We’ve just launched a survey to learn more about our audience, and to get feedback on Forumwarz and the future of the game. Everyone who fills it out will get an E-Peen(tm), and 10 randomly drawn users will get a free copy of Episode 2 (or 7BP if you already own it.) The random draw will happen on Dec 16th. Thanks for helping us out!

This week’s Forum Build is Cosplay Central: Do your friends not understand your need to wear a kimono everywhere you go? Are you mocked for wearing cat ears to school? Come to Cosplay Central, where you’re not alone! Discuss the finer points of wearing pleather, how to make realistic-looking swords out of cardboard, and what fishnets go best with crossplay! (It’s also our first Level 35 forum – Good luck guys!) ...

Subject: Publishers and Panties: An appeal to review my game, Forumwarz. Dear Brian Crecente, My name is Robin Ward, I go by the alias Evil Trout. (this is an open letter, also published on the Forumwarz blog.) I’m the creator of a web-based RPG game called Forumwarz. It parodies the Internet. Instead of traditional RPG games where you might play a thief in a dungeon battling orcs, you play an Internet user, pwning message boards. We currently have about 100k accounts, and a small (yet awesome) community. It’s an indie effort. It was self-financed and made over the period of several years by a team of people working for very little money. To say it’s a labor of love is a huge understatement. ...

It’s been a while since we’ve had a major update here, but we thought we should hip you to some of the upcoming improvements intended for Forumwarz. A couple weeks ago, the Crotch Zombies went through the long and occassionally painful process of prioritizing all of our suggestions for fixes and improvements. We now have a nicely sorted list, and now it’s just a matter of slogging through them. Some of them will be really big and cool, but for the next little while we’re going to push some of the simpler, bite-size fixes that people have long been asking for. For instance, you can soon expect to see: ...

It might be a level 1 forum, but don’t let that fool you about its hilarious content. Our latest forum build is Society for Creative Historical Revisionism: Wouldn’t it be awesome if the Vikings rode dinosaurs into battle against Stalin’s werewolf army? Sadly, mainstream history doesn’t allow for these kinds of facts. Historians use fuzzy methods of research and “facts” that give us the dull stupid truth. Books tell us Anne Frank didn’t win the Minnesota Iron Man competition three years straight and that Ghandi wasn’t actually Mata Hari. Well, we here at SCHR don’t believe those books…because we believe books were never invented. Join us today. ...

We’re trying to get our loyal users to nominate us for a \* award. We’ve created a thread on Flamebate where you will get a special prize if you bump the thread after nominating us. With your help we can spread the word about Forumwarz and make the world a much worse place!

Tonight I deployed a change to the way streaks were being handled in the database. It’s quite simple now compared to the way it used to be: By pwning different forums in a row, you increase your streak If you repeat a forum, the streak resets If you do not complete a forum (die, chicken out, whatever), your streak resets. Every 4 forums you pwn, you will be rewarded with an E-Peen(tm) and pistachio scoops. ...

Balancing a game like Forumwarz is hard. When Episode 1 was released, I did all the balancing by hand. I would literally start the game over with a new member of each class, and progress them all simultaneously, updating the difficulty of the forums and attacks as I went along. As you can probably imagine, this is a horrible way to do things. Even if I played through the game 10 times with each class (which by the way is exhausting), that would still only be about 30 trial runs. As a result, the Emo Kid was horribly overpowered compared to the other two classes at launch. ...

This week’s forum build is special in that it’s the first one that has been published automatically! (Okay, I held its hand a little, but it was done with no manual settings.). It’s also hilarious, and you should check it out: Need to know where to find the best porn on the internet? Need a good torrent? Or would you like to find the closest adult store to your basement? Our trained guides at FapQuest can direct you to any of these places, whether it be on the internet or not! ...

One idea that came up at a recent meeting was to build an ItemBuildr site similar to ForumBuildr. I wanted to run it by you guys: The idea is a contest where people build items for the game. The winning items are automatically put into the economy and can be purchased. The reasoning for this is that ForumBuildr remains popular after all this time. Also, when we ran the Junk contest it was also insanely popular. People just love the idea of their items becoming part of the game universe. ...