Hey, JaSn here! We know it’s been a while since our last major newsletter, so here’s an update on how we’ve been doing. In the past few months, our team has been hard at work, and we’re excited to report that BlockTanks is BACK, and we are firing on all cylinders!

Oh yeah, speaking of “our team”, here’s an update on our management situation:

A New, Active Team

If you haven’t read our last major newsletter, Kevin made the decision in early January to retire from his position as the active lead developer of BlockTanks back in January. At first, this meant that BlockTanks would no longer be worked on, but after a whirlwind of events, Kevin instead opted to put together a team of trusted volunteers to run the game.

So around mid-February, we released a form on our official Discord server where dozens of long-time players (about 60 applicants) from Discord applied to volunteer and help out the game, and now we have a team of qualified, experienced volunteers running everything essential, just as we hoped!

These guys are not just good at what they do, they also have hundreds of hours worth of playtime on BlockTanks spanning years, and are long-time members of the BlockTanks community.

Yes, this also includes a team of new developers. This means that despite Kevin’s retirement from active duty, we are still able to develop the game!

However, keep in mind that most of us are students or have jobs, so we humbly ask that you expect from us a modest, reasonable pace of progress.

Our Progress

The list of stuff we’ve done is too big to cover in different sections, so we listed it all here instead:

• BlockTanks Roadmap: In March, we dropped this year’s roadmap for BlockTanks to present our plans to update the game. (We will be providing important information in the next newsletter to help you navigate!)
• April Fools’ Day Celebration: Our players celebrated April Fools’ Day in BlockTanks with some awesome events that our community members hosted, and with a few goofy in-game changes that we made, for festivities’ sake.
• Updated Shop: Also on April Fools’ Day, we finally updated the shop, make sure to check out the new items in stock before the next shop release!
• Gifting Shop Items: Players can now gift shop items to other users.
• Changes to Gamemode Rotations: We made some important changes to the weekly rotation of gamemodes in public matches. First, we made Free-For-All permanently available (for some reason it wasn’t showing up on weekends). 16v16 and 3v3 are the other two permanently available gamemodes. Here is the new weekly schedule:
  • Sunday: Capture-The-Flag
  • Monday: Payload
  • Tuesday: Capture-The-Flag
  • Wednesday: Payload
  • Thursday: Capture-The-Flag
  • Friday: Battle Royale
  • Saturday: Payload
• Removed Dodgeball: We temporarily removed the Dodgeball gamemode from public lobbies because it proved unpopular and we want to bring it back later as its own gamemode (dodgeball can be hosted in normal Team Deathmatch lobbies).
• Changes to the Map Pool: We edited Fortress a bit (don’t worry, we didn’t change it too much), and we’ve also added a couple new 16v16 maps.
  

Spreading the Word!

Now that we:

• Have elaborate plans to update the game (the number of changes we have planned are difficult to count)
• Are actively running the game on all sectors (the shop, missions, event-planning, moderation, and development)
• Have managed to do this in 2025 (if you’re a player from 2021 or earlier, you’d probably think we would be on the decline at this point)

We will soon be pushing the odds even further by creating BlockTanks-related content to advertise our game across social media!

This is our best hope to get our playerbase growing again; with the tight budget that we currently have, we can’t afford to spend money on ads right now. Social media, on the other hand, requires only the significant effort of a few people with proper expertise, and a little luck!

Other Plans

• Clan Wars: We plan to host this year’s clan wars in July at the latest, but probably somewhere this upcoming June. Stay tuned for information related to clan wars on our official Discord server.
• Shop: We plan to have the next shop update happen sometime in June, to commemorate the shop’s re-launch back in June 2021! Make sure to check out the current shop while it lasts!
• Missions: Admittedly, our team of Community Managers (myself included) has not given the proper attention to assigning missions for currently active players; starting now, we will always be having weekly and monthly missions to provide fun challenges for all of our players.
• Clan Roles (if released before newsletter): Now, clan owners can give their members special permission to change the clan description, handle requests, or kick members.
• Color Scheme Option: We recognize that many players do not like the new color scheme (actually, this was implemented as the last BlockTanks update from Kevin’s team); we will soon give players the option in their settings to choose between that or the old color scheme.
  
• More Frequent Newsletter Posts: Sorry that we came back to you as late as we did, as our last major newsletter was nearly four months ago. Don’t worry, you’ll be receiving newsletters from us every 2 to 3 weeks, at the least.
  

For any questions, you can join BlockTanks’ official Discord server and DM us on Discord, you can catch us in-game, or you can post a comment below. Stay tuned for the next newsletter!

Until next time,

JaSn

Community Manager