Archive for the ‘Home’ Category
Affiliate Ads
As part of the continuous effort to introduce more players to Forumwarz, we have coded up a Beta system for running affiliate ads. We’re looking for people who have sites and are trying to monetize them.
Basically here’s how it works: We give you ads to run on your site. We then give you a percentage of the revenue earned from any users you refer to us. We also give you a special tracking page to see how many people clicked on the ads, signed up for Forumwarz accounts, etc.
Right now we’re only interested in sites that get a reasonable amount of traffic. If you are the curator of one, contact me and we’ll talk about getting you set up. In the future, we might allow anyone to run the ads regardless of the level of traffic their site gets, but for now it’s very much beta and we want to figure out all the kinks.
itembuildr Updates
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.
IDC ignoring command
One of our most requested features for IDC is the ability to ignore other players. Lately I made some changes to how IDC works on the back end that allowed me to implement the feature. Here’s how it works:
On the IDC console, if you type:
/ignore name
Will start ignoring the player in IDC with the name supplied. If you want to unignore them, simply run the ignore command again (it toggles.)
If you want to list all the people you’ve ignored, type in:
/ignore
Without a name. It will tell you everyone you’re hiding from!
Add your own Word Filters to IDC!
You can now purchase your own word filters in IDC. To avoid rampant abuse like people purchasing word filters for “the,” a moderator has to approve your filter.
Word filters have to be at least 2 characters long, and they’ll cost 3BP for 10 weeks of use.
Some of the most recent people who were previously given word filters will have them for free for 10 weeks. For people who had them before that, unfortunately you will have to buy in.
Enjoy guys!
Custom Emoticons!
I spent some time re-factoring our image uploading system to allow for more user submitted content. It was a lot of refactoring, but from now on it’s much easier for users to contribute to our game.
The first step was implementing custom emoticons. These can be purchased for 5BP on the Support Us page. A few have been added already:
:highfive: 
:manphin: 
:goatse: 
They have to be approved by a moderator, but we’re usually pretty quick at doing that. Enjoy!
Meet the new Forumwarz mod team!
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!
A bunch of new stuff!
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.
Mod Idol!
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!
itembuildr is live!
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!
Why I haven’t responded to you!
Thanks to a recent ad campaign, Forumwarz recently passed the 150,000th registered account mark.
When we launched Forumwarz nearly a year and a half ago, we had no idea if people would enjoy it or not, so hitting this milestone is quite meaningful.
Attracting that many eyeballs doesn’t come without a cost, though. When Forumwarz had 150 users, I would personally respond to every piece of correspondence I received, whether it was a bug report, game feedback or just people saying ‘hi!’
I remember a couple of people remarking on the fact that they’d received a reply, saying they never thought a bug report on a web site would incite a reply, from a site founder no less! It was flattering.
However, as the site grew, the amount of feedback grew with it, and it became far too much for me to stay on top of. Have you ever tried to email someone from a popular web site? Did you receive a reply? Probably not!
The thing is, is our business has changed. We used to sit around thinking “well, what next?” Now it’s more like “OMG, HOW LONG UNTIL THAT IS DONE?” We struggle with the complex issue of prioritizing.
Recently, in our chat room, someone told me they were surprised how nice I was, because he’d heard that I didn’t care much about the game. This is a site that I’ve invested thousands of hours working on and one that I spent countless hours of my day thinking about. I have even taken a huge pay cut to work on it full time. And why? Because I love it.
At one point, Forumwarz was just an idea in my head. Now it’s something that many people have enjoyed. That accomplishment is incredibly meaningful to me.
The one thing I want to convey above all else is that a lack of a reply does not mean we don’t care about your issue. Nothing could be further from the truth. We want Forumwarz to be an awesome game too!
Our current solution is a spreadsheet that lists upcoming features we want to deliver (currently about 50). We have a column for estimated development time (which is often wrong!) and a column for our best guess at the value that feature would deliver to our product. Then we came up with a formula that spits out a “score” based on those two factors. If something can be developped quickly and adds a lot of value, we do it first.
Unfortunately, as a player of our game, this might mean the feature you enjoy the most tends to not get upgraded or looked into for a while. I know, it sucks, but it’s a bad side effect of having limited resources. Larger companies than ours can afford to hire more employees to work on more features in parallel, but ours is a simple web game, and we have to make do within the limits of our current revenue steams.
Having said all that, we still appreciate all the feedback we receive even if we don’t act on it right away. Every ticket and email that falls into my inbox gets read, and ultimately prioritized.
Official Forumwarz Blog 
