miscellaneous

At long last, clans are now live! I was anxious to get something out there so their full functionality will be rolled in over time, but there is already a substantial portion of it in place. This first update alone introduces thousands of lines of new code, 29 new files, 6 new database tables, and 4 new cron jobs. There's a lot that can go wrong! I've been testing this all myself of course, but it would be a miracle if it all worked flawlessly. If you like trying to break things in any way possible, now is your chance to shine and prove yourself more clever than me.

Off the top of my head, here are the things that are in:

-Clan founding
-Clan profiles
-Clan rankings
-Clan applications
-Clan journal
-Treasury donations/tax
-Permission matrix
-Changing rank names
-Promotions/demotions/kicks
-Changing clan owner
-100 energy every 6 hours for bots in clans
-Taking energy from other players
-Turning invites on/off in workshop

And this is what's not in yet:

-Clan invites
-Clan forums
-Clan MOTD, profile, picture
-Changing rank colors
-Quitting/disbanding clans

Please post feedback testers!

First

Ripper effort Ender!

Will go hunting for that old rusty sledgehammer and see what I can do :)

ROFL!

"You are clanless" and "If you had any clan invites, this is where they would appear" hahaha love it, mate!

Perhaps you could do the same with the post office for the inbox? "If you had any friends, this is where their letters would be" ;)

lol. Spud, I accepted your clan invite, even though you were in a clan already :P

Hehe all good.

I was wanting to see if I had applied to a clan, and then joined(or in this instance, created) another whether it would put me in two clans or kick me out of the first one to put me in the one I applied for.

It didn't which is good.

Just trying little finicky things like that to make sure it's all running smoothly.

And Dyna nabs the first bug. Your existing clan applications should get deleted when you found a clan. I did remember to delete other applications in the case where you accept one of them, but forgot the other case. Going to fix now.

Should the invite have disappeared for Dyna the minute I was put into another clan perhaps?

And spud gets a point for making the situation possible, good work! The part that accepts an application does make sure the person is clanless, so it failed there. The application should just be deleted though.

Beat me to it, Ender.

Good job.

Hey! I noticed the ' was missing, I must gain credit xD

Ding ding ding! What have we got for him Johnny?!?!

*hands Asmoo a lollipop*

Dyna, attack spuds and see what happens with energy.

Good idea, here goes.

woop, clans!

Is diplomacy on the 'to do' list? Or am i staring straight at it?

Max treasury constraint is working fine.
Journal showing deposit entries.

nothing, we aren't at war or hostile yet. heh

There is no wars or hostiles, so that means the energy is working correctly.

Yeah that makes sense.

Now apologise for hurting my ego as a result of that beating!

Right, the entire clan system is revamped and diplomacy is gone. I should start adding to the documentation now that there are actually new features...

And as for energy, you get it every 6 hours so you'll have to wait until 6am server time for there to be some in the game. Then you can start taking it from each other.

Yeah that's working great, and apologies to Spud for giving him an ass whooping.

Roger that Ender.

I'll be able to jump online then, but I'll need a lvl91+ person in rise of nations to be able to hit i think?

Without the diplomacy option, what's the go with tapping people below your level?

I can see it as being only able to attack the ones that attacked you at this point, might change though.

you cant fight lower levels

Not possible to attack lower level bots for now (or ever maybe).

Aye, revenge fights might be added.

Makes sense. No more smacking lowbies you're at war with for 1CS then :)

Apology accepted, Dyna. I'll fight you with my eyes open next time lol.

"Application has been canceled."

Check, that works too ;)

lol :)

Can someone join up for a tick? I want to test the ability of lower rank members not being able to kick people at or above their rank.

Otherwise,

Whoever made the rise of nations, fancy promoting someone to the second rank, giving them kick permissions via the permission matrix, and then asking them to kick you? Similarly, promote a second person to the same rank and see whether they can kick each other.

What are the numbers on energy? How much do you get for a win?

applied, spud

Ah Dyna, you and Asmoo are both on.

Give that above scenario a shot can you?

Ownership transfer works fine, only allowing one 'rank 1' member.

Jans got promoted and it sent me to rank2.

You take 16-24 energy for a win depending on length of fight, and give 8-12 for a loss again depending on length of fight.

Also remember to try url/form manipulation when testing...

I hope you realize you wankers just made me the first ever person kicked from a botsIV clan....

I kicked Asmo with no problems.

I kicked Asmo with no problems.

ah damn, double post lol

oh, haha, had me confused. I was rank 5 when i checked, went to the permission matrix, and found i could change it. But you promoted me in the meantime

ROFL! Congratz on bots4 first lol.

Permission matrix seems to be okay so far. At rank2, i can't alter Jans(rank1) in terms of kicking/promoting/demoting

Repromoted you :)

Cheers mate.

Promote/Demote options working as intended.

If rank 2 'promote' brings up rank1 while 'demote' brings up ranks 3,4 and 5

Similarly with the rest of the ranks, they're only showing the available options, no weird "currently rank 3, can demote to rank 3" for example/

Found a bug with the ability to promote/demote people.

You can change it with the url by typing bots4.net/clans/demote/"user id"

I just demoted Dyna, lmfao.

Great catch Asmo, I reinstated Dyna and am looking into this now. Not sure why it wasn't caught.

Nice one, Asmo!
That fancy url stuff if way beyond me lol. I need a hand turning the computer on and off :D

What exactly does changing the url like that actually do? Is it a way to get around certain mechanics that may only be in place on the current page?

I don't really know much about it myself, but figured since it used the ID to check when I was demoting someone, was wondering if it would work for someone of a higher rank, since there was no link to demote them.

Haha, I had a good laugh when it worked.

The demotion bug that Asmo found is fixed now.

That was actually the most fun about Bots2, finding exploits ^_^

Umm, where's gone Clan avg lvl @ Clans HoF?

Umm...There is none. Level doesn't matter.

Also... Ender should add total number of clans, total treasure, etc to Documentation :)
Useless stats ftw!

Ender [26]

2011-02-26 00:42:24
[5 hours ago]
Right, the entire clan system is revamped and diplomacy is gone. I should start adding to the documentation now that there are actually new features...

oh... missed this one somehow lol

bots should be able to fight lower levels, as we know from the old days 5 levels below is right about it. In this way you wont get to lose targets then you level up, and this should be good for higher level bots,

Muhahaha. First bitches!

why do I have to wait for energy? I find that kinda sucky.

Can't change colors. Hah.

http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/9549/yesxl.png

Lost 12 energy for a lost against a higher level different-clan member.

Clan total adjusted accordingly

Okie dokie,

Suicided all my energy and once it reaches zero it reads "you lost to blah blah but no energy is exchanged" which sounds about right.

And a win directly after against a different opponent and I'm back to +12.

I get the idea here. The clan starts with 100energy per member, and the idea is to keep pinching it off other members from different clans. That seems like a good idea, as the first thing people will do is hit the whores to deplete their energy to zero, but then they'll be encouraged to start hitting each other in order to improve energy levels.

How often were you looking at having energy 'rejuvinate'?

every 6 hours of the clan being open. you get 100. So, in about 4 hours.

The battle is over. Off is exhausted and loses -10 energy.

The B.O.T.S. Union takes 1,154,756 kudos from you and gives it to the winner, FNIX (2,309,512 total).

------------

I shouldn't steal/lose energy while fighting my clanmates. Same about xp/kudos.

Thanks Off, will go fix now.

Okay, can't fight bots in your own clan now.

As for the waiting for energy issue, I'm pretty sure that only appears to be an issue because of the very small number of people in clans so far. Once things are more established, finding energy to take shouldn't be hard. My intention is not to make the game turn-like or anything like that.

um in the clan journal ive seen players get promoted to higher ranks but when they are demoted it doesnt show that in the journal.. Im in ID and in the journal every new player was promoted from recruit to general and never showed any record of demotion yet all members are now soldiers (lower rank)

Haha. Umm..Lets just say that the rank got deleted. And i couldn't remember what it was.

the same ranks are still there... demote me from soldier to recruit and check to see if it shows in the journal

The name got deleted. Its ok. You and everyone else is still the top rank.

oh ok i see now theres no more soldier and i saw it say i got demoted in the journal so yea its all good =)

I changed energy regen from 100 every 6 hours to 20 every 1 hour.

I was originally going to do energy every 24 hours, but Jans pointed out this would provide some advantage to people in certain timezones, so I went with every 6 hours. I've thought about this some more and every 1 hour seems to make more sense than every 6 hours just so there's less waiting around. I don't think it will matter much either way in the long run, but maybe this will make things a little better at the starts of months.

Has Alan left and made a new clan yet to see if you can disban a clan correctly.

Cannot disband yet, as far as I am aware.

I changed energy regen from 100 every 6 hours to 20 every 1 hour.

So why after 21 hours in a clan have I still got zero energy? As I've not been attacked that many times :P

You lose between 22 and 26ish per fight with me, dRose, I have to say so far I am not liking how quickly I can eat someone's energy, it hasn't been giving me much to do, it will have to be tested more thoroughly in ob.

holy fuck 22 to 26 :o

I thought I read somewhere it was to be between 1 & 6?

Keep in mind that at the moment there arent that many opponents to fight yet..

Indeed, which is why I mentioned testing it more in ob, I only currently have 1 target, which I have been draining of energy at my own leisure, haha, dRose :p

ye but at that rate you can only attack me 5 times per hour.

Having said that my bot is uber sucky & never wins. I guess with a decent bot the energy will see saw between the two opponents.

I'm still to be convinced on this new clan system btw.

"So why after 21 hours in a clan have I still got zero energy? "

funny ^^
maybe the fight log should show how much energy you lost/gained

Indeed, I am not sure if it will work or not myself yet, strong bots will have at best a 52% win chance against each other, which will cause a lot of issues I believe.

hmmz not that I can see Jans

Demon Of Judgement [35] attacked you 1 time.
You won 0 times and lost 1 time.
You gained 91 exp.
You lost 1 kudos.
2011-02-27 03:06:11
[53 minutes ago]

Oh maybe it should (sorry misread) ... indeed yes there should be info somewhere to indicate the energy lost or gained :P

Fuck yeaaaah clans!

Btw, "I shouldn't steal/lose energy while fighting my clanmates. Same about xp/kudos."
I disagree. Why shouldnt i be able to take kudos or energy from a fight, just because we're in the same clan? Sure, there' not much point to it, but why make it impossible? I want to be able to fight clanmates and see how our bots match up.

your mom

One thing that's become apparent about this system is that it needs a lot more people than we currently have for it to work. This is motivating me to get open beta started so that people have more than a few targets. It simply doesn't work with only a few dozen bots spread out over a 100+ levels.

I'll indeed modify the fight log to show energy at some point. I'm putting that off for now because I might restructure all that stuff anyway (if I change the way attack limits work) and don't want to have to write the energy stuff twice.

As for fighting your clanmates, it was easier to just make it impossible to do that. The game doesn't actually save the winners of fights; it infers this from the kudos exchanged. I thought of just making clanmate battles only exchange 1 kudos (kudo?), but that seemed weird. Anyway, I would have to store wins/losses if I switched to the new attack limit system referenced above. Histories would be stored as aggregates, so the win/loss data would be lost in the aggregate kudos change. Meaning...maybe I'll add it later.

Yeah, energy is actually really fun (so far). The only problem I'm having right now is that it require other active players who try and get their energy up.

The battle is over. Carrion is exhausted and gives you 24 energy.

The B.O.T.S. Union takes 242,896 kudos from the loser, Carrion, and gives it to you (2,943,379 total).

Your bot gains 63,957 experience points (25,577,419 xp to next level).

Auto-repair: No repair costs have been deducted.

Your opponent is online NOW!

Will there be no penalty to energy gain in online-fighting?

Undecided. Being onlined is generally annoying, but it's a part of the game and I wouldn't want to turn being online into an energy safe haven either.

Ok, not an energy safe haven, but a penalty similar to exp and kudos?

Safe haven was a poor choice of words. I meant easier to hold onto energy, not immune from losing it.

I wouldn't change it, it creates another dynamic for rivalry.

Granted it's probably too early to tell as we haven't seen how the energy stuff will work with a large player base as well as with the inevitable whores etc.

But with the assumption that whores will be targeted and depleted of energy quickly, meaning that 'real bots' will have to hit each other, is this going to switch the emphasis towards tourny-like builds and away from 'raping' builds?

So rather than seeing bots rushing powerful weaps 10 levels early at the expense of con so they can 1hit whores, could we see the tourny bots become popular as it will be harder to have energy pinched from you, while also standing you in good stead to beat other non-whored bots?