Hey BT!

Since our last post in March, we have been steaming on ahead with several action items. You’ll hear me yap about:

• Roadmap updates 📋
• QoL + Support updates 🪜
• Upcoming May/June updates 👀
• Shop updates 👜

Without further ado,

Roadmap Updates

Last round, I was writing about where we were with our roadmap updates:

Noww,

Indeed! We have two major roadmap updates to share:

1.) Automated Mission Rotations are finally done (subject of course to all our initial review). Most automated missions should work, but let us know if any don’t, as the feature is pretty experimental. You’ll see them crop-up as “Weekly Challenge” and “Daily Challenge”.

I had brought this effort forward back in my time as a moderator when previous Community Managers (CMs) were time-choked at getting missions across. There were even times you may recall when we didn’t even have missions! Not to mention that mission rewards and quality could be inconsistent, and learning how to make missions using our internal tooling can be somewhat confusing (especially every time we transition to new CMs).

Well I put it forward and you all upvoted it for prioritization, and now as developer, I worked on it with the splendid help of our CM team and Yolo, and got it across.

tl;dr for what this means:

• Every week, two weekly missions
• Every day, two quicker daily missions
• Increased and standardized chances to earn XP
• Always something to pop-in for
• Most importantly, busy CMs? No problem at all for missions. Instead, CMs are given more time back for engaging with the community and hammering out events.

You may see more work later piggy-back off this effort.

2.) Clan Stats and the Stat role have arrived!

Clan owners, clan leaders, and members with the new stats role will be able to see your detailed clan stats! CMs also have the ability to see any clans’ detailed stats, as they may need this data to organize clan events based on activity or strength.

Here are some of the examples you may expect to see. We’ve added an activity view to see stuff like time invested, recent XP earned, last login, etc.

We have an overall table to sort all sortsa stats like Botless KDR:

We have a general performance section that tells you how your clan is doing overall, gives you median clan member stats, and even tells you who your top and lowest performers are:

And for the rank-competitive folks, we have documented folks’ positions on the global leaderboards:

This information should all be hopefully useful to clans as they strive to improve their performance. Clan leaders may use this info to help either craft their rosters or work with existing members on improving.

But it also doubles as a loyalty reward, not re-mentioning the CM uses. Clan leaders who trust certain members or appreciate consistent member activity may grant them this new Stats role as they deem fit.

With the automated mission rotation update and clan stats update done, we’ve knocked out 5 of your highest ranking items🫡

There have been several more security, moderation, event, and support items we’ve also fielded alongside those as you recall, such as email-change delays, but I’ll mention what else we’ve been stewing.

QoL/Support Updates

You all may remember our March post mentioning I had given map managers the ability to edit the official map pool, and CMs the ability to do stuff like clan and account transfers.

These are what I consider to be supportive updates that empower staff to carry out functions that would have previously relied upon e.g. me. That means, more can be done when we’re busy (happens).

And so, I am pleased to say I got done with many of those this past month or so, here’s a breakdown:

1.) Community Managers, Developers, Map Managers, and even Art Managers can now restart the servers if something goes down. Funnily enough this actually happened this week, where the Asia and Europe game servers blipped out suddenly. Our CMs initially pinged me while I was at work, but then remembered this convenient new tool and successfully restored Asia and Europe 🥳🙌

This function is useful to Map Managers as well, as the game servers can now be restarted upon map pool changes and load in the new maps.

2.) Art Managers can edit the shop settings themselves, which also used to rely on me to throw in the banner, lock the shop, etc. And building off of the above, editing the shop settings auto-restarts the website now to load in the changes 🎉💪

3.) Farming search and auto-farm-reports (with replays) were both added to quickly bolster moderators’ abilities to hunt for farming matches, the latter to save a bit of time hunting. We also are attempting to put down a farming bug, but we’ll share more about that later.

4.) Artists regained their access to the item catalogue, and can now search it for items using our new tool! They can search by artist, colors, keyword, etc. Gone are the days artists will wonder “has XYZ been done yet?” and have to ask art managers and other artists.

Here’s me searching stickers for “animal” based on what we’ve tagged so far:

Yes though, you also heard that right. Preluding this, Yolo and I worked out the Art Credit and Categorization update as well to start better categorizing items and giving artists the proper credits they deserve. We still have more historic items to get through, but for a first pass, here’s a couple changes you may start noticing:

We will continue rolling out artist credits where we can, and we aim to incentivize artists to submit art to get free items in return. Pop-in our Discord to inquire more!

5.) CMs got automated mission rotations as mentioned, freeing up some of their time, but they also can now modify clan XP and clan kills. This effort is not immediately useful, but it will be soon👀

Upcoming Updates

We have a ton planned for the summer. Because of that, this month is gonna be busy.

1.) Gun Game, a new mode, will be slated for Beta testing this month. If that prevails, you may see rotations change-up a bit and/or a new event 🔫

2.) Thanks to Unknown, Abilities are also sliding in to said Beta test. As mentioned in March, we consider hammering out our mechanics to be essential to nailing the feel of ranked, so please do drop-in to help us test more! 🙏

3.) Ngara also began working on a patch for shooting-through-walls, we may decide to incorporate that as well into our Beta test. For reference, shooting through walls was actually rank #7 🧱

4.) With a lot of farming checks in, clans (and us) able to better review activity stats, and CMs able to address clan stats during farming cases, a greater incentive to reaching the top of the weekly board is coming. Stay tuned 👀

5.) More moderation tooling is set to come into help keep out repetitive trouble-makers, but also give certain folks a final chance. BT may see a more official return of some prominent players, TBD. What you need to know is, we may soon be collecting certain connectivity and device information, and we will notify you promptly when that occurs in-game with all the proper procedures. 🧑‍⚖️

6.) Artists, we want to give more to still. We want artists to be able to test items locally. We also want artists to be able to make cooler skins that aren’t limited by team color constraints. You’ll see more around these two goals fairly soon. 🎨

7.) Currency is still planned, just gotta wade through everything else first 🤽

It is true that while we got done with automated mission rotations and clan stats, a ton hasn’t changed about the game itself yet. Once we get Beta working again (yep it broke again woo), we’ll announce a Beta test and get everything sorted for this month. Please do help us test!

HOWEVER, the support work we did was no-less crucial, because it gives everyone what they need to succeed, reduces time sinks, and unblocks efforts. Also restored the game expediently this week! 🫡

Shop/Events

Spring has sprung, goodbye Halloween!

_{Thanks MDS for the excellent banner!}

There have been a few events that have manifested here n’ there since March, such as the April Fools’ edits we made, the Easter collectible event, etc. GP is putting some weekend events together that can net you some extra XP, I encourage you to pop-in and say hi if time allows it! Looks like the next one on May 3rd will take place at 12 PM UTC.

And again, keep your eyes out for the Beta tests coming this month! You will also get XP from participating and providing your feedback, we’ll give you some instructions soon!

Closing

Lot of backbone work this last month or so. But it was critical to paving the way for what is to come. We hope to make this summer big, and we’ll need your help to do so as we roll out the mentioned features!

Thank you all for reading, I know I had a lot to update y’all on. Hope to see you soon!

Warm Regards,

SirDrone
Blocktanks Developer