought of by Default User" - Barricaade
I think this would be confusing. Who has to approve the addition of more email addresses? The answer seems to be that every currently-verified email has to approve it, which sounds messy and difficult to implement, and probably confusing for players. I don't think the work involved for something like this is warranted to better support bot-sharing.
9. (+4/-10) "Any possibilities for graphics? Images of Bots, Weapons etc just to enhance visuals in game ;) and can i make them!" - Dazzekiel
This question took a bit of a beating, but I would like (long, long term) to eventually have item images in the showroom like bots2 did. It might also be neat to have player avatars next to forum posts and such that change based on level and what equipment you're wearing. Planning doesn't get much more long-term than this though, so don't hold your breath. :)
