announcements

Hi everyone, as we head into the home stretch of the May clan race, I wanted to start a dedicated thread to gather your feedback on the experimental changes we trialed this month (the daily scaling energy exchange and reducing ranking member cap from 20 to 10).

Now that you've had a chance to experience most of the month with these mechanics, I'd love to hear your thoughts:

• How has the daily energy scaling felt? Has it kept the race more competitive or engaging deeper into the month? How did it affect your strategy, activity levels, or perception of early vs. late-month effort?
• What are your impressions of the ranking member cap reduction from 20 to 10? Has it noticeably impacted competition, or the ability for more clans to contest top spots? Could going even lower, at least for a time, be fun?
• Overall, what worked well, and what didn't, with this May experiment?

I've noticed this month's race is still quite lopsided at the top (with first place having more than double the energy of second place currently). This might suggest that one month isn't enough to fully gauge the impact, that different player strategies are still adapting, or that further tweaks might be needed to achieve the goal of broader, sustained competition. All constructive feedback on this is very welcome.

Looking ahead: Ideas for June and beyond

Beyond just feedback on the May changes, I'm also keen to hear your broader ideas for June and future clan race iterations. There's already some great discussion happening in other threads, like the one suggesting All Bots Gain Monthly Energy, which I'm following with interest (and have just replied to with my initial thoughts).

• What other changes could make the clan race more engaging for more people?
• Are there tweaks to the current May experiment you'd suggest?
• Do you have ideas for new energy sources, ways to spend energy, or different clan incentive structures?

Please share your suggestions here! A quick note on timing: Implementing entirely new, complex systems for the June race is likely unrealistic unless they are very simple adjustments. More significant changes will take more design and development time, but gathering your ideas now is crucial for effective future planning.

A note on "Total energy kept when leaving clans"

Separately, regarding the planned "total energy preserved when leaving clans" change: The energy inflation we've seen from May's scaling experiment has made it clear that the meaning and comparability of a single "total energy" stat across different months or eras of the game is becoming less straightforward.

To ensure we have the flexibility to continue experimenting with race mechanics that might affect monthly energy generation, I'm currently re-evaluating the best way to represent a bot's long-term clan-related achievements. The goal is still to allow players to retain a sense of their bot's history without being penalized for changing clans, but I want to do it in a way that doesn't "lock us down" by making a single, ever-inflating stat (i.e. total energy) the only measure of this, especially when its perceived value can change drastically based on changing month-to-month mechanics. We might need to explore alternative ways to track or display historical progress. This feature is still a high priority, but I want to ensure it’s implemented thoughtfully in a way that supports the game's continued evolution. More on this when I have a clearer path.

Thanks for participating in these experiments and for helping to shape the future of the clan race. I look forward to your constructive thoughts and suggestions!

My thoughts haven't really changed from what they were initially, but I'll flesh them out more. The first half-ish of this will be more objective focused, and the latter more opinion based.

Increasing the rate of energy doesn't really change anything, only inflates numbers and the amount of energy/bots one needs to possess to fully utilize. This is contradictive with trying to make scoring more easily accessible. All this progressively increasing rate achieves will be to allow whichever dominant clan to only need to score the last week of the month until a real contender comes along.

If an increased rate is kept, and we also do something along the lines of all bots generating energy, then we're basically back to where we were but with larger numbers. There is what I will call "protected" energy, aka level 100 answerer dumpers and such, and "free/loose energy" which is random garbo bots people leave clanned like win dumpers. Energy is finite, especially the loose variety if you factor in that things like the ziz bots can be declanned if there's actual competition taking from them. An increased energy transfer rate only depletes this even faster, meaning one cannot score in a meaningful capacity without their own resources, and more resources are required than before to continue at full pace. So if the all-bots-generate-energy idea increases the loose energy pool to 3x what it was, but the rate of taking it is 3x, it effectively changes nothing.

Only generating energy for recently-active bots (to manage overall energy input and avoid issues with older abandoned bots). The exact window for "recent activity" would need to be determined.

I think this would be a mistake and create work (punish) active players who would already have clanned bots they want generating energy, and not have clanned bots they don't want getting attacked. So on the contrary, I think it should be old/inactive bots that get the energy generation thus also giving them a purpose. The original idea as a whole I think is the way to go if the goal is to make scoring more accessible (this idea by itself, not with increased rates alongside it).

I'm not really a fan of the widespread energy generation honestly, but that's more of an opinion piece that results in a deeper dive. darkweb summed it up well in that thread

there is a bit of a balancing act between keeping some strategy to the race and being as friendly as possible to new players

The current iteration of energy (not May) is already a good balance imo, especially with how the meta has developed these recent years. The fastest way to score is of course with broken one shot dumper bots, but those are susceptible to being drained by other people. This alone means pretty much anybody will be able to score, at least until the owner of said bots decides the people taking the energy are a threat to their ranking and declans them. Whenever that scenario happens, it's almost like showing respect to the opponents scoring power. That's when they can look to invest time beyond clicking 'fight again' by building resources, they pressured the competition and no longer need to be coddled. So then we've got regular dumpers, or protected energy as I called it which requires a lot of initial effort to make. Win dumping maintenance if one wants to keep them at 60 eph, trophy points eventually will run out, gear might need to get replaced etc. but it's basically a guaranteed source of energy.

To me, this cycle embodies the game pretty well by encouraging the creation of more bots while also rewarding invested players. There is more strategy and nuance into this area as well, like calculating the con + absorb for particular builds to 1 or 2 shot the dumpers with your scorers build. These things are what separates the current energy system from old clanscore. If the end-goal is to just make energy available for the taking 100% of the time for everybody, then that's just clanscore without diplomacy which I find incredibly lame and boring. But again, this is more of an opinion piece on the game design.

I'd also like to point out that with a vastly increased loose energy pool comes with a lot more trophy point draining for main scorer bots. This would result in a lot less continued use of individual bots which is also kind of lame imo, especially for the people the energy changes are intended to help. Sure later down the line they could do resets after learning more, but bye bye wins and energy. Not really a huge deal, but I thought it's a small factor that would seem a lot bigger to a new player.

Overall I liked these changes. When using a DE3 buff, we were getting 4 more energy per one hit each day (40, 44, 48, etc) and this energy ramping up felt smooth. It's true that I didn't score much in the last days, except some quick 80k (would have been 20k before) which made me into the top 100 energy, my goal for this month. Now top energy has another meaning, Gpof will be close to top 10 energy with just 1 month scoring. I'm not sure how energy HoF should be dealt with from now on.

I'm curious to see if ziz (500 lvl 100-101 bots) will be all drained by the end of the month. Those are probably the levels that generate more energy. In competitive months against Apex, ziz were always drained while the race was on, but then they accumulated some energy towards the end of the month. Now, they are getting depleted even in this non-competitive month.

This brings me to the other change, the 10 members cap. The main consequence was that it became almost impossible to get a plat for top levelers. Myriad may be an exception this month but that's only because it's a non-competitive month. I think that until there's another clan trying to beat Lusitania, we won't really experience how these changes affect the game. However, the 10 members cap change made me feel that some people may decide to leave Lusitania because there isn't much space to get plats now. So, if you can't get into Lusitania top 10, you can go to another clan to challenge Lusitania and get at least a gold trophy (better than nothing). It also made us not score in more than 1 bot to leave space to everybody that wanted to score this month. This change also might increase cooperation between clan members, instead of scoring with 2-3 bots, people can score with his bot and dump energy to another clan member, or creating shared bots is more important now than ever. In conclusion, I also like this 10 member cap change. Going further to 5 members cap is overkill imo. That would mean 1 or 2 max people scoring in a clan.

To finish my feedback, while top spot was never at risk, we should assist to an interesting clan competition for top 10 as we seen last month. I think it will be fun to see those clans getting mass energy for just gold trophies hehe

As for June, I'm not sure if anything should be changed. Maybe the treasury should take in account the 10 members cap as it did at the start of the month. This will make Lusitania smaller and we will need to carefully choose which bots should be in the clan and who can be kicked. However, if this change is going to implemented again, it would be good to be warned so we can adjust our clans to 10 members. The downside is that the clan list will be doubled up, unless the idea of all bots generate energy would solve this.

About that suggestion, it would make energy infinite again which goes against the feeling that energy was finite with the new changes. I think that finite energy is positive because it enables clan strategies like unclan some bots, and it also increases the need to build more weak bots or dumpers, meaning more activity for the game.

I'm eager to read what others feel and what are their suggestions for next months :)

Maybe the treasury should take in account the 10 members cap as it did at the start of the month. This will make Lusitania smaller...

I don't think Lusitania or any real clan is terribly affected there. I think it's much more likely to just potentially hit the clans we attack versus the clans that do the attacking.

Some clan like The North or potential new player or something could certainly feel the effects, of course... but not clans with access to level 400+ bots and such, minus it maybe sometimes being a very slight added annoyance. But those kinda changes would actually help the "haves" overall versus the "have nots."

Limit of 10 monthly contributors, and treasury changes

I do support this. It sucks to say when Lusitania have been relatively diplomatically successful and gathered the vast majority of good players in one place, but it's not sustainable. There's no real way for new clans to pop up when 80% of the good players are in one clan and getting along. Nothing changed this month as it was temporary and an "off" month with no competition so people were fine not getting a spot, but that won't always be the case and I'd probably encourage anything that might make Lusi members want to leave and form their own clans (not you JJ, you have to stay).

This month being lopsided

This is more for meta reasons than any change you offered, like I mentioned - Lusitania are just too strong at the minute for these experiments to have done anything. With Gpof going for a monthly record, JJ being willing to score, and us owning 80% of the available energy, no clan had any chance unless it was some amalgamation of basically every other person that's opened the website in the last year which can't happen due to the limit anyway. The lopsided-ness of the competition can't be fixed by game changes, or at least not changes to energy generation and attacking multipliers. The game will always be fairly easy to adapt to and win if you have all the best players. I'd focus on breaking that up, rather than changing what happens when you click fight again.

Energy multiplier

I don't think this was a positive really, for quite a few reasons.

It makes it incredibly hard for a new and upcoming clan to even try to win. Lusitania got their first and subsequent wins because Apex couldn't upkeep their scoring every month, and eventually just had to accept they won't win them all. Regardless of what happened in the first 20 days, Lusitania could just "wake up" in the last 10, dump and score every bit of energy they own, and take the win. I understand the intention of the change - two titans competing for a win can't possibly "finish" a competition a week into the month with the looming multiplier coming in almost resetting any lead. In reality, in 90% of months where there aren't 2 similarly matched clans, it just means the bigger clan can always win with a weeks worth of effort at the end of the month. As we've seen this month, entire clans of dumpers can be drained in a single day, even when not scattering. JJ drained 700k+ from his clans in a single day as we can see on the new clan charts, imagine 4-5 other players doing that and just completely demotivating a group of new players that spent all month fighting for lowbie energy.

I also don't really like the way it devalues total energy, and the way you're now reconsidering total energy changes. Since the initial EPH changes, energy has been fairly consistent and beyond a bit of inflation it's always meant the same thing and been a nice record of that. Blowing it up with a 4x multiplier, Gpof immediately getting a 10m month directly after a new record of 7m was hard earned, just kinda makes a mockery of all previous achievements. I like the idea of total energy essentially tracking amount of wins you've scored for your clan in pursuit of energy, basically divided by 40 or 20 depending on how you scored, so I don't want it to go away, or get devalued by the multiplier.

I do appreciate that it's an ever increasing number that no newbies can really compete in, but maybe we could see a change to the Hall of Champions on the homepage. As it stands, the 5 names currently there likely will never change again. Maybe we could also show those metrics, but counted over the last month/maybe year. So if someone has 300k wins this year, or the most energy, they get a little recognition for it. I think this would also encourage people to take part in different aspects of the game that mostly get skipped over. Most plats/trophy points in the last month would probably change pretty frequently, and get more people involved in the reset-for-trophys game which can be quite fun. Newer players could easily pick a category they want to try and would have a chance at it, rather than it being literally impossible to get there as it is now.

On a personal level, the multiplier sucked cause it basically dictated when I should score. I haven't been playing a ton recently, but will occasionally get myself in the top 10 monthly energy for some nice plats and wins. The multiplier essentially banned me from playing in the first 20 days as it would be a gigantic waste of trophy points to use buffs early in the month for that spot when I can just do it later and get way more bang for my buck.

The multiplier also kind of mandates more energy and energy generation, which is why we're already seeing calls for the War month idea (but permanently). Even in an off-month, Ziz are going to end the month with no energy. That's nearly 500 bots someone had to create that wasn't close to enough in a month where people weren't really trying. New players won't want to create their own Ziz-style bots if they know they will (at best) get ~100 attacks on each bot per month, and that's if nobody else hits them. Everyone's existing energy infrastructure (and any future bots made) suddenly got 3-4x less valuable, as you just need so much more now. Sure, you energy is multiplied, but so is your rivals, so its neutral except now you need WAY more infrastructure to hope to keep up.

I think a lot of what the established players enjoy about the game is everything around scoring that supports it indirectly beyond the fight again link. Building bots for energy, reacting to what else is happening in the game and targeting your rivals infrastructure more than your own, planning trophy bots so you can always afford the best buffs (a big motivation for tourney participation), etc. A lot of suggested changes recently seem to just be pushing us towards a bland clan score system that was incredibly shallow and didn't allow for as much thought and strategy, even if people are nostalgic for it. I'm all for a War month, as my post originally stated, but it shouldn't be every month, and it definitely shouldn't be with a multiplier.

Final thought is we really haven't seen what an actually competitive month would look like. All easy energy bots like Ziz would just be declanned, and it would be a competition of dumpers. This month hasn't seen any of that because no one is threatening, but all the "community energy" would instantly disappear and it'd just be a game of who owns the most dumpers, and who wants to trash tourney bots to win the most.

After testing strategies this month, one thing is clear: the rate of energy scaling favors the well-established and makes it harder for new players or clans to compete for the top spot.

To compete in the monthly race you currently need control of energy sources.

There's two types of energy sources:

• Bare Essentials: Fast, accessible, easy-beat bots. You can build one in 4 minutes. With a few of them in your back pocket, you have a great starting point to push for a top 10 plat.

• Luxury Goods: Protected, 60EPH bots. Time-consuming to build, harder to beat, and far more resilient.

With energy scaling, luxury goods dominate. Energy from the essentials dries up fast, and only those with private stockpiles of luxury goods can keep racing. Late-month dumps/raids from these hoards swing entire leaderboards while newer players stall out.

More scaling also equals more vulnerability. A small build flaw means a stronger player can cause damage to a competitor at an increased rate (and keeps on increasing with each passing day). Recovery options are there, but become more limited as the public resources go dry. Many give up.

Consistency is still king. Gpof solo'd the monthly race (using luxury goods), and players like SideZ and Orbiting Death sit close to the top of the pile through sustained and steady effort. But energy late-month energy inflation would make these final days absolutely crucial in a competitive month; outweighing the early effort and coordination. Here's a small sample of what could happen.

Recommendations:

• Dial back or remove energy scaling.
• Please keep the 10 member cap.
• Continue exploring “all bots generate energy.”

Side note on long-term stagnation:

2024 was highly active. Mount Wario just won. The race is waiting for challengers. Let’s keep the barrier low so more clans can climb quickly. Currently though, that barrier does require players to at least prepare the bare essentials.

While i joined the month to up my total energy amount a bit, i don't feel that this system is actually good for the clan race and think we should keep the energy gain the same as it always has been.

Smaller clans - this could work in the longer run, as it hopefully would spread better players out, but even in the end, i think the strongest/most resourcefull will always team up in the end, not leaving much wiggle room for other clans to jump in and win.

And also curious on the energy kept plans, as even though this clan doesn't have any life or activity left in it, i dont want to leave my energy behind, so hope you can let us know more once you have more clear plans

Energy multiplier

I know the focus is on the top spot... but I think the energy multiplier is likely going to promote some extra activity at end of months - there's bots that may want to get too 10/top 100 monthly and possible extra completion inside clan to top 10 there and, ultimately, the top 10 clan spots should become more competitive with other changes as well and you might see top 8-12 or whatever fighting it out more aggressively.

Also, as we adjust, if there is a fight for top spot then players are going to need to aim a little higher to feel secure with actually holding top spot and the eventual second-place clan may not quit the fight as fast. It isn't sexy and wouldn't be super obvious with a flashy fight at end, instead it's just a more active time towards a middle state, but I think that aspect probably does have very real value to game and shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.

Sure, definitely more action now we're at the end of the month, but it's all been at the cost of the quietness at the start of the month really.

If anything, I expected much higher scores needed for top 10 player and clan monthly. Gonna be 1m at least for top 10 monthly, but with an average of a 2.5x multiplier, people haven't clicked much more than they would in a month where ~500k was needed for top 10 which would have been seen as a quite month

Top 10 (both clan and player) has always been somewhat competitive tbf even in quiet months, there is almost always a little fight for those spots it just doesn't get as much attention.

Recently, top 10 has become more active... but when I came in it was DEAD. I remember getting The North to 3rd spot with insanely little effort.and a clan like Rapture.was still likely to grab a top 10 with literally no effort and simply by existing.

It's only been very recent that it's required more than a trifle bit of effort and bots getting max energy to get a top 10 clan.

And I think even if that isn't near as sexy as the top spot that it's actually pretty huge and shouldn't be dismissed at all...

I will try to keep this short as there is already a lot to read, took me a good 20 minutes to get through. I haven't played this month to give the best opinion but I have been watching a little and chatted to a couple of players.

Starting with the 10 member cap this is the no brainer change IMO, it gives other clans more chance to compete with the top clan and I requested this a long time ago as the game seems to go through a cycle of two big clans to one big clan and back again, this now might mean in future we see 3 or 4 big clans competing at some point who knows. In general I think it promotes competition and there isn't much more to say about it.

The energy scaling idea I think is good although the scaling I think is bad, like I said when the changes were first announced I think 5% per day would be more balanced and feel the current 10% is too extreme, it would feel a waste of time to score in the first 5-10 days currently and the amount of resources you would need this month is insane giving the current big clan a huge advantage over other new and upcoming clans.

The idea of every bot generates energy I think Fish suggested and I didn't like it because it basically eliminates a huge aspect of the game in building resources and preparing as a team to win (or atleast a big part of it), I still feel the same although if this months energy scaling is kept it would seem pretty necessary and would work well alongside these changes, another positive here is new players can create a bot and score for a whole month straight away if that's all they want to do, making it harder for more experienced players competing with them to effectively stop them playing by draining all their targets.

Final word is this hasn't been a competetive month because there hasn't been any credible attempt to win by a group of players other than Lusitania, the reason this game is often dominated by one big clan is that this clan normally owns the best RW's, stars, tourneys etc, most experienced players basically clan hop for access to these things and you end up with all the best players congregating in the best clan with the best resources. As somebody else said further up the thread finding a way to break this cycle would be better than energy changes IMO.

What if.....Top spot doesn't gain extra energy? Who ever is in first get's get base rate, then 2-4th get a small boost, and 5th-10th get a big boost.

Also, the only way you get any boost is if the clan overall multiplier is above 1.5x. This should stop dumper clans that are usually in the top 10 from gaining huge energy.

So here's a completely radical idea.

Remove EPH from clanned bots completely, and have only non-clanned bots gain energy (EPH).

This would rid the game of idle clans in the HoF ranks. Idle bots in the HoF ranks. (Granted people with dumpers that want them to gain tps I could see having a concern with this, though with fewer clans in the clan HoF you could likely clan them last day and grab some tps faily easily).

I'll keep my reply to just the questions asked by you Ender.

How has the daily energy scaling felt? Has it kept the race more competitive or engaging deeper into the month? How did it affect your strategy, activity levels, or perception of early vs. late-month effort?

The end of month scaling I did was fun with me getting my random new clan to top 10 in under a day. It was fun to drain energy so fast but it really throws off getting into a rhythm with multiple bots when there's so many random amounts like 2k here and 1k there and 10k there. I don't feel like it made the energy race more competitive as too many good scorers are concentrated in one clan with too many resources (I'm not even sure how many dumpers Gpof had to use this month but it must have been a lot). I think adding more randomness to the game vs. just letting the people with all the resources control everything month after month might be a good idea (not just my suggestion, plenty of others have said that).

I think that the early game suffered by having people wait until the end of the month to use their trophy points to buy buffs and get 4x the energy with well, 4x less effort lol. Cutting down on the amount of clicking people have to do might be a good idea to get more casual players who want to play like 1-2 hours a day to participate more even if it doesn't end up in winning any platinums.

What are your impressions of the ranking member cap reduction from 20 to 10? Has it noticeably impacted competition, or the ability for more clans to contest top spots? Could going even lower, at least for a time, be fun?

I don't like it myself because it puts more emphasis on either dumping or using only bots with high trophy points. It also cuts down on anyone outside the top 10 from participating much I think. The only way of going down for a time might be a hilarious 1v1 me bro months for glory of who's the best scorer on this game LOL. That idea about getting rid of idle energy and making it so only active scorers get anything might be a better idea than keeping reducing the member limit so only the top dumping bots get any 1st places.

Overall, what worked well, and what didn't, with this May experiment?

I've noticed this month's race is still quite lopsided at the top

You answered your own question lol. One bot got more than energy than either of the 2nd or 3rd place clans got on their own individual efforts. Same thing happened in April but without the energy changes.

What other changes could make the clan race more engaging for more people?

Total war and/or eliminating idle energy or in a weird way, they are both a similar idea. Whichever would be less effort. I'll explain this more later.

Are there tweaks to the current May experiment you'd suggest?

I did that in my June Ideas. Although there's plenty of other good ideas out there.

Do you have ideas for new energy sources, ways to spend energy, or different clan incentive structures?

Ideally we could make the game way more rewarding than it currently is to play to drive activity. Instead of focusing on individual efforts like "look at how much energy this one bot can get" we could focus on team-based activities that get the whole clan doing things together. Kind of like raids against PvE bosses or clan vs. clan activities that you see in other online RPGs. Then together the clan can get rewarded for doing these activities. A good way of doing this on a text game would be like Kingdom of Loathing's clan system. It would add more to the entertainment part of the game but it might be outside the scope that you want.

As for some other things I thought of:

As for total energy, just make it a profile only thing with no trophies related to it like a "history of this bot" thing. That way nobody will really care about who has the most energy.

I wrote this yesterday and thought it might be useful to gain an actual players perspective on what it feels like to play currently:

My only suggestions would be to either increase energy gain for all bots alongside increasing the energy draining increase as the month goes along or, better yet, implement the total war suggestion of Fishwick's with no holds barred. No activity restrictions (you could keep the 0 workshop energy thing if you wanted but I think it'd be better without it for a month to see if it changes anything). The reason I say this is simple, there's no energy left on the easy bots and there's still 5 days left. The energy draining increase was too massive vs amount of bots in clans like I said before (if one bots gained 20 energy per hour but you can gain 160 energy per hit, it'd take 8 hours to recover per bot or equivalent to 3 hits per day so one bot with 2 250% energy buffs could drain around 666 bots for ONE DAY). The idea for the total energy month is to add a layer of randomness to the clan race while also reducing the burden on having to make and maintain a bunch of bots. I think, maybe, just maybe, 4x energy gain + total energy month might work out. Because as is of May 26th I checked on my bots ranges from 27-150 and this is what I found:

Level 150: All easy bots had around 160 or less energy.
Level 130-140: Maybe like 10-20 bots to hit with around 1k or less.
Level 120-130: Maybe like 30-50 bots in total between 60 energy and 1k.
Level 110-120: Around 30-50 bots with 3k energy and a few with 400-1000. Probably less than 100 targets at all in this range.
Level 100-110: Around 100-200 bots with 2k energy or so with most around 400. Level 75-100: Around 200 bots with energy between 1k-3k. Massive drop-off in amount of clans though.
Level 50-69: Probably the most amount of bots with energy left but that's because people have been using their higher levels to quickly drain the ziz bots probably.
Lots of energy in the 20-50 range but most of it is owned by Lusitania to be used for dumping onto hyp etc.

So in total, low range still has lots of targets, high range has little to none. Will total war help the higher ranges find targets? Maybe. At this point from what I observed by looking at the clans overall, there are only about 6 people left maintaining pretty much all the clans on this game. Esv, Cosby, Pirate, Nos has a few, Fishwick and/or Laser Kiwi or whoever owns those bots they dump with, Mal, and that's about it (Gpof and Peet seem to have a few but they also seem to use them for themselves). Everyone else seems to just maintain dumper clans or their own clan. If you go ahead and look at the fight lists, there's literally thousands upon thousands of no clan bots now. But if just the 6 people I said decided to quit en masse at once, there's be about...absolutely nothing to fight. Those 6 people are now keeping the game alive by themselves pretty much.

Wow, thanks for the incredible amount of detailed feedback and thoughtful discussion over the past few days, not just here but across the other recent threads touching on the clan race and energy mechanics! I've been reading through all of it - in this thread, the All Bots Gain Monthly Energy discussion, the Why not raise minimum energy debate, and the New System for Energy Gain proposal. It's clear there's a lot of passion and many different perspectives on how to best move forward, and I really appreciate everyone taking the time to share their insights. I'll try to consolidate my current thinking here based on what I've seen.

Reflections on May 10% daily energy exchange increase:

The feedback on this has been particularly strong and varied.

• I hear the concerns that a 10% daily increase "feels like a lot" and the valid points about the current scaling potentially draining system-wide "loose energy" faster than anticipated, especially towards the end of the month.
• While the math (as shared in the spreadsheet) shows that the first half of the month still contributes about 1/3 of the total "weight" to a month's score, perception is important. The goal was to keep the end-of-month competitive, not to make the early month feel devalued.
• Regarding the "total energy inflation" this causes, I'm less concerned about that specific stat in the long run. As I've touched on, the meaning and comparability of "total energy" as a historical metric is something I'm already planning to re-evaluate, especially if we continue to experiment with mechanics that significantly alter monthly energy generation. My aim is to not feel "locked down" by how one stat has historically worked if it prevents us from making the game more dynamic.
• For June: Based on current feedback and observation, I am strongly considering adjusting this. The most likely change for the June race would be to reduce the daily energy scaling from the current 10% to 5% per day. This would still provide a significant end-of-month multiplier (around 2.5x on the final day) but should feel less extreme and might better balance early vs. late month efforts.

Reflections on May ranking member cap decrease from 20 to 10:

I'm still evaluating the impact and feedback on this. The primary goal was to lower the barrier to entry for more clans. As was noted, the current top energy bot has more energy than the second plan clan, so I think this was a step in the right direction, but it needs to be balanced against other notable effects on clan strategies and player motivation (e.g. high-level training bots in clans that may no longer be eligible for monthly trophies).

Broader ideas and future directions:

• "All bots have EPH": There's clearly a lot of interest in making energy more broadly accessible. I am very open to this idea and want to find ways for more players and clans to meaningfully participate. My goal would be to strike a balance where existing infrastructure (like well-built dumpers) and long-term investment remain valuable, but new players or different playstyles can also find viable paths to acquiring energy and competing. Concepts like "recently-active bots generate some EPH, with an opt-out, at a lower rate than dedicated clanned bots" are definitely on my radar for future exploration. These are more complex changes that, if pursued, would target July or later to allow for proper design, balancing, and testing.
• "Fluff" clans: I agree that it would be good to reduce the number of placeholder clans in the rankings. While the "EPH for all" idea is one way to address the need for such clans, I'm also considering other mechanisms, like potentially requiring a positive clan energy ratio or certain activity levels to appear in the ranked listings.
• New player experience vs. veteran investment: This is a crucial balance. I believe long-term investment and building significant infrastructure should be rewarded, and new players shouldn't expect to be at the very top immediately. However, I do want new players (and new clans) to feel they can become competitive and make meaningful progress sooner than they might currently. This will be a guiding principle for future changes.
• Trophy point system: I've seen various discussions around TPs and buffs. To be clear, I value the strategic depth the current system offers, including the meta around resets and buff management. I intend to preserve this as a core part of bots4 progression and strategy.

Realistic timeline for June:

Given the feedback and the current state of the May race, the primary change I anticipate being able to implement in time for the June race is the adjustment to the energy scaling (likely down to 5% daily). More significant systemic changes, like any form of broader EPH generation, require more development and thorough testing, so those would be targeted for July or later if I decide to move forward with them.

This May trial has been exactly that - an experiment. Your feedback throughout this month, especially as we approach the end, is incredibly valuable. Please continue to share your experiences! Thank you everyone.

As was noted, the current top energy bot has more energy than the second plan clan, so I think this was a step in the right direction

This has happened several times in slower months without competition. I assume the thought is 'smaller roster so this outcome is more likely' but I don't really see how this indicates a step in the right direction. To me all it shows is the stupid amount of energy that can be pushed if somebody has the resources, which no new player has any hope of holding a candle to, especially in a competitive month where it matters. I really can't express enough how awful I think increased transfer rates are for less invested players, but if you decide to continue exploring it I'm fine with reaping the benefits in the meantime.

Bonus close one even back in 2012.

Trophy point system: I've seen various discussions around TPs and buffs. To be clear, I value the strategic depth the current system offers, including the meta around resets and buff management. I intend to preserve this as a core part of bots4 progression and strategy.

The problem I have with your stance on this aspect of the game is that you have never actually played under these conditions. I -might- be willing to accept this is about adding strategic depth to the game if it wasn't possible to avoid it by donating.