Itembuildr

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. ...

We’ve listened to your feedback on itembuildr and pushed out a few updates: The item-generating code is a lot better. There should be fewer random repeats of the same item class. You should never get the same item class twice in a row. Secondly, there are fixes to prevent pricing from going way out of whack (like with the Dragon Ball items.). Thirdly, we can create special items for all classes now (like Hackers!). Unfortunately, I had to make adjustments to a few of the existing items to keep their prices in line with our economy. There are two new E-Peen(tm) for itembuildr – one is for having your idea chosen. The second is for having your image chosen. A bunch of items built with itembuildr have been moved into the regular stores. Each item will display credits for its creation. They have subsequently been removed from the ItemBuildr consumer’s co-op. I’m hoping these fixes will go a long way to making itembuildr a lot more useful and fun for everyone. As always feedback is appreciated. ...

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. ...

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. ...

So Kyoubai has been quite the success! Since it launched just over two weeks ago, we’ve hosted over 40,000 auctions with 150,000 bids. At any given time, there seems to be over 1,000 auctions to peruse for stuff like rare .moar files. Thanks to all our users who offered input and helped us tweak the system so that it’s easier to use and less prone to exploits. Up Next: ItemBuildr ...

We’re getting pretty close to launching our first major feature since Episode 2 was introduced back in October. It’s called Kyoubai, and it’s an auction house that allows player to auction their items to each other for Flezz. The name Kyoubai was chosen by the horrible denizens of Flamebate in a series of polls. It is one of several Japanese translations for auction, but it also sounds a lot like Ok, you buy!. ...

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. ...