Dear community,
You are reading our bi-weekly community update.
We hope you all had some lovely holidays (and/or are still looking forward to them in your region) and enjoyed our little April Fools prank with Talos the Automaton. For those who missed him, here is one of the things that totally happened. But now, let’s get you all the most recent news and previews for the next version!
Player Council update
As you have probably seen by now, we announced the second term of the Player Council project on the forums and are starting the candidacy period today.
In the meantime, our former Inner Council members are working on putting together some thoughts on their experiences with the Player Council. Once they decide to publish this, you will of course find it here, on our DevBlog. 🙂
At the same time, we invited 3 of the former Inner Council members to act as the Council Advisory Board for the second term: HBB-1 (NL), phidippidies (EN) & florian799 (FR) and are very happy that the three of them accepted our offer and are willing to help the next generation of Inner Council members.
For more updates on the Player Council, please stay tuned and keep watching both our forums and our DevBlog.
v2.160
Browser version 2.160 was released on Tuesday and Wednesday. The mobile version is pending approval on Apple side.
This time, both versions share the same content: Battle point calculations were reworked, Medea’s and Telemachos’ bonus effects were increased from +1 to +1.5% per level, all events with a Wheel of Fortune are going to display the chances of winning each of the prizes from now on and it is now possible to disable the confirmation prompts, which appear when attacking a member of your own alliance.
The battle point changes come in preparation to the new Domination endgame and aim to make battle point stacking by attacking own units or units of alliance or pact members a lot less attractive. Battle points continue to be calculated per unit and the changes are also applied on a per unit base, meaning that a kill of one of your own units always yields 0 battle points and the sum of all battle points gained by killing units owned by alliance or pact members is lowered to 20% of the original amount, while any other killed units will still give the usual amounts, even if they were accompanied with any of the aforementioned “friendly” units.
In this version we also kicked off a series of security improvements. Unfortunately, one of these security improvements will change the handling of external images added to the game through BBCodes in the near future, because they could potentially be used to prompt users to enter their user data and thus steal the account. Only images of image hosters that are compliant to several security requirements, including CORS, will then still be displayed. We are looking to make these changes as little intrusive as possible, but it will not be possible to cover any image hoster since not all of these services meet general security requirements.
Next version preview
The sprint work for version 2.161 will be concluded this week.
Unfortunately, we had to postpone some changes, which were initially presented for 2.160 in the last community update. The spell highlight animation is one of these changes. Now, with 2.161, we will finally introduce the highlight effects which will show especially to new players what the spell they cast changed for them, be it added resources, units or bonus effects, the respective area will light up to show what happened.
Additionally, we changed the way the player council election menu works a bit. For the next elections, all candidates will be assigned a random position in the list of candidates to ensure that no one has any advantage due to being displayed first. The shuffle happens every time the window is opened, so make sure to write down the name of your favorite candidates instead of remembering their position in the list if you cannot make up your mind immediately!
Last but not least, this update will come with the aforementioned changes to the handling of images, so please make sure to stop by on our beta servers to check if images hosted on your personal favorite image host will show up after the update and chip in to the discussion on our beta forums, even if it works for you.
The current update schedule for v2.161 is as follows:
Tuesday, April 17: NL, SE and SK market
Wednesday, April 18: international roll-out
Version 2.161 becomes available for testing before the official update on our beta servers. Please follow the daily changelogs to learn when features become available!
Weekly stats
The following statistics represent activity between March 22 and April 4:
| New tickets | Answered tickets | Av. resp. time | Rated tickets | Av. rating | |
| Week #13 | 1962 | 1737 | 4.09 | 398 | 4.32 |
| Week #14 | 1873 | 1742 | 3.68 | 363 | 4.01 |
Bugs
| Status | Browser | Mobile | All |
| Open | 12 | 1 | 13 |
| Reported | 23 | 0 | 23 |
| Resolved | 14 | 2 | 16 |
Have a nice time and see you around!
As Lead Community Manager and passionate gamer, Steffi knows of the importance of transparent information sharing while keeping an eye on the needs of both players & development team. She takes community feedback and makes your voice heard at InnoGames!