legacy announcements

Jul 5

• The sidebar links with numbers in brackets now have mouseover text to explain what the values mean.

Jul 3

• I'd like to try something new. In what I intend to be a sort of monthly Q&A series, I've opened a Q&A series on Google Moderator. You can ask questions anonymously, and upvote/downvote other questions. After a few days or something, I'll answer the top questions (or maybe all of them if there aren't a lot). I'm already pretty active on the game forums, but I figured this would be a neat alternative to that, plus it will allow people to see what others think are the most important topics in the game as well as my responses to them. Ask away!

Jul 1

• Congrats to Jules for leading <Eternal> to victory in the June clan competition and securing her sixth George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Jun 23

• The showroom has been patched to work in IE7 (and IE8 compatibility mode) because newbies not being able to get the showroom to work comes up a lot in the forums and the answer is almost always for them to upgrade or change their browser.

Jun 1

• Congrats to Jules for leading <Eternal> to victory in the May clan competition and securing her fifth George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

May 26

• Showroom orders now show how long until they expire. Expiration time has also increased from 7 days to 30 days. Enjoy!

May 24

• Please accept my humble apologies for the rare outage(ish) tonight from about 12am-2am. The server ran out of disk space and caused all sorts of things to go wonky. The immediate problem of having no disk space is now fixed, but there may be strange unintended side effects of this where things have gotten into an inconsistent state because something couldn't be written, so please be on the lookout for anything unusual and report it in the bug forum if you see something. I need to either purchase more disk space or start throwing out logs...

May 14

• And it turns out there was a bug with the new code for accessing bmails that only showed up when neither player had any stars on their account. This has been fixed. Thanks to ReneDescartes for reporting!

May 13

• I changed the way bmails are stored and accessed, but there should be no user-visible changes. Please inform me if you see anything unusual when accessing your inboxes.

May 1

• Congrats to Jules for leading <Eternal> to victory in the April clan competition and securing her fourth George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Apr 28

• New logo! Congrats to Jules for winning the contest.
• If you're in buff lockout, you'll now see how long until you can purchase one again.

Apr 26

• The sum of each clan's trophy points is now displayed on clan profile pages.

Apr 2

• New logo design contest - 5 stars up for grabs! Check out this forum thread for more details.

Apr 1

• Some additional EPH tweaks:
  • Level contribution is now significantly lower for high-level bots. Until level 100, each additional level gives a larger EPH boost than the last, at which point a soft cap kicks in and the gains begin to decay.
  • Energy offset (max effective = 6) contribution is now logarithmic instead of linear.
  • Ratio (max effective = 3) contribution is now logarithmic instead of linear.
  • Wins contribution is still logarithmic (no change).
  • Minimum EPH is now 5 instead of 0, so you will always be able to regen energy.
• Congrats to Jules for leading <Eternal> to victory in the March clan competition and securing her third George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Mar 21

• Fixed a bug that was causing energy offset (and therefore EPH) to erroneously rise out of control. Thanks to neps for reporting.

Mar 18

• tl;dr: Losing all your energy sucks. xE gone, EPH staying (with tweaks), PvE stuff coming.
  • The #1 recurring theme in player feedback on the new energy system is that it's too easy to lose your energy now (and that that really sucks). As a former bots2 grinder myself, I completely sympathize with wanting to have something to show for your time investment. With it possible for your progress to be zapped away in a short period of time now, it makes the grinding seem rather pointless. To account for this, the focus of bots4 is going to shift away from PvP/real wars and more towards a better-developed PvE system where you compete with other clans more by progress and traditional grinding rather than direct assault.
  • xE is now completely gone, so it should hopefully be much easier to retain energy now.
  • EPH is sticking around, but with some tweaks, in an attempt to reduce the effectiveness of dumping.
  • Level is now more of a factor in EPH.
  • Ratio is now less of a factor in EPH.
  • Wins now factors into EPH.
  • Thanks for your patience with these system tweaks and for helping me figure out what works and what doesn't. Sorry for the mid-month changes, but I think most of us agree these were necessary. Let's just look at March 2012 as a test month. This also leads me to...
  • Expect to see a new way of acquiring energy that does not involve PvP very soon. PvE in bots4 is about to get significantly more interesting!

Mar 13

• Have thoughts on the new energy system or the direction of the game? Come post your thoughts in this forum thread. Thanks for your input!

Mar 5

• Fixed a bug that was causing fight history to not be displayed for some bots.

Mar 1

• The long-awaited energy system update has at last arrived!
  • Energy per hour (EPH) regen is no longer fixed at 20. Level, ratio, and energy offset are now taken into account. Some very weak bots might not even regen energy at all now.
  • EPH is displayed in bot profiles, clan profiles, and the Hall of Fame.
  • Energy exchanges now have multipliers (xE) which depend on you and your opponent's level difference, ratios, and energy offsets.
  • xE values are visible on the fight list.
  • A new buff series is available that increases energy exchanged per battle.
  • A new buff series is available that decreases experience earned per battle.
  • Minimum effective int changed from 5 to 1.

Mar 1

• Congrats to Jules for leading <Eternal> to victory in the February clan competition and securing her second George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Feb 26

• Fixed a bug that allowed you to be in a clan before level 20. Thanks to Draoi/easy for reporting/verifying.

Feb 1

• Congrats to Jules for leading <Eternal> to victory in the January clan competition and securing her first George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Jan 30

• The fight history page has a new look that makes it more informative and useful. Data is now shown in a table which is sortable and filterable. And at long last, energy gains are now displayed.

Jan 9

• You can now set your bot's battle cry, victory message, and defeat message on the workshop settings page. These yells are shown to opponents when they challenge you, so go set them now and earn the Yeller trophy!

Jan 1

• Congrats to Sera for leading <Eternal> to victory in the December clan competition and securing his sixth George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

2011 updates

Dec 1

• Congrats to Sera for leading <Eternal> to victory in the November clan competition and securing his fifth George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Nov 1

• Congrats to Sera for leading <Eternal> to victory in the October clan competition and securing his fourth George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Oct 31

• Fixed a bug that was causing the clan rankings page to sometimes not render correctly.

Oct 24

• A new table has been added to the clan rankings page showcasing the day's top energy heists.

Oct 3

• NC bots can now contribute to clan treasuries.

Oct 2

• A series of changes aimed at making the monthly energy race more lucrative for individual performers:
  • Instead of 100 trophies being awarded to energy scorers at the end of the month, there are now 1,000 trophies: 10 platinums, 90 golds, 150 silvers, and 750 bronzes.
  • The new trophies have been retroactively awarded, so if you got new award notifications, that's why.
  • The history page now includes individual results in addition to clan results.
  • Like clan profiles, player profiles now show your energy ranking in past months.
  • The default sort in the HoF is now monthly energy.

Oct 1

• The energy offset stat has been replaced with energy ratio, which is defined as total energy gained divided energy regen'd.
• Congrats to Sera for leading <Eternal> to victory in the September clan competition and securing his third George Washington platinum trophy! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Sep 30

• Clan rankings from past months are now shown in clan profiles.

Sep 28

• Ding 10,000! bots4 reached 10,000 accounts yesterday afternoon. This game wouldn't exist without the great community that supports it, so thanks for playing and being awesome. In celebration of this momentous occasion, the 1,854 bots that have been active in the past week have been awarded a unique buff. :)

Sep 26

• Introducing the non-competitor (NC) rank for clans, meant to cater to social members:
  • Clans can now have an unlimited number of bots. NC bots do not count towards member cap of 20.
  • NC bots do not regen energy and cannot gain energy.
  • Demoting a bot to the NC rank sets its monthly energy to 0.
  • Every addtional 5 NC bots doubles the clan's daily tax.
  • Each addtional NC bot decreases the maximum days of tax that can be saved in your treasury by 1 day per NC bot, to a minimum of 7 days.
  • NC bots cannot contribute to the treasury.
  • NC bots do not receive monthly clan trophies.

Sep 25

• A kudos bar has been added below the experience bar in the game HUD, showing your kudos as a fraction of the 5 million cap. Mouseover for the exact amount.

Sep 24

• Players of the world! You can now specify a country in your profile which will cause a flag to show up next to your forum posts and bmails (and likely other places later on). Check out the useless stats section in the documentation for country popularity rankings too. You get a free bronze trophy for setting your country, so go forth and represent your nation.
• Following right behind clan profiles, player profiles can now be updated too.
• Clan profiles can now be updated.

Sep 14

• Password reset is now available for accounts with verified email addresses.

Sep 12

• Buff purchases are now limited to one per day. This is meant to (1) even the playing field between those with lots of trophy points and those without, (2) turn buffs more into what I wanted them to be - temporary enhancements, not (effectively for some) always-on enhancements, and (3) force you to make more choices (more buff variety is in store for the future).

Sep 11

• The bug with ratio-based trophies not being awarded to bots with NaN ratios has been corrected.

Sep 8

• Introducing forum search, courtesy Google. Searching from the forum index will search the entire forum, while searching from a subforum will search only that subforum. Page titles were reorganized just two days ago, so it will take some time for it to all be reindexed with thread names showing in all search results.

Sep 6

• The page title structure has been revamped to be more useful. The "bots4" part has been moved to the end so that the important part is visible when you have lots of tabs open. Forum threads also use the thread name as the title now which will improve searchability when I outsource forum search to Google.

Sep 5

• The clan rankings page now shows how many platinum trophies each clan's members have earned. A list of these trophies is also available at the bottom of the clan profile page now.

Sep 4

• You now have the option to reset your bot back to level 1. Head on over to the workshop to read about the requirements and details.
• You can now register your email address on the settings page. This optional feature will allow you to perform certain special actions like requesting a password reset, permanent star transfers, and bot resets. These aforementioned features will be implemented soon. Also, you get a free bronze trophy for registering and verifying your email, so go do it now!

Sep 3

• The 1,711 monthly trophies handed out at the end of August were bugged and did not include point bonuses. This has now been corrected in the end-of-month script and the points have been retroactively awarded to the affected bots. I also gave the 1,097 affected bots a free 100 points for the mixup. Thanks to Saiyan Z for reporting the bug.

Sep 1

• Congrats to Sera for leading <Eternal> to victory in the August clan competition and securing his second George Washington platinum achievement! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Aug 29

• You can now change your password on the settings page.

Aug 22

• Super-massive achievement trophy system update!
  • First off, achievements are now known as trophies, since we've been using...well, trophies. :)
  • Trophy points can now be used to purchase temporary "buffs", which can increase things like battle speed, experience received, kudos received, base stats, damage dealt, and more!
  • Active buffs are listed in a new box at the bottom of the game HUD (hover for details).
  • Buffs have durations in terms of number of battles and can be paused/resumed/canceled at any time.
  • Buffs only take effect in battles you initiate so that you do not lose duration from being attacked (and cannot get "infinite duration" buffs by never initiating attacks).
  • New level 1 bots now receive a free buff called Aura of Eternity (duration 100 battles), which increases battle speed, experience received, and kudos received. This is primarily intended to make the game do a better job at hooking new players by letting them play at a faster pace.
  • In celebration of the new buff system, all existing bots have received the Aura of Eternity buff.
  • With the exception of the All Star trophy, repeatable platinum trophies now count multiple times towards your total platinum count.
  • Collecting platinum trophies earns you discounts when purchasing buffs.
  • The default sorting of the trophy leaderboard is now total platinum count instead of trophy points.
  • Non-platinum trophies are now hidden in profile pages by default.
  • Places where complete trophy counts were previously shown (online page, HoF, forums, etc.) now have a more concise view, showing only the bot's total platinum count.
  • The homepage Hall of Champions now also showcases the bot with the most platinum trophies and the bot with most total trophy points.
  • Botnames have returned to places they'd been removed from (online page, HoF, etc.).

Aug 1

• Congrats to Sera for leading <Eternal> to victory in the July clan competition and securing his first George Washington platinum achievement! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun. (and apologies for the late reset)

Jul 6

• I will be traveling internationally for the next few weeks with limited-to-no Internet access, so no updates for a bit. I'll try to check in from time to time when possible, so send me bmail if you need something.

Jul 5

• An achievement card showcasing your awards now appears next to your name in various places throughout the game including the online list, hall of fame, fight indexes, clan profiles, forums, and post office.

Jul 4

• Massive achievements update! 153 new achievements are now available to unlock, including NaN-related, ratio-related, and training bot awards. There are also many repeatable monthly awards to collect like top level and top clan. These new achievements were awarded retroactively where possible, so apologies for the notification spam this caused for some of you.

Jul 3

• Fixed a bug that affected certain browsers like Chrome and Firefox where battles progressed too slowly in background tabs.

Jul 2

• Unlocking an achievement now shows a notification bar at the top of the screen with its name, rather than just incrementing the sidebar count. Click to dismiss.
• There's now an achievement leaderboard so you can compare your progress to everyone else.

Jul 1

• Achievements can now be viewed in player profiles.
• You can now click on individual achievements to go to a page with more details such as number in existance, players who have recently collected it, and who has collected it the most (for repeatable ones).
• bots4 has officially moved out of beta! All bots have been reset to level 1. In celebration of the release, an achievements system has been added. It's still in its early stages, so expect to see more to it as we go forward.

Jun 28

• Attack limits now reset all at once at midnight every day instead of 48 hours after each individual attack. The fight history page has also been changed so that it reflects both the level of your attacker and your level at the time of attack (as opposed to your current levels). It is also grouped by day now and the old ordering bug should be gone.

Jun 27

• The Time of Madness is upon us! In celebration of the final days of open beta, a number of multipliers have been introduced: battle speed x4, shop chances x10, weapon damage x2, kudos gain x10, item damage probability x0.5, and...experience x1000. Thanks to everyone for making the beta a great success.

Jun 25

• There are now some minimum requirements that must be met when equipping items. This is designed to prevent bots from being made too easy to beat (usually for the purposes of quick exp for another bot or energy transfer). These requirements do not apply to bots under level 50 nor to unique items.
• An insurance salesman will now greet you upon logout and offer various policies to protect your kudos.

Jun 22

• bots4 will at long last transition out of open beta to official release at the stroke of midnight on Friday, July 1 (EST, server time). Bots will be reset, not deleted, so you will be able to login into your same accounts, but you will be at level 1 with no equipment/clan/etc.
• Private clan forums are now open for business.

Jun 20

• Like forum thread lists, post office inboxes are now paginated at 25 per page. This too came along with a SQL rewrite, so larger inboxes should see some load time improvement.

Jun 18

• Fixed a bug with the sidebar notification counts where they would sometimes be out of sync, such as the workshop/showroom counts on the first page after logging in. Also, the "clans" counter will now show the number of applications to your clan if you are in one (previously it only showed how many clan invites your bot had if it was clanless).

Jun 13

• Equipment damage is now a bit more realistic. Previously, there would be a damage check for each piece of your equipment for every attempt you made in battle. Now, a hit causes a roll for the attacker's weapon and defender's armor (not including shield if they have one), a block causes a roll for the attacker's weapon and defender's shield (if they have one), and a miss causes no roll. This should result in an overall decreased amount of equipment damage.

Jun 12

• Nerf! It had to come sooner or later. Worn equipment now takes damage in battle and will need to be replaced when it completely wears out. Items you equipped and no longer have the stats for will still be usable, but will suffer a small additional damage penalty.

Jun 11

• Forum thread lists are now paginated at 25 per page. This combined with rewriting the SQL behind them should speed up load times quite a bit for larger subforums.

Jun 10

• A subset of HTML and Markdown formatting can now be used in the forum and in bmails. URLs are also auto-linkified now. Legacy posts are not affected by these changes.

Jun 6

• Old clan rankings can now be viewed in the hall of fame.
• Congrats to Sera for leading <Eternal> to the fourth clan victory of bots4! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun. (and apologies for the delayed news announcement)

May 11

• Player profiles can now have images too.
• Clans can now have images.

May 8

• You can now manage stars you've purchased yourself and transfer them to other bots. This operation has a 5 day timelock per star and is available in the workshop.
• Added some screenshots to the homepage along with Masterath's intro video.

May 1

• Congrats to Rivan for leading <Ascendance> to the third clan victory of bots4! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Apr 3

• Showroom improvements:
  • Time between restocks has been decreased from 90 seconds to 60 seconds.
  • The message that tells you how long until the next delivery now counts down dynamically and turns into a refresh button when it reaches 0.
  • The 1-2 second delay for a restock to appear after its scheduled time should be gone now.

Apr 2

• Two new workshop settings aimed at improving mobile browser support:
  • Floating sidebar can be disabled.
  • Showroom scrollbars can be disabled.
• The workshop link now shows how many unspent stat points you have.

Apr 1

• Masterath created an awesome video about the game. Watch it on YouTube and then share it!
• New game HUD! In addition to formatting the old information in what I hope is a more visually-appealing layout, it includes a smaller version of the exp bar from the workshop.
• Congrats to Shadowfax for leading <Aflac Insurance Inc> to the second clan victory of bots4! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Mar 27

• The post office should load much faster now.

Mar 23

• A progress bar and countdown now appear next to battles to indicate the remaining duration. This feature can be disabled in the workshop.

Mar 21

• Just a friendly reminder that cheating (auto-clicking in particular) in open beta is allowed only under the condition of full disclosure. I'm looking at you, bots that are online 23+ hours a day.

Mar 20

• Showroom orders can now be canceled.

Mar 18

• I'm traveling again for the weekend, so no updates. Take care.
• The workshop now has a level progress bar that fills up as you gain experience.

Mar 17

• The page title now flashes "(done)" every second at the end of battles, which should help people using multiple tabs/windows. This feature can be disabled in the workshop.
• If you try to train/fight while your bot is still battling, a countdown will now appear. When it finishes, there will be links to continue training/fighting.
• Clicking "back to fight list" after a battle will now bring you back to level range you were looking at.
• The showroom can now be reverse-ordered.

Mar 16

• A smorgasbord of small changes, mostly designed to make things not suck for new players:
  • Going from level 1 to level 2 now requires 50 exp (down from 70).
  • Five new low-level weapons (weaker than daggers) available in the showroom: syzygy shiv, precious knife, broken bottle, rusty spoon, and crab whistler.
  • No fighting until level 5.
  • No "fake" links until level 10.
  • Help with "fake" links until level 20.
  • No captcha until level 20.
  • Added welcome message with tips on homepage (stays until level 20).
  • New formula for redistribution point prices (less expensive now).
  • Kudos gain from training increased by 50% (affects everyone).

Mar 15

• Stars are now available for purchase. These give you extra stash spaces and allow you to place orders in the showroom.

Mar 11

• I am traveling for the next few days and will have limited-to-no Internet access, so no updates for a bit. Have a good weekend.

Mar 10

• Invites can now be sent to clanless bots for a small fee.

Mar 9

• In response to people wanting to play together at Internet cafes, work, at home with family members, and so on, 5 simultaneous logins per IP are now allowed (increased from 2).

Mar 8

• Jane, the game's IRC bot, only reports levelups every 10 levels now for bots under level 50.

Mar 7

• Open beta has started!

Mar 6

• Real/fake links now vary in color.

Mar 5

• Open beta registration will begin on Monday at 6pm EST!
• I setup a Facebook page (different than a group) for the game. I'll put game updates on there as well as here. Please "like" it to keep updated and help promote the game.
• Added a confirmation dialog for promoting someone to the top clan rank because this gives away ownership.
• Open beta will be starting on Sunday or Monday night. Your closed beta bot will not be reset!
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to "donate" negative kudos to your clan. Thanks to Alan for reporting.

Mar 4

• The online list now shows which players are in chat. It works by matching your username to the nicks currently in the IRC channel. If you try to connect with the web client and your nick is taken, underscores are appended to your name. This is accounted for.
• You can now leave/disband clans.

Mar 2

• The "location unknown" error should be gone. Please let me know if you still see them.
• You are now limited to 2 bots online at once, though this won't really come into play until open beta.
• Logging into your bot from a second location will now cause the first location to be logged out.
• There's a player search in the hall of fame now.

Mar 1

• The game (showroom in particular) should now be compatible with IE8+. Please report if not.
• Monthly energy gains relative to regen are now shown. For example, if you have 400 energy, 300 of which came from regen, you'd be +100. Similarly, if you have 50 energy and had received 500 from regen, you'd be -450. The same logic applies to clans' net monthly energy. This should make it easier to tell at a quick glance which bots/clans are performing well.
• Congrats to Alan for leading <-ID-> to the first clan victory of bots4! Monthly energy has been reset and a new round has begun.

Feb 27

• An IRC bot named Jane now reports levelups in the chat channel. It reports data directly from the game database, so there's a lot of possibility for expansion. Feel free to submit other ideas in the forum.
• You now gain/lose total energy alongside your month energy. Gains are locked in at the end of the month and cannot be lost except by leaving your clan.
• Fixed a bug where clan journal events were being deleted too early. Thanks to Jans for finding.
• Fixed a bug preventing multiple bots from applying to the same clan. Thanks to FNIX for finding.

Feb 26

• Changed energy regen from 100 every 6 hours to 20 every 1 hour.

Feb 25

• The first wave of clan features is now live. Read the details in this forum thread.

Feb 10

• The post office is now open for business. Notifications work a bit differently now. Instead of a message appearing at the top/bottom of various pages indicating you have new mail, instead the number on the sidebar will change color when you have mail.

2010 updates

Dec 23

• Happy holidays! Updates may be a little slower over the next week or two as I will be visiting family.

Dec 22

• For better or for worse, you can now see how much time you've spent on your bot (time since I began tracking this of course). Check out the documention to see how much time we've wasted as a community too.

Dec 21

• I found myself scrolling to the top of pages to get back to the sidebar links a lot, so I made it float along with you as you scroll down pages (provided your browser window is tall enough to show it all at once).

Dec 19

• New logo! Thanks to Deadmaster for all his hard work on it. :)

Dec 18

• PvP fighting is live! Challenge other players and see how your build stacks up against theirs. The system for reporting aggregate battle results has been revamped quite a bit too, so be sure to login and check it out.

Dec 15

• Forums are now online, though they are pretty bare-bones at the moment. Off the top of my head: no HTML, no editing/deleting, no search, and no moderation tools. These will of course be added later.

Nov 7

• The 5/2 redis points to buy/spend every 10 levels weren't being awarded correctly. This is fixed now. I also gave everyone an additional 25 free points because I'm just such a nice guy.

Nov 6

• You can now buy/spend redis points. I gave everyone 10 free points to play around with and test things.

Oct 3

• Removed CAPTCHA from showroom and increased its time between appearances to 15-25 minutes.
• Added CAPTCHAs. Unlike in bots2, you won't see it upon login. You will see it every 10-20 minutes while training and while in the showroom (and fighting when it's added).

Oct 1

• Retweaked the formula for kudos gain from training. There was some ambiguity about whether total damage referred to the sum of the damage inflicted by both bots or just your damage, but not inflicting any damage in bots2 led to a 1 kudos gain, so it is the latter. The formula has been updated to reflect this.
• Fixed the formula for kudos gain from training. It's now the same as was used in bots2. Thanks to floR for providing the formula.

Sep 30

• Fixed a bug in the experience gain from training formula that was causing double experience to be awarded.
• You can now change your bot color.

Sep 29

• Closed beta has started.