Archive for the ‘Site Updates’ Category
scullyangel joins the moderator team!
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.
A new quest! New E-Peen(tm)
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:
What’s Coming!
fig 1.1
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
Last night during our weekly brainstorming meeting, we discussed our next project: ItemBuildr.
ItemBuildr is to items as ForumBuildr is to forums. Every week there will be a competition where items are created by our users for the community.
The beauty of ItemBuildr is that it will mean a steady trickle of new equipment, junk and collectible items into the game economy. And unlike other popular MMOs, each item in our game will have a hilarious blurb of text inside it.
ItemBuildr is kind of the yang to Kyoubai’s ying, in that it guarantees that there’s always fresh new items to be traded back and forth.
Kyoubai is Live!
We’re delighted to announce that Kyoubai, the official Forumwarz auction house, is live!
To celebrate its birth, we’ve seeded it with two special auctions. Note that for the following links to work, you must have a bookmark to Kyoubai. The quest begins around level 5. All players who meet the criteria for Kyoubai should have a tubmail that opens up system.
Wireless Headset – Currently the most powerful item in the game.
Custom E-Peen(tm) Voucher – Whomever wins this auction will have the ability to create a custom E-Peen(tm).
As always, we’re looking for feedback to improve this product over time. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
Kyoubai: The Forumwarz Auction House
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!.
The mascot of Kyoubai will be BidSquid (a cartoon squid with a cowboy hat and a gavel). He’ll be the one who corresponds with you when you are outbid or when you win an auction. He’s going to be designed by the talented artists at Dooomcat. They’re the ones who designed the awesome homepage for Forumwarz, as well as the player class portraits you get when choosing your class.
How the auction house will work:
- You can select virtually any unequipped item from your inventory and put it up for auction.
- You set the starting price, as well as a length of time to run your auction (12, 24 or 72 hours).
- Optionally, you can set a buyout price or a reserve price.
- The auction house will charge you a listing fee based on the parameters of your auction. Generally speaking: the longer the auction, the higher the fee.
- Other players can then bid on items. There is a minimum bid amount based on the current bid on an item. However, you can choose a maximum bid that is much higher than the minimum. In this case, your maximum price remains hidden, but you will automatically outbid any bids that are less than your maximum.
- At the end of the auction, the highest bidder wins the item. If the item does not sell, it is returned via tubmail.
New Items to Trade
- We plan to introduce new and rare items via the auction house. So keep an eye on it from time to time to see if there’s something you’ve never seen before. You’ll never know what you might find.
- We are going to be introducing more rare .MOAR files soon. For those with lots of excess flezz but no patience to grind for Pink Floyd type of files, the auction house will be a great tool!
- We are planning to introduce ItemBuildr in the future, as a way to get a constant feed of new and awesome items into the economy.
When’s it coming out? What’s next on the Forumwarz agenda?
Most of the coding is done. We are mainly waiting on the artwork. If things go well, it will launch by the end of the week. If not, next week for sure!
Afterwards, we’re going to focus on enhancing Forumwarz Domination. There are plenty of discussions going on in the Domination Forum, and we plan to go a long way to address the major issues as well as to make Domination much more fun and open to all players.
Forumwarz has topped 100,000 users!
Happy New Year, Forumwarriorz! And congratulations to the very first pwners of 2009: srtop it and Rape Train. (Great names!)
We expect the new year to bring a lot of exciting changes to our site and a bunch of fun new content updates, so keep an eye out.
We also want to announce that Forumwarz has reached a new milestone. As you can guess from this post’s title, we can confirm that Forumwarz has surpassed 100,000 sign-ups!
This is kind of a big deal for us, because we weren’t expecting to grow so quickly. Needless to say, here at Crotch Zombie HQ, the champagne malt liquor has been a-flowin’!
We’ll announce the name of our 100,000th user in Flamebate. He or she will also receive a honking big E-Peen™ — an E-Peen so huge that it will sweep the nation and terrorize its citizens. Or, you know, just a nominal ‘Peen to commemorate the event.
We hope you have a pleasant and pwnful 2009!
Help us design ads, win some BP!
I just created a thread in Flamebate for a new on-going contest we’re running.
You might have noticed ads for Forumwarz around the web. They’ve worked out pretty well for us in the past, bringing in thousands of new players!
We want to start running more ads around the web, but our current ones are getting quite stale (not to mention we only have them in certain sizes.)
Do you know Photoshop or another paint program well? Do you have some funny (both NSFW and SFW) slogans in mind? If so, you can get some BP for your efforts!
If you know Photoshop, you should check it out! the actual thread is here.
I’m really excited to see what you guys can come up with!
Job Board Enhancements
I pushed out a few enhancements to the job board today. Most are to address confusion players get when they beat a forum and don’t get paid for the jobs they complete. Usually what happens is people don’t know a time limit is attached to a job, or how long it took them to complete it.
So now, if you have a job when you enter a forum, you’ll get instructions in the top orange status bar:
Also, if the job has a time limit, you get a countdown clock after you perform your first attack:
And then, you’ll get a more detailed update in your newsfeed if you complete or fail the job:
New E-Peen(tm) Length System
Previously, everyone’s E-Peen(tm) length was relative to the leader. What this meant was that there was one user with a 13″ peen, and everyone else’s scores would be scaled against it. It was good on paper, but people hated it. There were multiple discussions about how bad it was, so yesterday I changed it.
In the new system, each E-Peen(tm) you earned contributes to a potentially unlimited length. It will never go down.
Unfortunately, people hated the scale of the new system. It meant their 8″ peens went down to 3″. This was to be expected, but after a few suggestions I changed it so that everyone starts with a minimum length of 3″, and then people were pretty happy!
I went to bed, then woke up and realized the rollover code still had the old calculation, and everyone had 3″ chopped off again. I just fixed it.
So yes, going forward: Your E-Peen(tm) has no limit to its potential length. It will never shrink, only grow.
Brownie Point Prices Changes
Effective immediately, we’ve changed the prices for several items in the “Buy Stuff” area of the site:
- The Game Dolphin is now 3 Brownie Points instead of 4
- Changing a Domination Team Name now costs 1 Brownie Point instead of 2
- Lottery Winner has been split up into three levels (worth 1BP, 2BP and 3BP respectively.) The levels assign 250k Flezz, 1M Flezz and 5M Flezz.
Note that if you recently bought a Lottery Winner, we’d be willing to give you extra Flezz if you contact one of the admins, since they now give much more bang for your buck.
