Hey everyone,

As threatened in our last post, here's the podcast for your listening pleasure:

The Episode 3 Development Podcast

We did our best to cut it down to size, but it's still an earful. We hope you find it an interesting and informative masturbatory aide.

Thanks for listening!

So the great news is the gameplay upgrade launched quite smoothly. We also made some major server software upgrades and the site is running much faster for it. For the geeks reading this: we upgraded to Ruby 1.9.1, which is quite a big change from Ruby 1.8.6. It's over 3x as fast in most of our benchmarks!

Following the gameplay tune-up, I have turned my focus to Episode 3. While I haven't been working on Episode 3 full time until recently, Jalapeno Bootyhole and his talented apprentices have been churning out content for months. There is a lot done, and I will end up spending most of my time integrating it.

We have a much better idea of what shape Episode 3 is taking and can now answer a lot more of the questions we've been putting off since Episode 2 launched. It seems like a great time to do another Podcast, so we'd like to invite anyone interested to post their questions in this thread on Flamebate

Finally, a public service announcement: We have been updating the blog far less frequently since we started using Twitter. A lot of our announcements are better suited to short sentences than long posts. If you are looking for Forumwarz news you should watch us there, too. You can find a link on the right hand side of this blog.

When Episode 3 of Forumwarz launches, there will be hundreds of new items available for players to obtain, trade and use to their advantage. Since we've covered the basics of Episodes 1 and 2 with itembuildr already, we're going to hijack itembuildr for a while to create Episode 3 content.

The content you guys create will exist when Episode 3 launches in addition to the hundreds of items we've created internally, so there will be plenty of new shopping opportunities.

This is how it'll work:

• The stats of items will be hidden. We will assign them later.
• All winners will get a special Episode 3 item contributor E-Peen(tm)
• The winners will also get an IOU for the item once Episode 3 launches. These IOUs can be traded via Kyoubai in the meantime, so it's a great way to earn extra Flezz.

You can start building Episode 3 items right now! Have fun!

I'm delighted to announce that after months of development, we're going to launch the new gameplay enhancements on September 10th.

Addtionally, the new gameplay features will also herald a new Domination season!. We due for a new season, and since things are changing so much we figured it would be better to not mess with the existing medals and winners too much.

Important Launch Notes

The migrations for the new gameplay changes are HUGE. The database has to change in about 20 different ways, some of which could take hours to process. So rather than do our typical "The site should be down for a few hours" thing, we've scheduled a full 24 hours of downtime. This will happen directly following the ending of the current domination round, at 9:30PM EST on September 9th. So we can expect the site will be up by 9:30PM on September 10th.

The road to Episode 3

We haven't talked about it much, but Episode 3 has been under heavy development for months. I'm really happy with the progress the writers have made. Following the gameplay update, the integration of Episode 3 will be my primary development focus, so you'll be hearing more about the cool things ahead.

Until then, I'm hoping these new gameplay enhancements will keep everyone busy, and keep the game feeling fresh.

Thanks again to all the testers, apprentices and regular users who provided feedback to help get this release out the door!

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.

This is what it looks like

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.)

It's been a long time since we've had a Zunecast (yeah, I'm calling it a Zunecast, wanna fight about it?) and last time I was unable to participate thanks to technical difficulties.

Since we have some major features coming up (Episode 3, Forumwarz Apprentice), and I love the sound of my own voice, I figured now's a good a time as any to answer some of your questions using a medium other than my keyboard.

UPDATEZ0RATION: You can download the 'cast here!

Jalapeno Bootyhole is looking for a summer intern: a brilliant, talented wordsmith whom he can mold into the next great writer of online parody role-playing games — a very in-demand career choice, we might add.

Does this sound appealing? Check out the ridiculously long application on our Flamebate boards and then decide if it's right for you!

This could be a fantastic opportunity and a chance to help make Episode 3 even more awesome than we assume it will be. Good luck to all applicants!

I'm happy to announce that greasemonkey superstar Invariel is joining Crotch Zombie over the summer to work on a game extension to Forumwarz. Invariel caught our attention by writing a useful script to make Forumwarz raiding easier.

He's also going to be sitting in on our Episode 3 meetings, so I'm sure he'll get his fingerprints all over that too!

More details on what he's working on will come in the future!

We're pleased as punch (the tasty kind that you drink, not the painful kind you get from mean people) to announce that we've added five new mods to create an all-star, balls-out, ass-kicking team of internet arbitration!

Say hello to spacekadt, Nicco, dobnits, Aldo_Anything and Sergeant Cid (aka Acid Flux)! They're going to be making things a little less Goatsey around these parts.

Show them some mod-love in this official announcement thread!

I've been updatting Twitter a lot more lately than the blog, mainly because most updates don't warrant a full posting. If you have a Twitter account you can follow forumwarz for more frequent updates. Actually, even if you don't have Twitter you can just subscribe to the RSS feed there and you'll get all our updates. Here's some stuff you might have missed:

New Hardware

The site has been pretty laggy lately. We decided to finally do something about it and ordered 3 brand new servers, all of which are faster than our current server. They're currently being set up by our hosting company and hopefully we'll be able to switch over pretty soon.

There will be some downtime as we switch over. This is a pretty major change so it might take the larger part of a day to switch over, but it should be worth it for the performance we'll gain.

Tubmail Updates

I've pushed out some early upgrades to Tubmail, which should help if you have many messages in your inbox. It's now paginated, and you get much more screen real estate to view the list of messages.

ItemBuildr Results

We've published a few ItemBuildr items already. You should check out the ItemBuildr section of the site and the store to see the awesome stuff our users have come up with.

What's next?

Over the next little while I'll be putting out many little enhancements to existing parts of the site such as Tubmail and Flamebate. If you've been part of the community for a while I'm sure you'll be glad to have some of the new tools we plan to build.

We're starting to work out a schedule for Episode 3 development, too. It's a long way away, but we're getting ready to get the ball rolling on that one too.

Forumwarz is looking for a great new moderator to help our team with day-to-day activities.

It's a fun, responsible position and it'll give you access to the secret, inner bowels of the Forumwarz engine.

If you're interested, read this thread and tell us why you think you deserve the gig!

Today I'm delighted to announce the launch of itembuildr, our latest system for players to create content in the Forumwarz world. Whereas forumbuildr allowed players to create forums, itembuildr allows you to create items that your player can actually equip!

Here's how it works:

Step 1. The itembuildr gnomes come up with an item type and stats.

This is done automatically, and is mostly random. The item will either be an equippable item or a junk item. It can be anything from a .moar file (in fact, our first build is a video .moar file) to a tattoo or even a special item. Pretty much anything that can be equipped can be designed by our players.

The stats for the item are generated by marrying two existing items together from a particular class, plus a little random mutation thrown into the mix. So you don't have to worry about designing some kind of super item that's better than anything in the game. Everything should be within the limits of what we consider acceptable.

Step 2. People submit names and descriptions

Any character on Forumwarz can submit a name and description for the item. They are told what type of item it should be and what it's stats will be, and they can submit exactly one idea. The submission period lasts 24 hours.

Step 3. People vote on the names and descriptions

On the second day, people will anonymously vote up and down other people's ideas. Again this lasts 24 hours. After the voting period ends, the winner is picked as the official name and description of the item.

Step 4. People submit images for the item

Now that the item name and description is known, people can submit images for it. Each character can submit one image for consideration.

Step 5. People vote on the images

Again, a new voting period occurs and people can vote on the best images. After 24 hours, the best image is picked and..

Step 6. The item is published!

The item will end up in an itembuildr store at first for a limited time, along with recently published items. People can purchase the item and begin trading it on Kyoubai (or just stockpile it for their collections.) The best items will also be moved (at the discretions of admins) into the actual game stores, so anyone playing the Forumwarz storyline can purchase them.

Working in Parallel

Now that we've explained the pretty straightforward flow of the itembuildr process, you've probably figured out that it takes 4 days for an item to go from concept to the store. That would mean about 90 new items a year, which isn't nearly enough for our rabid users.

Instead we've designed the process so that we're designing two items in parallel!

The way this works is that we've broken it into a two day cycle of submitting and voting. During the submitting day, you can submit ideas for items, but you can also submit images for the previous winner. Then on the voting day, you vote for both. So it still takes an item 4 days to be created, but there are always two on the go. Cool huh?

How to access it

You can start using itembuildr right away by logging in and clicking on the multiplayer tab. Today we are only submitting item ideas since it's the first time it's being run.

Feedback

As always, we welcome feedback on the process, the interface and the integration into Forumwarz as a whole. Let us know what you think and how we can make itembuildr a great piece of the Forumwarz universe!

Today we've added scullyangel to our moderator team.

I think having a woman on our team will ensure that Flamebate remains the most intelligent and respectful forum on the Internet for many years to come.

Fan Service!

For those who have finished Episode 2, we have partnered together with Celerysteve to build you a new mission that parodies one of our infamous forum members. The quest is only available for a limited time, so be sure it check it out sooner rather than later. You can access it on top of your character's page.

New Epeen(tm)!

We've also added some new E-Peen(tm) to the game:

I'll BINGE to that

Gavel Time

Full of SALE

Oranje Pride

A bunch of people showed interest in the conversation editor I showed off in the screenshots of our admin section.

I decided to record a screencast that shows off how the tool works. It's un-rehearsed and rough around the edges but it'll give you an idea of how we write the conversations that you play out in sTalk.

• View the Screencast