announcements

Thanks to all who participated in the July 2012 Q&A! There were 45 votes on 5 questions from 17 people. Here are my responses, in order of question popularity:

1. (+10/-1) "Do you plan on adding/revamping the showroom selections(armor/weapons/shiel­ds) with newer items when you do the overhaul of the showroom you have stated you are working on?" - Nosferatu

New equipment is most certainly in store, but it's still a long ways off. I want to take the time to do it right, which will include careful balancing and testing, in order to add items in a way that's fun and interesting, not but disruptive to the current game balance. This is unfortunately low priority at the moment while core features like tournaments are being worked on.

2. (+9/-1) "Do you plan on adding a mobile stylesheet or mobile version of the game, for example, smartphones like Android and iOS?" - Anonymous

This answer has two parts:

The first is that yes, I intend on adding better support for mobile web browsers. There are already some workshop options to optimize gameplay on mobile phones, but these can be improved and made unnecessary/automatic in some cases.

The second part is that no, I don't currently have plans for a bots4 app. Unlike a website optimized for mobile web browsers, this would have to be updated separately to include each new feature/update, plus this would have to be written per-platform (one for iOS, one for Android, one for Windows). I would love to have this, but I don't currently have the time resources to invest into it.

3. (+8/-4) "Do you plan on adding additional game avenues so the game is not centered around fighting? (clan competition, energy, wins, ratio, future tournaments)" - First Question

The main focus of the game is intended to be the monthly energy race, but it's also intended that there are other ways to play. You can train your bot to get to a really high level, collect trophies, or participate on the forums, for example. Beyond that, no, fighting will always be a major focus.

4. (+3/-0) "pew pew............when are you going to give our bots lasers/guns. and maybe some artillery. special attacks?" - Arkuden

I think this is meant mostly in jest, but adding some extra strategy/flavor to the battle system would be a long-term project unlikely to be seen anytime soon.

5. (+6/-3) "The Dark Energy and Mindreave buffs only have 500 charges but cost the same amount of trophy points as the 1000 charge buffs, is there any chance of getting them moved up to 1000 charges (preferable) or halving their trophy point cost?" - Anonymous

This is intentional because they pretty directly help with the energy race, so I wanted the cost to be higher. Decreasing your exp per fight will let you stay in a level range longer and taking more energy per fight speaks for itself.

Do you plan on making this a monthly thing, or a semi-monthly thing, or what?

Aiming to make this a monthly series.

Excellent to get some direct feedback on this kinda stuff from you Ender, thanks!

Sad face that new stuff is still long term project timeframe away.

STROKE OFF!!!

1. (+10/-1) "Do you plan on adding/revamping the showroom selections(armor/weapons/shiel­ds) with newer items when you do the overhaul of the showroom you have stated you are working on?" - Nosferatu

New equipment is most certainly in store, but it's still a long ways off. I want to take the time to do it right, which will include careful balancing and testing, in order to add items in a way that's fun and interesting, not but disruptive to the current game balance. This is unfortunately low priority at the moment while core features like tournaments are being worked on.

This troubles me. Due to the addition of "freaking" being allowed, it allowed for more variations in the builds. But know that the majority of us have figured out the best ways to go about freaking, the builds at certain levels are becoming stagnant once again. I know adding new items most likely wont fix this problem, but I think it's been stated once before of having armors with floating stat modifiers. I'm not sure about this one but it something along these lines where you have 2 or even 3 armors, with similar amounts of defense, but different stat modifiers to fit the needs of different styles of bots could be a way to go.

Bump.

Time for more questions.

It might be fun to do one of these again. I'll spin one up soon.

+1