It has been too long since the last update. I know you deserve better, so I made this one
extra big and juicy:
Live chat
Now you can chat in real-time with anyone online. Invite people to a game, or just talk the night away!
A huge thank you goes to MrDexter who helped us and is continuing to help as an expert chat consultant, and thanks to everyone who gave feedback on different chat solutions we were considering. We are going with Gabbly as an interim solution while we prepare our own hosted chat, which will be more powerful and give us better control on who's allowed in.
Auto-attack
Do or die! This button will repeatedly roll the dice for you until you've smashed the enemy or have been smashed yourself. To be precise, it stops when you are down to 3 armies, and at that point it works the same as the regular attack button. Auto-attack also has some strategic value during those times when you are trying to cut off an opponent who is playing simultaneusly as you, and every second matters.
Visual dice
Now you can actually see what our perfectly random dice look like. Winning rolls are highlighted. Thanks to Tr0y for designing the dice and helping me avoid some lousy web design.
In-game player listings
Turn status, rank and feedback show up next to players in the game. Rank and feedback show up in various other places on the website too.
Game log enhancement
It now records when a player missed a turn in freestyle games as well as sequential games.
Join games from Game Finder
It was very confusing to click on a waiting game in the search results and not be able to join. Now you can use the Game Finder as a convenient tool to join the types of games your prefer.
Session improvements
Sessions are extended to 1 hour before they expire. I also synchronized the main website session and forum session so you'll never find yourself logged into one but not the other. A nice benefit from this is that the Who is Online section of the forum is now accurate (before it was missing people and had a bunch of bogus guests)
Navigation menu in forum
Isn't it nice that you can go to My Games directly from this announcement?
More emoticons
etc...
Changing email
You could change your email address on the My Settings page, but the confirmation email was being sent to your old email address. How dumb is that!? What if you are changing your email because the old address no longer exists? Well now it sends confirmation to the new address so please take a moment to update your email if necessary.
Return of the moderator
This is kinda old news, but moz976 is back on the Mod Squad
Known performance issues
Sometimes the website freezes up. We know this happens for about 5 minutes each day around 04:00 EST when the backup occurs. This should get fixed in a week or two. It also happens at random times when there is high traffic. I hope to have that those freeze-ups resolved in a month from now, so please bear with us...
EDIT: If you see black dots in the game player listing hit the refresh button (F5) once whe you're in the game. If the logout link looks bigger in the forum hit the refresh button (F5) once when you're in the forum.