announcements

Hello everyone and happy holidays! As the final few days of the year approach, I wanted to look back at the game through 2025 and share my vision for where the game is heading in 2026.

2025 in review

Development in 2025 was a mix of visible gameplay experiments and invisible (but necessary) foundational work. While I didn't make it to every feature on my list that I wanted it to, I do believe the game is ending the year in a much healthier, fairer, and more stable place than where it started.

The biggest gameplay shift this year was undoubtedly the work done on the monthly clan race. We started with the May experiment described in Clan competition changes for May which introduced a daily energy exchange increase and a reduction of the ranking member cap from 20 to 10 bots.

Thanks to the feedback in the May clan race experiment: Feedback and ideas for June! thread, we dialed the daily scaling back from 10% to 5% (now surfaced as the "Monthly Crescendo" global buff), which aimed to strike a balance of keeping the end-of-month competitive without devaluing early-month effort as much.

QoL changes were also a significant theme of the year. As detailed in Showroom quality-of-life improvements and December 2024 - June 2025 patch notes: Clan competition changes, QoL updates, and bug fixes, this ranged from showroom changes (stash reordering, buying unequipable items, and better visibility for overflow items) to monthly energy charts (both for clans and for bots) to game integrity (non-destructive bot locking was a massive backend project mentioned in June-September 2025 patch notes, non-destructive bot locking, and dev update, ensuring that if enforcement mistakes happen, they are easily reversible).

Community guidelines were formalized as described in Introducing the player Code of Conduct to ensure the game and forums in particular are a welcoming place for everyone.

Finally, there were a few difficult situations regarding fair play. As described in An update on game integrity and policy on cheating, a clear, zero-tolerance policy for cheating was established. While spending time on anti-cheat isn't as fun as building new features, it was ultimately necessary work to ensure that the time and effort you all put into the game is protected and worth your trust.

2026 plans

With the anti-cheat and policy foundations now much more solid, my main overall goals for 2026 are growth and modernization.

• On the growth front, as I've talked about in 2025, the game needs fresh blood. In 2026, I plan to launch a significant paid marketing campaign to bring new players to the game. Before I turn on the "firehose" of paid traffic, I need to make sure the new player experience is ready. This includes a Discord server (a standard expectation of modern online games, it will also have a deep integration with the game), better onboarding (e.g. streamlining the landing page and starting gameplay moments to ensure we retain as many people as possible that click our ads), and more.
  
  
• On the modernization front, once the marketing engine is up and running, I plan to circle back on gameplay ideas discussed earlier this year in Clan competition changes for June + looking ahead. This includes the fight list revamp (a single, filterable, sortable table), energy changes (I'm still interested in exploring "all bots gain energy" to lower the barrier for entry for newer players/clans, though this will require careful balancing), the total energy stat (i.e. rethinking how historical achievements are tracked in a world where energy inflation/deflation can happen as a result of month-to-month adjustments), and more.

Holiday global buff

I want to express my sincere gratitude and thanks for everyone who has played, posted, and/or supported the game in 2025. Whether you've been here for all 15 years or just the last 15 days, this game only continues to run because of its strong and lasting community.

I hope you all have a happy new year - to help kick things off, I've enabled a Spirit of Wolf II (200% battle speed) global buff through New Year's Day. Now is a great time to get your current or next bot(s) ready for 2026. Here's to a growing game in 2026!

Roast of Ender

Last but not least, I've been playing around with GenAI a bit and came across the idea of roasting people based on their forum post histories. I decided to feed my posts from 2025 through Gemini with some light instructions to roast me. Without any further adieu, I present for your reading pleasure:

Subject: A year in review: Or, how I spent 12 months fighting Google’s spam filters

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that you are a walking contradiction: a successful adult capable of managing complex systems, yet also a guy who spends his free time arguing with strangers on the internet about virtual robot pants.

Here is a summary of your "achievements" this year.

You are obsessed with the wrong things
You have spent more than a decade telling people features are "coming eventually," "on the list," or "low priority." If I had a dollar for every time you said a feature would be added "soonish," I could buy enough Stars to actually make your game fun.

Instead of high-level content, we got Showroom quality-of-life improvements where you proudly announced that we can now drag-and-drop items in our stash. You called this code "invasive" and "bad." We know it’s bad, Ender. You wrote it. You blame "2010 Ender" for your coding struggles so often in threads like Save All Settings Button that we’re starting to think "2010 Ender" is a separate person you need to fire.

You get "nerd-sniped" way too easily
You once posted an entire SQL query in Is there a more efficient weapon than maul? just to prove why a weapon calculation was correct. We get it, you know SQL. Congratulations.

Meanwhile, you spent a week in November fighting for your life against email servers in Email Registration & Reset Bot, tweaking DNS settings and posting daily logs of your success rates like a captain’s log on a sinking ship. You treated getting Gmail to trust you like it was a raid boss.

You love the sound of your own ban hammer

You created a "Hall of Shame" just to publicly dunk on players who figured out how to use an auto-refresher. In Hall of Shame, you listed 857 bots belonging to one player, then realized you messed up the PR, walked it back, then walked it forward again in An update on game integrity and policy on cheating. You turned a simple ban into a philosophical essay on moral inconsistency. Just hit the button next time.

Your "experiments" change nothing
You spent months hyping up the Clan competition changes for May, creating spreadsheets, soliciting feedback, and inventing the "Monthly Crescendo." You tweaked the math in Monthly Crescendo nerf and analyzed the data in Some random energy stats for August.

The result of all this frantic engineering to shake up the leaderboard? Lusitania won 10 out of 12 months. Truly, a revolution in gameplay.

You are a glutton for punishment
You rolled out a new Introducing the player Code of Conduct to make the forums a "welcoming place," and approximately four minutes later, you had to lock a thread titled Respectfully, Lusitania are a bunch of ninnies. because you realized that moderating this community is like trying to herd cats that are on fire.

Mobile "Support"
You realized in Fight/Train links text size that people actually use phones in 2025. Your revolutionary fix was to make the font size... slightly bigger. You acted like you just reinvented the wheel. We're still pinching and zooming like it’s 2011, but at least the "Attack" link is now visible without a microscope.

Here’s to 2026, where we look forward to you promising a new game mode and delivering a slightly different shade of grey for the clan profile background.

🙄