Features in the Gameplay Revamp:
In early June, we begun development of a new fork of the Forumwarz code base, with the goal of making the core gameplay more varied and interesting. For a long time we’ve been happy with the storyline and textual content of the game, but the gameplay just hadn’t scaled up as quickly.
While role-playing games are notorious for repetitive gameplay (there’s a reason it’s called grinding), we had a lot of room for improvement. We started with a long list of enhancements that was built from community suggestions and our own gameplay ideas, and drilled through it until we’d gotten a lot done.
At every step, dozens of players helped bug fix each feature, and at this point they’re more or less stable. There will still be a second and third phase where we integrate the new features into the game properly before they’re open to the public, but we’re comfortable enough now to announce exactly what is going to be available to all players.
Gaining Fans:
At the end of every battle right now, you are told that people noticed what you did and it affected your cred, but then these so called fans of yours never appeared.
In the upcoming update, you will gain a certain amount of fans based on how well you pwned the forum. The fan mechanic will replace the speed run mechanic currently in place. Instead of being based on time (something which is annoying if you play on a slow connection), fans are based on how many turns you took to beat a forum, and how how much damage you dealt and took while doing it.
Fans are also somewhat finicky, you’ll lose a certain amount of them over time even if you’re doing well. But you can lose fewer by pwning forums with more diversity. Of course, there will be a leaderboard to keep track of who has the most fans at any given time.
The leaderboards for fans are also split up by class. Previously, some less offensive classes had a difficult time competing seriously for lemon scoops. Now you’re judged against your class, not the entire game.
Status Ailments:
Threads can hit you with status ailments (known in some other games as de-buffs). While the status ailment is active, your player will feel a penalty on each turn in the battle.
Status ailments can be removed by consuming items.
Preventable Attacks
Threads can do special attacks that can throw off your strategy. For example, Line Noise causes all your abilities to require a refresh, effectively rendering you offensively useless for a turn.
These attacks can be prevented by taking consuming a particular item (in this case, a routing script, in advance.)
Forum Sensitivities
Each forum can now react differently, depending on which abilities you use against it. There are 5 basic types of elements: Misanthropy, Narcissism, Antisocially, Aggression and Incompetence. Each ability in your toolbar will be assigned to one of these elements.
Depending on which ability you use on which forum, you will find it works somewhere on a scale from (immune -> very strong -> strong -> neutral -> weak -> very weak). Hence it will be important to tailor your abilities to the appropriate forum in order to beat it effectively.
To keep track of the various forum sensitivities, you will be given an item you can refer to in battle that will automatically log your findings.
AFK
There’s a new ability called ‘AFK’ which allows you to skip a turn. This is useful in combination with some of the new status ailments and preventable attacks a thread can do to you.
The Battle Log
There’s a new window during battle that gives you a line-by-line update of what is going in the forum. It’s useful if you miss a turn for whatever reason, or are curious as to what happened a couple of turns ago.
Expiring Consumable Items
In order to keep things challenging, virtually all consumable items now can expire if you keep them in your inventory for too long. The dates at which each consumable type expires is variable, so certain items are better to purchase than others.
Instead of vanishing, when the items expire, they morph into brand new items, which can still be sold at the ppwn shoppe so the financial loss is not so great.
Note: When you choose to consume an item, it will automatically consume the item that’s closest to expiry.
Forum Moderators
In some threads, you might be unlucky and a moderator will appear. When this happens, they will clean up your nasty posts, and the thread will lose some of the pwnage you’ve already inflicted on it (read: it will heal the thread.).
We’re happy with what we’ve come up, and the tester feedback was enormously useful. We don’t have an exact date for the launch of these new features since we have to make sure they are balanced within the game, but we’re targeting within the next month.
Unlike our episodic content, this large-ish update will be FREE to all players, and we’re hoping it’ll help pass the time until Episode 3 is ready.
(Speaking of Episode 3, we’ve got a ton of awesome stuff in the pipeline for that too, and we’ll start divulging more shortly.)