Hey all! Hopefully you liked our spooky events!

We’re back with more news because there is a ton to follow-up on and cover:

• QoL Updates 🍁
• Moderation Updates 🔨
• Map Updates 🗺️
• Survey Feedback 📋
• November Surprises 👀
• Shop & Events 🛍️

Without further ado,

Quality-of-Life (QoL) Updates

Starting us at the top with QoL, we have patched a number of inconveniences in Blocktanks that you have voted for us to prioritize!

Anomalous Weapon Disappearances and Rebounds

Related to the shooting-through-walls bug we recently patched, we were also looking to correct the way wall-edges perceive bullets. Actually to borrow another Rhykon clip, we were looking at the following problem:

When a weapon perfectly strikes the edge between walls, it may disappear, or in the case of bombs, rebound weirdly. This wasn’t as stark of a bug as shooting-through-walls, but it was very much linked to it.

Ngara and I have been examining this problem, and we finally put out a patch to correct the way wall-edges treat bullets. Let us know if you see improvements or if the patch doesn’t suffice, but from our testing, it may very well be addressed!

Mission Completion Notifications

You’re seeing that right! If you complete a mission and the match ends, you will finally see notifications for what you completed 🫡

Some match statistics are saved when the match ends, so progress updates were best finalized at that time based on how our stuff worked.

This was an item you voted as priority #14 of 50, a “High”.

Dark-mode Update

Next to it, at #12 (also “High”), we finally applied Dark-mode to the whole site!

It took us a bit actually to get this one right, as we initially applied it based on the in-game dark-mode:

While it does help reduce the bright white screens, some folks want us to take it further. We’re brewing a potential “darker” mode right now!

Auto-Respawn Option for VIPs

When you die in Blocktanks, you must wait five seconds to respawn. For regular players, we must show ads to try to generate a small bit of revenue to support server hosting costs, and that’s one of the places we squeeze them in.

But for VIPs, we don’t show ads. So it was suggested to us to make it so VIPs can auto-respawn after the respawn timer is up, and behold:

No more needing to mash the respawn button in a tense game, it’ll respawn for you 🙂

Player Menu Updates

When you hit the player icon in the top left of a match, or you hold TAB in-game on PC, you would be shown the list of players in a match, their current kills and deaths, etc. One such thing you could do in this menu is click on a username to…report it? That was it??

Hah, no more! You now have far more choices we think that make more sense, such as “View page”, “Add friend”, and yes, “Report”. Moderators may see extra options based on their role:

We also improved player reporting:

You can now report players without leaving the match, and you can still choose between a normal player report or a farming-type report.

These issues ranked #9 (“High”) for allowing reporting from within the match and #23 (“Medium”) for allowing you to add friends from the in-game player menu. Moderators also got some of their Mediums knocked out with this, so everyone wins hopefully 🤞

Moderation Updates

Speaking of moderation updates, we did get a number of those in too. But the two big ones that I think everyone should be aware of are:

Profanity Update

In Blocktanks, I will playfully relay how our old profanity system worked by imagining you typing in the following badword:

Typed Word	Filter Action
Badword	Blocked
Bad word	Allowed
Bad.word	Allowed
Baaadword	Allowed
B@dword	Allowed
Badw0rd	Allowed
Badwrod	Allowed
Badwörd	Allowed

You get the point. It was an extremely difficult issue to deal with, because there are so many ways to represent a word, and we didn’t want to overblock something and punish innocent players trying to have a normal conversation. This gets compounded by complex rules with three or four letter words that appear regularly in other words.

So, after no short amount of time hammering many of these cases out, we have finally arrived to a newer filter, where the above cases should be blocked actually without generating a bunch of false positives.

While some players may believe we are challenging their freedom of speech, we are instead trying to create an environment where anyone of any age can play our game, and parents should be able to better rest assured we take this matter seriously. A community without a bunch of slurs, harassment, and curse-involved insults should hopefully be a more positive and welcoming one 🙏

Actually the system will auto-report and auto-mute you when you try to be profane. We still have human moderators though who will review your cases, for now anyway.

Account Terms Update & Farming Language

On that note, we have provided a quick-draft summary of what we’re guarding against when you play Blocktanks. These brief points (and greater Community Guidelines) help illustrate what will get your account acted against.

Farming has been probably an ill-described issue. Our existing abstract in our Guidelines was designed to be intentionally general, relaying:

It is a catch-all, and our new sign-up summary does give one example already, but I’d like to illustrate several farm-cases we’re hunting for and moderating:

• Spawning additional guests or accounts you pilot to raise XP and stats, or complete missions
• Killing guests or accounts a contact of yours pilots to raise XP and stats, or complete missions
• Killing folks intentionally “feeding” their accounts to you (allowing you to get free kills)
• Intentionally using guests or accounts to despawn bots and get a bunch of free flags in CTF, Payload points, or win matches
• Forming alliances to complete missions or farm objectives without resistance, e.g. flags, payload points, etc.
• Helping others raise XP or stats, or complete missions, by “feeding” an account or guests you control (allowing it to die or lose intentionally)

Phew that’s a lot. And there may even be more cases, but with that kind of list, you get the point, and why we used such general terminology in our Guidelines! 😅

If you see any of these cases in matches, please do report it, especially with our easier reporting feature. Be sure to set the report type to “farming” to automatically send us replays 🫡

Map Updates

Okay on more enjoyable topics, let’s get back to our updates. We’re getting closer to December, and we may wish to reintroduce certain map events 😏

Well anyway, we’ve got something that will help make any such events much easier!

Simple First, an Actual Map Button

See that new map button! 👀

Hah, before you had to go through the “Host Game” button, then click on the “My Maps” tab, then the “Create/Manage Maps” button. That’s a lot operations just to find the obscure map creator!

It was a simple edit, so we’re glad to get it to you. But we wouldn’t have a whole “Map Updates” section if that were all eh? Up next,

Add/Remove Rows/Columns

You ever make a map that’s just shy of a row or column you needed? Oh but then you would go into the settings, add a row or column, and they get appended to the very END of the map?

Or maybe you’re like me — you create a big spacious map for a certain Spooky Snipers event.

People mostly like it, but commonly complain that it’s too big? Oh but resizing it with the map settings again makes it:

Yeah no. That wasn’t going to cut it (actually it’s one of the main reasons I delayed getting this map in for this round). We should be allowed to edit rows/columns at any point of the map.

YES, on PC, if you hover over the left or top edges, you can finally delete or add rows and columns by clicking on their respective buttons!

For mobile users, since you’d have trouble hovering, a new add-mode, delete-mode cycle button was also added!

Ah, but you can see another new button there too, can’t you?

Symmetry Functionality

Has been added to aid you in making those perfect maps! There are many such functions, like mirroring vertically, mirroring horizontally, or even rotate-copying quadrants! It probably won’t solve every case, like adding unique spots on your map, but hopefully it otherwise makes map making so much smoother!

We actually have two more map updates that may squeeze into November, so keep your eyes out 👀

Survey Feedback

Well we did say in October that we’d get a feedback survey out to collect your opinions of our experimental abilities and Gun Game updates. We did put out such a survey, and were able to collect 34 responses! Let’s review together:

Abilities

Will abilities be staying in BT? Well according to you all:

Yes! They will be staying. But there’s a couple of ways to look at this chart. While the majority voted for abilities to be on by default, given the three choices (41.2%), if you combine the “off by default”s and “keep it on a schedule” to mean “I don’t want to see abilities all the time no”, actually those two would end up having majority (~59%).

As such, we may end up keeping them on a schedule after all, to please both sides.

And the cooldown system?

Look at that perfect split! 50% voted to keep the cooldown system as-is, but the other half wants us to incorporate dodging for ability-use to be more skillful. We’ll have to weigh that feedback carefully, and we may ask follow-up questions soon!

And of course, we asked if abilities should apply to a future ranked mode.

Another split! Actually to tell you a secret, we added in the “let folks vote per match” option later in the survey upon a player’s recommendation, after ~22 people already voted. We also added the “any abilities that should be specifically excluded from ranked?” question in the same addendum.

But that meant that of 34 entries, after the initial 22 folks voted, 11/12 thought that we should specifically exclude phase-dodge from any talks of “ranked”. So will phase-dodge be staying?

Yes! It has an uncontested majority vote to stay. But a common condition people began to write was that it should stay out of ranked, echoing the above. I will have a follow-up question I’ll post soon in our Blocktanks Discord poll channel, so stay tuned!

You also voted for it to keep it’s duration at 2.5 seconds, so we’ll do that:

To not make the post even more massive, I’ll summarize the majority votes for Yoink and Dash:

• Yoink’s grab-range will be kept at 1.5 blocks (it was a close contest between that and 2 blocks!)
• Yoink’s duration will be kept at 4 seconds
• Yoink’s cooldown will be kept at 30 seconds

Ironically people voted the same way with Yoink as to whether or not to keep it, but that is still majority!

And as for Dash:

One of our thoughts given everything is to see if folks want to have ranked start with Dash alone and RAGS, but we’ll make sure whatever we end up doing has community buy-in.

As for potential future abilities, thank you all for your great feedback! We did see some commonalities, one of which was the ability to temporarily shrink (which does sound less OP than phase-dodge to be fair).

We’ll carefully review and see what folks think.

Gun Game

The most common feedback points we seemed to get were:

• Adding better indicators for how many more kills one needs to get to advance tiers
• Adding bots or more incentives as the mode can be empty
• Changing the weapon order in a better arrangement, e.g. from spammy to less spammy, or easy-to-kill-with to harder-to-kill-with
  • Honestly I may have us incorporate these feedback points and pick which progression it is at random (still following these recommendations) to switch things up
• Updating the grenade phase in some way (e.g. reducing number of kills for it, adding regulars to it, etc.)

Noted, thank you all! We have some modifications to undertake, and XP will be awarded shortly 🫡

Oh right, I am seemingly forgetting one more question…

Surprise Updates

Okay I knew for some time actually players wanted some form of teleporter in the game, because we had several posts about it in our Discord. I confess that I anticipated that the third option would be the most desired, more than abilities or an item.

As such, I’m going to pull an “October blog move” and let you know that map makers can now experimentally place teleporters in Blocktanks!

There’s a lot of colors, they represent the possible channels you can place. You can place:

• Portals that are rare (don’t spawn frequently in a given match but exist)
• Portals that are frequent (present in a match more than not)
• Portals that are fixed (always there)

You can place many such portals in your maps, but there are some bits to know:

• At least two of a given color should exist, no one-off portals that lead nowhere lol
• Fixed portals come in pairs. Only two can be used per color
• A given portal has a cooldown of five seconds, so folks cannot rapidly self-teleport themselves
• No portals don’t allow for bullet/nade throwing shenanigans yet lol

I figured that by allowing map makers to make portal choices, there’s a lot more control as to when teleportation is permitted or not.

But that’s not the only surprise!

Remnants of our Spooky Shenanigans Event

Hopefully, everyone had fun with our Spooky Shenanigans event on the 31st! The developers and community managers descended to trick-up some matches throughout the day.

Something new you may have seen during that time:

This signified that the match was altered from one of our tricks. But alas, I fear our experiment may have broken out of our Halloween lab and matches can occasionally self-mutate! 🙊

If you play in these matches, you’ll get an additional XP multiplier of 1.25x.

We kept it as a rarer occurrence for public matches, but it should:

• Provide an interesting challenge mode that breaks up the monotony of matches
• Allow you to try a limited taste of our Spooky event if you missed it
• Grant you an additional XP multiplier of 1.25x

But there was one more experiment that escaped, we really need to improve our lab security 🤦

Events and Shop

From now until November 10th, it’s possible you may see scarier new Superbots invade matches from their usual holding cells. They seem to be motivated to avenge completely crushed bots 🤖

Our CCTV footage captured the following sample:

They seem to possess all sorts of new abilities, such as:

• Dodging grenades
• Rerouting against bottle bombs
• Faster reaction time than the angriest of bots
• Basic sense of angling

To help restore order, we’ve put out a bounty. Taking them down should award you a generous XP bonus paid at the end of your match, if you can deal with them.

A map-related contest may also be announced soon, and we are giving thought to potential clan-related contests as well.

As for the shop, we’re pleased to announce that it refreshed just before Halloween hit!

Lot of spooky stuff you can grab from it, it appears to be a bit of a mystique and masquerade theme this run, with a rare solo-only decal as well! Thank you to all our artists for making this possible 🙏

Summary

Yeah that’s a ton. Lemme summarize that:

• Patched the anomalous weapon disappearance and rebounding bug 🪲
• Mission completion notifications ✅
• Dark-mode on site 🌚
• Auto-respawn 🔁
• In-game player menu options for adding friends, reporting without leaving, viewing pages, etc. 📋
• Profanity filter updates 🤐
• Can quickly visit your maps, modify rows and columns, and make them symmetrical 🗺️
• You wanted teleporters as map-maker features, we did that 🔴
• Mutated matches for 🌶️
• Superbots breakout 🫣

What are we Tackling Next?

• Polishing Gun Game
• Map QoL Round #2
• Achievements (in-progress)
• Clan Quests
• Currency
• Blocktanks Tutorial
• Mini-ability?

Hope you’re looking forward to it, and be sure to join our Discord server if you can for follow-up polls!

Warm Regards,

SirDrone
Blocktanks Developer