Arxos Posted 23 hours ago Posted 23 hours ago Hello everyone. There's a lot of new stuff coming, and even more new stuff that I have planned. I figured it's about time (more like, well overdue) to further explain the things that are happening or being planned, both to prepare or simply to discuss. As such, I figured I'd start doing a newsletter here, to give these announcements a bit more permanence and not be lost and forgotten in Discord before long. My current plan is to do these weekly, but it probably won't be too long before I reduce the frequency of these to once a month or something in that region. We'll find out what works as we go. Anyway, there's lots of topics I have in mind. Lots of new site features that are already added, or features that are planned for the near or not so near future. But for this week I figured I'd focus on things that aren't quite the same... which begs another important question: What things aren't changing? Well, put simply, most things! I tried my best to make sure SC v2 is the same as SC v1 in most places, as well as that all data is transferred over to the best of my ability. And I'd say I did a damn good job at this, as hopefully SC v2 should feel familiar to longtime fans of SpriteClub. Which isn't to say that everything is the same, far from it, but it's mostly new things, additions, enhancements. Not changes to existing things. And those new things are stuff I'll dive into more over the next weeks. Anyway, so lets get to the things that did change then. Of course, there's probably a few things that I'll forget, but I think this should cover all of the important bits. Changes E-Mail You can no longer change the e-mail associated with your account. Changing the e-mail of an existing account is something very few places offer. SC v1 only offered this because it didn't do e-mail verification anyway, but SC v2 does, so changing your e-mail is just a hassle and not something I want to spend time on when so few sites allow this anyway. With this in mind, please use SC v1 to change your e-mail if needed while you still have the chance. Exhibitions Any exhibitions that you requested but did not get a chance to be played out yet will be cancelled. I'll be fair, this is kind of the result of a mistake of mine in creating the database migrations, but it's really annoying to fix at this stage and just not worth the effort. Luckily, making a new exhibition on SC v2 will only take a minute, or less when using the new template feature. Additionally, SC v2 fully allows turns teams to be matched against single/simul teams, allowing for example 1v4 without having to pad slots. In this instance, the team of 1 will have 4 lives, meaning the match winner is still effectively just whoever gets to a score of 4 first. There are no plans for these type of matches to appear in matchmaking, so the only way for such matches to take place is via exhibitions. Settings All user settings are completely reset in SC v2. The format in which settings are stored is entirely different, and SC v1 simply did not have enough settings for me to bother ensuring existing settings would be preserved. Hence, you'll want to take a look at the new settings page in SC v2 once it goes online, both to restore any old settings you had, but perhaps more importantly, to make use of the newly added settings! The Great Escape This custom mode isn't making it into SC v2. The long and short of it is that this mode existed in SC v1 in order to allow F division characters to escape confinement. However, for a while already and all the more in SC v2, F division has natural means of escaping it. This custom mode is simply no longer needed and has outlived its usefulness, hence why I had already massively reduced the chance of it occurring in SC v1. Re-implementing the mode in SC v2 wouldn't be too difficult, but more difficult than any other custom mode, and I simply saw no reason to put such effort into it, so into the bin it goes. Debuts Debuts still need a few finishing touches in order to be good to go for SC v2. The mode itself actually already works, but there's still work to be done for actually adding new characters to the roster in a productive way. This involved a fair few manual steps in SC v1, and I really want to ensure this process requires as few manual steps as physically possible for SC v2. Because of this I'm leaving it in the oven for a while longer, and the next debuts are expected to occur around September or October. Boss Matches SC v1 had very weird logic for deciding bosses. It did something akin to taking the total size of the division, then grabbing randomly from the bottom half (or top, for demotions), ignoring characters rated outside of the cutoff range of that division (e.g. 1700 for 2nd Division). The thing is, some divisions have very uneven spreads, particularly 1st Division, though there was some code in place to attempt to counteract this. However, even for other divisions it could lead to wild swings in the difficulty of boss fights, as the strongest character in the bottom half could actually be surprisingly high rated. Instead of this weird logic, SC v2 works much more simply. Bosses are simply grabbed from the first 25 rating beyond the cutoff, so for a 3rd Division character looking to promote into 2nd Division, the boss will simply be a 2nd Division character that ranges between 1700 and 1725. Character Bans Characters have various ways in which they can be banned from things. Even v1 had more ways to do this than most people probably realised, especially because some methods were incredibly underused, as nobody but myself could change them. To be a bit more precise, SC v1 could allow banning characters for fighting on or against teams (2 different states), banning from tournaments, or banning from bosses. That last one would also ban them from appearing as opponents in debuts. None of this info was displayed anywhere, though moderators did have means of retrieving tournament/boss ban lists. SC v2 in contrast displays all ban states publicly, allows moderators to change all ban states freely, and expands the possible ban states to effectively... everything. A character can be banned from being on a team, against a team, on a turns team, against a turns team... even banned from appearing on its own! Though I doubt that one will ever get put to use. Besides that, the state of being banned from boss fights and being banned from debuts are now 2 different states instead of being linked. Furthermore, a character can now also be banned from appearing in King of the Hill or Lord of the Valley, which is referred to as a "Survivor ban". Quick note, these bans do not apply to exhibitions, at least not yet. Divisions This is a big one. SC v1 had a very weird structure. Anyone that paid attention to the URL when filtering for divisions would notice that 1st Division was identified by a 5, and 5th Division was identified by a 1. There were also a bunch of divisions ranging from -5 to -9, none of which were normally accessible to users, but they existed. For reasons. Anyway, SC v2 not only re-orders the number association to make more sense (I'm sure this is very important to everyone), but also reduces the number of special divisions: Dupe is the only one unchanged, still housing all of the characters that are marked as "[D1]", "[D2]", etc., marking them as being duplicates of characters already on the roster, but with a different AI or some other change that is meaningful enough for them to remain requestable for exhibitions. Untiered now consolidates the old "Joke" and "Untiered". If you're wondering how to identify joke characters, worry not. This is a perfect job for the new tagging system. Hell, in the long run I might even consolidate every non-matchmaking division into one or two because of this, but I digress. All of -5 through -9 is now consolidated into simply "Removed" and "Banned". The latter of which is not something you'll ever see, those characters will not show up anywhere, ever. As for "Removed", this essentially just causes the character to be banned from exhibitions, but is otherwise not different from any other special division. Quick note, character search pages will automatically filter on matchmaking-only divisions. This can of course be disabled if desired. Additionally, there are also some changes to the matchmaking divisions. The crux is simply that the matchmaking divisions are expanded from 1st-5th to 0th-6th. The exact cutoff ranges for each division is not fully decided, but it is likely that any existing cutoff between 1st-5th will remain as-is. The ultimate goal of this is, first of all, to properly acknowledge the former F division as a proper matchmaking division. It was more or less already treated as such anyway, so this is more of a name change than anything. Secondly, it is to allow the peak strength characters to get a better playground. When SpriteClub first launched, the roster was just over 5000 characters, there simply weren't enough characters to have a healthy ecosystem for a hypothetical 0th division at the time (the same goes for F/6th division, for that matter). Nowadays, the roster is much, much bigger, and it's about time that the low 1st Division characters get their own playground away from the true eldritch horrors. Finally, if you're wondering "when 7th division?", the answer is... likely never. One of the goals of divisions is to be a bit inherently unfair. The big gap between the top and bottom is to create interesting dynamics of a character being "weak" or "strong" in correlation to its division. To allow characters to stand out within a division, be it good or bad. The thing people call "mistiers" is something that I consider a feature, not a flaw. If you want fair matches, rated matches have you covered. Ultimately, divisions require there to be a big rating gap to create such environments, and divisions containing more characters doesn't change the overall power gaps. In this instance, the growth simply allowed room to support a new range that had before been too void of characters. And lets be real, a low 1800 had no business fighting 2200's. Their odds aren't great with a 1950 either, but at least there's a faint chance. Next week That is all for this week! Check in next week where I'll give an overview of lots of new features of the website. For better or for worse, there's too many to cover in one post, but I'll try to cover most things. There'll definitely be changes that I won't even bother mentioning, but I'll be trying my best to give a comprehensive breakdown.
Recommended Posts