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Hey everyone, I'll be taking off to travel for most of December in a couple days, so I wanted to give an update on game stuff before I head out. I'll still have my laptop in case the server catches fire. :)
I've chatted with some of you on IRC (soon^TM to be Discord) about this, but game activity has spiked way up starting in October and then really taking off in November. Depending on how you measure things (online bots, 1-day actives, pageviews, etc.), I'd estimate the game is anywhere from 4-10x more active in the past couple months than earlier this year. This is really cool to see!
To celebrate the increase activity and the holiday season, I've just enabled 2 things:
- 500 Hastened Adventure buff - All bots that have been logged into since the start of November have been granted 500 battles worth of the Hastened Adventure buff, which grants 10,000% battle speed.
- Double showroom chances - The probability of all items appearing has been temporary doubled. So if something had a 25% chance of showing up, it now has a 50% chance each showroom restock. I'll revert this in a month or so.
I also wanted to mention a few things that are on my radar:
- Custom logo upload bug - I've seen some reports that the Imgur workflow for uploading custom logos isn't working in some cases. I'll dig into this when I'm back.
- Email verification bug - I've seen some reports that various email-related functions (verification, view all bots, etc.) are sometimes not working. I'll dig into this when I'm back.
- Bmail backlog - I'm still pretty behind on my inbox. For those of you still waiting for replies, I'm sorry and will try to catch up when I'm back.
Lastly, I wanted to share a brief development update. Earlier this year I asked everyone: What do you want to see done for the game? In typical Ender fashion, progress has been slower than I'm sure anyone has wanted, but I wanted to share that there has been stuff going on behind the scenes. Below is a chart showing the number of "commits" to the game's codebase per month for every month I've worked on the game since I started in August 2010, over 13 years ago. A "commit" isn't a great way of measuring progress (e.g. the original tournament update was a single massive commit), but it does give some indication of general activity. So the part I want to highlight is mid-2023 where I returned to 2010-2015 levels of activity for the first time since then. Not much of this work has been visible to players, but it has modernized some really old stuff and laid the groundwork for what I hope are fun updates in 2024.
Until then, good luck to everyone in the December clan race and happy holidays!
(click chart to expand)
