It's been exactly 6 months since my last patch notes post, so I figured it's about time for me to comb through my code commits to the game's repository and piece together a collection of the player-facing changes.
Features:
- [August] Remaining energy in battle log: The remaining energy of the bot that lost energy is now shown in the battle log (from suggestion).
- [October] Expanded showroom settings: There are now 3 showroom filtering options instead of 1: (a) Hide "too strong" (renamed from "Show only equippable"), (b) Hide "too weak", and (c) Always show uniques (from suggestion).
- [November] Tarnished label: Introduced the tarnished label, which is retroactively applied to a clan's win if it's later discovered that a significant portion of that clan's energy was gained through cheating (see details and discussion).
- [December] Emoji reactions: Added emoji reactions to the forum (from suggestion).
- [December] Global buffs: Introduced a global buff system. These are time-based (as opposed to the existing quantity-based) buffs affecting all bots. To kick things off, I've enabled global double exp through New Year's Day (you can disable it like a regular buff if you want to minimize exp gain). After that, there will be a rotating global buff every weekend.
Bugs:
- [December] NaN ratio sorting: Fixed an issue that caused incorrect ordering when sorting clan profiles by ratio when there are NaN bots.
Misc:
- [August] Trophy display order: Trophies awarded at the same time now tie-break sort order in a more intelligent and visually appealing way (from suggestion in IRC, I think).
- [October] Unicode support: Emojis, etc. are now supported in forum/clan posts, bmails, and bot/clan profiles 💃 (from bug).
- [November] Buff bar order: This now matches the shop order. Buffs that can't be bought are placed first (from suggestion).
- [November] Buff colors: Names of buffs are now colored based on "rarity".
- [November] Already-owned buffs: The purchase button is disabled for buffs you already own (from suggestion).
- [November] Workshop save button: Moved the save button on the workshop page (and clan ranks page) to the left (from suggestion).
- [November] Improved simultaneous page request performance: I eliminated a long-standing problem known as session blocking. This was particularly noticeable if you triggered a long-running page request like a documentation page load that triggers a cache refresh; while that request is running, your other windows would get stuck.
- [November] Anti-cheat: Invested substantially into the game's anti-cheat system as a result of the November cheating in order to keep competitive aspects of the game fair.
- [November] Locked/reset bots in HoF: After having removed these bots from the HoF in 2018 (context), they're now back (context).
- [November] Bad word filter: To help keep the game fun, friendly, and welcoming for new players, there is now a "bad word" filter (it's fairly light, see motivation).
- [December] HTTPS: The game now runs on HTTPS instead of HTTP (see discussion).
- [December] Headings in bot/clan profiles: These are now allowed in formatting (from suggestion).
- [December] Forum post links: Individual forum posts can now be linked to. Use the link icon next to the post timestamp to get the link for that post.
Finally, there was a request last month for me to share more about what's coming up. I typically don't do this because I start and stop a lot of ideas depending on how complicated they turn out to be, time, motivation, and so on, so this helps me avoid making commitments that I can't keep to. That said, as an online game player myself, I understand it's fun to get glimpses into what might be coming next. My request is to treat all of this as directional ideas, rather than committed features. I may not end up exploring them further anytime soon for many reasons. In no particular order:
- Counting you!: It occurred to me recently that I have very poor analytics on how the game is doing day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, retention, and so on. The online history page takes a stab at that, but in general is kind of useless given how many players often create and play and share many bots. This is still preliminary, but I did some work on clustering bots to try to get a sense of how many actual "people" are playing the game each day. I ultimately want to be able to set specific metric goals for myself to grow the game. Depending on how this turns out, I'll probably end up sharing this data and using it to get a sense of how the game is trending, growing, reacting to updates, and so on.
- New player experience: I've talked about this one for awhile in various places, but I'd like to make the game more welcoming for new players. This covers a lot of topics, e.g. I've seen "still on HTTP" mentioned as something that was potentially scaring off new players. Other aspects include reducing barriers for entry like the need to create an account before playing (imagine a "play as guest" option). Analyzing dropoff of new players could be interesting to explore too. After improving all this, I plan to look into ways to promote the game, both paid and unpaid, with the ultimate goal of growing the size of the game's playerbase.
- Bot management: Earlier this month, I began soliciting feedback on managing many bots. Many players have more than one bot, with some players having many, many bots. See that thread for all the fun details, but I ultimately want to make your game account here more like an MMO account from which you can manage many bots (rather than each bot having its own separate login). This would unlock a bunch of fun possibilities, but is made complicated by (a) needing to do some sort of migration from the existing system and (b) the many bot sharing use cases that don't exist for something like an MMO account. I'm thinking of this project as "big risk, big reward" - if you have ideas or feedback, please share on the thread I linked.
- Discord server: IRC is super outdated and it's time to move to Discord. I have a basic server setup, but I've been holding off on opening it up to everyone until I (a) port over the Jane functionality to a Discord bot instead of IRC bot (need a carrot!) and (b) decide whether to block this on the bot management stuff mentioned above. I'd like the Discord server to have a deep integration with the game where you can link your bot (hopefully "account") with your Discord account. If the game's account structure is going to change, I should probably get that done first. But if that's going to take awhile, then maybe it's not worth waiting for. This is what I'm figuring out.
- High-level content: A couple aspects about high-level bots have been discussed on the forums recently. I believe the main ones were (a) new exp drop(s) which would retroactively apply to bots above a certain level and (b) new equipment. Both of these require carefully running a bunch of numbers to ensure balance, so it's a bit of a slow process. It's a bit of a niche feature since most players are lower level, but I still think having high-level content is important and fun (I did, after all, build Project X in the bots2 days). This is something I'll keep poking at.
- Clan competition: I've noticed the game is at it's best and most active when the clan competition heats up. I want to help facilitate more ways to make this happen, whether that's lowering the barriers to compete, having more ways to compete, or making competitions more interesting or even rewarding (being careful with balance to avoid a cycle where the top clan can too easily hold its position). I have some rough ideas for this that I need to kick around more, but for now I just wanted to share that this is something I'm thinking about and recognize it as something that's important for the lifeblood of the game.
Finally, if you have ideas for the game, there's never been a better time than today to post about them in the suggestions sub-forum. I read every post there (though I may not reply, see my recent post about what to expect when posting a suggestion). Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
