The Five Finger Discount

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. ...

June 19, 2008 · 1 min · eviltrout

Faux News

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. ...

June 17, 2008 · 2 min · eviltrout

New Contest: Emo Haiku!

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!

June 17, 2008 · 1 min · eviltrout

BalanceBot 9000

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. ...

June 13, 2008 · 3 min · eviltrout

New E-Peen(tm) Today!

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 Like most of our “x-in-a-row” E-Peen(tm), each of the new ones has a bizarre cultural/historical reference.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! ...

June 9, 2008 · 1 min · eviltrout

Internet Movie DoucheBags

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. ...

June 9, 2008 · 1 min · eviltrout

Using Metaprogramming for a RPG Battle Engine

Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes when you click on an action on your toolbar in Forumwarz? The action might perform an attack. It might heal you. It might even do both! Some attacks are stronger when you’re weaker, others spawn buffs that protect (or harm you) for multiple turns. How does the game know what to do? Putting Effects in the Database When I was first prototyping Forumwarz, I stored the information for each action as rows in a database table. An Action would have multiple Effects. ...

June 7, 2008 · 4 min · eviltrout

Domination Fiesta!

Forumwarz: Domination Fiesta Our next Forumwarz Domination round will be a Domination Fiesta! Scoops will still be earned for the same activities, only you will receive them in random flavas instead of what you earned. There’s more about it in this thread from BINGEBOT 2015. New Stuff ForumBuildr v2.0 BETA forums are now listed on your bookmarks tab, underneath the Community sub-tab. The ForumBuildr v2.0 Beta list has been shortened to the previous 5 forums. ...

June 3, 2008 · 1 min · eviltrout

Site Updates - Jun 2

Some small updates while we are deep in development of Episode 2: You can (optionally) select avatars from a drop down while creating a new enemy. Signatures now only support 2 images and smaller image dimensions. People with more images in their sigs have had them removed, sorry! Fixed some small bugs: weak forums were VERY strong and the wiki was broken.

June 2, 2008 · 1 min · eviltrout

ForumBuildr Stuff!

I’ve just published our latest forum build, Great Firewall of China. It is incredibly hard to beat. I figured that we have more than enough existing community forums to cover the regular spread of difficulty, why not bring it up a notch and see how you guys do? I will give out E-Peen(tm) to anyone who beats it before Episode 2 is launched. It’s that hard! Here’s the description of the forum: ...

June 2, 2008 · 2 min · eviltrout