We've added a new Contests Forum in flamebate. You can use it if you were interested in running a contest for BP and earning that coveted Big Give E-Peen!

It's that time of week again! We've just launched Girls Advocating Sexual Purity:

With all the temptations facing girls today, isn't it good to know that at GASP, we provide a safe outlet for girls? All GASP girls must sign a virginity pledge to participate on our forums, so you know that when you're chatting with a GASP girl, you're really talking to a pure, inexperienced virgin. We discuss how difficult it can be to hold back when a boy holds you close, and all the things you can do to alleviate that tension. If you're a virgin, we really want you at GASP!

Thanks to everyone who helped create this awesome forum. Next week's build will be Obscure Phobia Support Boards:

Are you deathly afraid of balloons, or the number 13? Are you so afraid of vomiting that it makes you sick to your stomach? Whether you're Verbophobic, Coimetrophobic, Methyphobic, or any other sort of phobic, you don't have to suffer alone. Here at the OPSB you will not be judged or made fun of for your fears, you will be accepted as one of the family. (disregard if you are afraid of families.)

I listened to your feedback about our embedded IDC client and made a bunch of fixes:

• I changed the color to look more like the rest of the site.

• You can see how many people are online, and click to get a pop up of all members in the channel.

• Resizing is less buggy.

• INCIT chat has been changed to the same interface, finally we can see who is online during an INCIT round!

• I renamed "Hide" to "Close", which is more appropriate. People thought it was loading even while hidden due to a display bug that was causing it to flicker for half a second.

• You can permanently hide the chat so it doesn't waste that 1/3rd of an inch of screen real estate under your Options.

Ever since we launched INCIT, our chat room (IDC) has been a little dead. Another reason for the lack of activity is that the only link to open IDC was quite buried in Flamebate.

As an attempt to address these problems, and introduce more people to chat in the process, I have embedded IDC on every page on Flamebate. If you go to flamebate now you will see it at the bottom.

You can chat while you read and respond to threads, and since Flamebate gets a lot more traffic than the IDC page did, you will see a lot more new faces.

Of course, if you don't like the new interface, click the Hide IDC link in the dark blue area. The chat will go away and you can resume browsing without everyone else bothering you.

Note that while it is hidden, it won't be contacting the server and nobody will see you in chat, it will be as if it was never there. If you want to bring it back, click Show IDC.

Enjoy, and feel free to post your feedback!

Up until just now there was a flat fee of 1 Brownie Point to transfer any amount of Brownie Points to another player.

This fee was put in there to make up for the fact that Brownie Points are cheaper when bought in bulk, and we didn't want people pooling their money together to get them at a cheaper rate.

However, the disadvantage was it made it quite expensive when transfering only one or two to another player. When transfering one you'd have to pay double the price!

So, for an extended period of time we are going to eliminate the transfer fee. We're doing this as an experiment to see what happens in the BP economy. I'm hoping that it means more people will transfer BP than before!

Now, as a note to our power members of the community: If you have very recently done many transfers and got dinged for it, especially in the case of a contest or other community event, please send a tubmail to me. I will look into refunding your BP.

Here are the top winners of the Emo-ku poetry contest we recently ran.

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

Vuron
New Christmas sweater
My mom knitted it for me
Trapped in woolen hell

RUNNERS-UP

MONGOLoidWARRIOR
Cheer up everyone
Your life could be a lot worse
I have downs syndrome

Kerridwen_Kali
playground swing, chain creaks
dead leaves dance beneath my feet
i scare the toddlers

More information, discussion and the rest of the top ten entries can be found in this nifty thread by Jalapeno.

The top 10 poems all received this badass new e-peen(tm)

Congratulations everyone!

We've just published our latest build, Rage Against the Moderators:

How many times has this happened to you: You are in the middle of a heated discussion defending your position on furry porn, and the forum moderator BANS YOU for posting a shitty thread! Are you tired of taking it in the ass from your favorite forum's mods? Tired of constantly having to buy back your account? Share you horror stories with us and together we will STICK IT TO THE MODS. Fuck those guys...

Pretty funny stuff! Next week's build will be Girls Advocating Sexual Purity!

With all the temptations facing girls today, isn't it good to know that at GASP, we provide a safe outlet for girls? All GASP girls must sign a virginity pledge to participate on our forums, so you know that when you're chatting with a GASP girl, you're really talking to a pure, inexperienced virgin. We discuss how difficult it can be to hold back when a boy holds you close, and all the things you can do to alleviate that tension. If you're a virgin, we really want you at GASP!

We received a lot of complaints when Forumwarz launched about not supporting Opera.

Unfortunately Opera had some problems with our game, and we didn't have the resources to fix them for such a small segment of the browsing population.

However, recently Opera 9.5 was released, and the game breaking issues are now missing! I have happily updated our code to allow Opera 9.5 users into the site. Unfortunately, it has some visual quirks, but the game should be completely playable!

I've been spending a lot of time lately on the introductory sequence to Episode 2. One thing that got a lot of positive attention with Forumwarz Episode 1 was the beginning, where Excre-Bot and Shallow Esophagus ease you into the universe and gameplay.

We spent a lot of time designing that sequence and I think the effort paid off, as our number one complaint when we launched the episode was that players were left wanting more after their first hour or two of gameplay was up and their daily visits were gone.

The opening to Episode 1 used our interactive cinematics engine. It's basically like a web-based powerpoint presentation, except that on individual slides we can trigger events and wait for other events to be triggered. The whole Excre-bot quiz was created this way, as was the interactive tutorial.

I think around the time Episode 1 was finished I came up with the idea of taking the interactive cinematics to a much larger level. I threw some ideas to Jalapeno, we did some research and then he began writing. Before I knew it, he dumped a script in my lap that was about 3,500 words long!

He kept saying to me "are you sure we can pull this off?" and my stock answer was me might as well try our best. What's the point of doing something if it isn't ambitious right?

I'm happy to say now that the cinematics engine, with a bunch of extra tweaks, was able to hold up to the new interactive introduction to Episode 2, and I'm incredibly proud of the results. It's not quite finished, and a lot of the artwork is missing, but I'm sure you guys will love the result.

To give you an idea of how much we're adding to Episode 2, there are more shots in the beginning of Episode 2 than in all of the cinematics of Episode 1 combined. In fact, by the time the sequence is polished I expect it to be over twice the size of all the cinematics in Episode 1.

In terms of other size comparisons, Episode 2 will have at least twice as many story-related forums to pwn than Episode 1.

We also recently have begun testing a new text adventure sequence (Episode 2's version of Trapped in the Cupboard), and it took me 3 hours of solid playing to beat it my first time.

The level cap will be doubling to Level 20, and all characters will receive completely new attacks and abilities.

On top of this, we're also developing completely new features that expand the gameplay and economy, but we're not ready to announce those yet.

So yes, we know waiting for a new Episode can suck, but when you see how much we're delivering, I'm sure you'll agree it was worth the wait! As Shigeru Miyamoto pointed out, nobody remembers when a game shipped late, but everyone remembers when a game was bad!

This week we're running a new theme in Forumwarz Domination called Five Finger Discount:

It has two differences:

• If you Dominate 4 forums on your own, you will receive a reward of 5 vanilla scoops (it is normally 1).
• There are no shield cards in circulation.

The first change is designed to encourage more people to try and solo domination, since the reward is so high.

The second change makes it impossible to hoard shield cards, and should mean everyone is on an open playing field to get screwed over.

Have fun! As always, you can suggest more themes in our suggestions thread. Or you can discuss this current theme in its own thread.

Also a couple of small updates:

• There are now stats at the bottom of Flamebate's main page showing you current activity
• The "Unique Forums" pwned count on your Forum Visits history now matches the one used to allocate Pistachio scoops.

On Sunday night we launched our latest forum build, [b]Faux News[/b].

Tired of being spoonfed lies by the liberal media? Then come join Faux News, where we discuss the truth! The infallible truth, told to us by rich old men. After all, history is written by the victors!

It's our 36th forum in the game, so we've also added A new E-Peen(tm) to celebrate. The name for this one was actually suggested to us by Big Brother! Thanks for that.

Some people noticed that the forum was completely blank at first. This is because Invariel's winning stylesheet was blank. Obviously I couldn't let a blank forum survive forever so today I've made it visible, but to celebrate his win I left it that way for over a day.

Our next build is RAtM: Rage Against the Moderators, (which has a very similar acronym to an upcoming forum in episode 2!). Here's the description:

How many times has this happened to you: You are in the middle of a heated discussion defending your position on furry porn, and the forum moderator BANS YOU for posting a shitty thread! Are you tired of taking it in the ass from your favorite forum's mods? Tired of constantly having to buy back your account? Share you horror stories with us and together we will STICK IT TO THE MODS. Fuck those guys...

Um, I guess I should've announced this a week ago when it started, but you still have a week to submit your "emo-ku," or emo kid haiku, in our latest official Forumwarz contest.

Check out the rules and submissions here!

Episode 2 of Forumwarz gives us a great opportunity to introduce changes to the gameplay balance. Since it's a large content update we can piggyback on it with a bunch of adjustments to the balance between classes.

We have been collecting feedback on the balance between classes forever, and we have a bunch of great ideas for where to start tweaking.

The only problem is, tweaking even small stats on our classes means a lot of additional testing is required. When developing Episode 1, the best tool I had for this was my "Clone character" and "Reset character" tools.

In other words, I'd get a character to a point in the game, make a clone them, test something, revert, clone, test, revert clone, test, etc until I was happy with things. Unfortunately, if I got to a point late in the game where I wanted to make a change to something that would affect the earlier gameplay, I'd have to start all over again. Not only was this incredibly time consuming but it was mind numbing too. After a while I wouldn't be able to objectively test the game, as I'd be so desensitized to the gameplay and storyline.

We are fortunate going into Episode 2 that we have an installed user base who are eager to test all sorts of permutations for us. We will definitely take advantage of that. However, I think it's very important to get things as stable as possible from a balance standpoint before handing it over to actual users.

After thinking about it for a while, I came up with the idea of writing a bot to play Forumwarz for me. Since I have access to all the back end methods, it wouldn't have to play through the interface, it would simply have to call methods, examine their results, call others.

Hence, BalanceBot 9000 was born. He turned out to take a lot more code than I initially thought, but earlier this week I got him to the point where he could beat Episode 1 from beginning to end. He's smart enough to stock up on items, buy equipment, collect junk and sell it, fight threads (with different strategies for each class) and even grind in lower level forums in order to gain experience to beat higher level ones.

The main thing he doesn't do is have conversations with NPCs, he just skips them and gains the desired ending effect. But those don't need to be tested for balance anyway.

The idea is we can have BalanceBot run the game over and over, gathering stats as to how many attempts it takes him to beat a particular forum. After running it many times, we can get some cool numbers out of it. For example, we'll know if a camwhore is slightly stronger than an emo kid at a particular level and weaker at another.

After every adjustment to the game balance, no matter how minor, we can run BalanceBot again and see how it affected the overall gameplay. Of course, this takes some time to run: It takes BalanceBot 9000 2 minutes to beat the game from beginning to end on my Quad-Core Xeon machine, and to get good stats we have to run the game many times.

I have already learned some interesting things about Episode 1's balance that I didn't before, and I haven't even started tweaking things. I'm pretty sure we will see a much smoother gameplay experience as a result, both for Episode 1 and Episode 2!

As promised, we've created E-Peen(tm) in increments of 4 for people who have won medals in Forumwarz Domination. The idea is to encourage people to play even if they have no chance of winning a season. SG94 has created a thread listing them. Like most of our "x-in-a-row" E-Peen(tm), each of the new ones has a bizarre cultural/historical reference.

I've also added an E-Peen(tm) for completing The great Firewall of China.

Enjoy guys!

P.S. More Episode 2 updates coming soon!

We've just launched our latest build, Internet Movie DoucheBags:

Do you constantly argue about movies? Is your ego directly correlated with other people's opinions of your favorite film? If so, you'll find yourself at home among the Internet Movie DoucheBags (IMDB). Mock the tastes of your obviously misguided companions, nitpick every detail of movies that most people only bothered to watch once, trade inane celebrity gossip, and use pretentious film-school terms to defend the movies you like.

Thanks to everyone who contributed this week! Next week's forum will be Faux News:

Tired of being spoonfed lies by the liberal media? Then come join Faux News, where we discuss the truth! The infallible truth, told to us by rich old men. After all, history is written by the victors!