Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Green Titans, Repairing Stairs, Voting
Admin CavemanJoe – 2020-05-22 15:26:58 [Permalink]
Hey, folks. There's a new kind of Titan in town, and they're green. Green Titans are incredibly resilient to strong attacks, but let weaker attacks through just fine. Titans were originally designed to be a group effort, but some of our higher-level players have gotten so ridiculously high-level that they can knock them down all by themselves - Green Titans are designed to be much more group-friendly, by regenerating 99% of damage dealt above 100 hitpoints in a single blow. This means that higher-level characters can still deal more damage than lower-level ones, just not orders of magnitude more.

I've also installed a Binoculars Guy in each Outpost, who will alert you if he sees a Titan. Beware that Binoculars Guy can't see as far when it's dark or rainy.

I've also been working on the Midnight operations, and Midnight Blue is a lot faster now, routinely finishing in around 15 seconds rather than our previous minute or so.

If you haven't read the previous MotD about our Missing Stair, please go and read it via the archives dropdown at the bottom of the MotD page - it's very important. Since I posted it, many other players have come forward with their own reports, which we're looking into now. I've had a lot of email lately, so please forgive me if I'm slow to get back to you. Most of the reports centre around three or four individuals, a couple of whom are long-term veterans. There'll be further updates on this whole situation soon - digging through the layers of this whole thing takes a long time and is emotionally exhausting for all involved, so the mods and I thank you for your patience and kindness during this time. Most of all, thank you to the players who came forward - the bravery you've shown, and your comprehensiveness in providing screenshots, chatlogs etc, will go a long way towards making the Island a safer place for everyone.

The second step in repairing our missing stairs will be to inoculate the playerbase against common manipulation tactics, to make it more difficult for future creeps to go unnoticed. That means, among other things, updating the game to add some clarifications to the rules and introducing a new player safety guide - and it feel weird to say "updating" in this context because online safety guides are a thing from when I was in my late teens getting my first 56k modem, you don't see them around much these days. To that end, I'm soliciting your feedback - what constitutes a red flag, for you? What behaviours do you see that makes you think "Uh-oh, that's gonna be a problem?" Email me, cavemanjoe@gmail.com.

Lately I've been dividing the Island work into game days and social days - on the game days I write code for new features (lately it's been fiddling with the outpost invasion module so that breaches can have automatically-adjusting difficulty like with Titans), and on the social days I've been doing stuff like writing the new player safety guide, looking into getting the Enquirer back up and running, investigating our missing stairs and being present and chatting in the game's chat channels, to let people know I'm here and listening.

Speaking of listening, we have a poll feature here, but we haven't used it since 2016, for two reasons. First, back then people were really sick of polls. Second, the poll system sucks - it's single-vote first-past-the-post, which is pretty widely acknowledged as a shit way to make a decision involving more than two options. So, to help me decide what to work on when, I'm making a ranked-choice survey system for the Island, which will let you arrange a bunch of options in the order in which you'd like to see me work on them. Expect to see it this weekend or early next week.

Have fun and hang in there,

~CMJ

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