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.

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: ...

So on Wednesday night, Forumwarz Domination: Season 1 ended. Click the link for the final rankings. Congratulations to all the winners!

We’re going to be recording a Forumwarz podcast soon and we’re looking for people to submit questions for us to answer. Please post them in this thread on Flamebate!

About a month ago I started using Scout to monitor Forumwarz from a performance standpoint. Scout can be very useful for finding performance bottlenecks in your Rails apps! If you set it up with the Ruby on Rails Request Monitoring plugin, it will email you all of the requests that are running slowly. I found this invaluable when debugging performance problems on the site. I was surprised to find out that selling items, for example, was by far the slowest thing you could do! I’d never received a single complaint about it, because the operation always finished in 5-6 seconds, but behind the scenes it was taxing the processor! ...

We’re pleased to announce the winners of our Junk hunting contest! 1st Place - FAIL 2nd Place - L2 3rd Place - Crayoncakes, TUBSWEETIE and Wyrd (3-way tie!) On top of their prizes, them and many other players received New E-Peen. We were honestly blown away with the quality of the submissions! That’s why we decided to make 3rd place a 3-way tie. FAIL has a unique item.

I just published Dolphin Love, and I think it’s the strangest forum we’ve ever built. Here’s the description: Do you like dolphins? What about whales? Come discuss your favorite Cetaceans with us! Post beautiful pictures of Duskys, Orcas, Bottlenoses and more in our friendly forums. Dolphins are so beautiful and graceful. I love them so much, and so should you. If you don’t love dolphins, come in anyway, and see what you’re missing. Dolphins have prehensile penises! HOW HOT IS THAT?! ...

I wanted to remind everyone that this is our last round of Domination for the season. Everyone playing this week will receive double medals on their final scores. Afterwards, Domination wil be reset and everyone will be on a level playing field. So make this last round count!

I don’t think it’s a spoiler anymore that in Episode 2 we’re launching a new class, The Hacker. In Episode 1, the attacks you can execute are all about posting. For example, as a camwhore you’d post a picture of your cleavage to try and derail a thread. The hacker class gives us the artistic license to screw around with more than posts. The hacker can pwn the forum itself, and I’m currently having a lot of fun coding up the various attacks. ...

As you know, we’re hard at work on Episode 2 right now. There’s still a fair bit to go, but we’ve made a lot of progress and things are really starting to shape up! In Episode 1, after you choose your character you are given a short cinematic introducing that archetype’s storyline. All three classes have a different storyline which continues in Episode 2. We’ve brought back the artists who did the Emo and Troll cinematics, but we’ve lost touch with the Camwhore artist. We are looking for someone who thinks they can imitate the style of the MS-painted camwhore art in all new panels. ...