By Espark on Sun 17 Oct, 2021.

Ai-Mo Times

October 17^th, 2021

“The only literate tribe deserves the best in information and entertainment.”

Polytopia News

Polytopia Legends Preview

On Oct 11^th, Midjiwan’s twitter feed posted a video of a new game project which he called “Polytopia Legends.”

Some fans started to analyze the video. Viera noted, “Oh man that combo. The Imp on the right attacked the Vengir and pushed him next to the other Imp. So clean.”

Pixel was also excited. “Idk if it's intended but I love ragdoll physics... Imagine Quetzali in this game. With big shields.”

Viera added, “Imagine the special super units.”

Other fans were concerned that Midjiwan’s attention on the new game wouldn’t allow him to finish updating the current app. With that opinion Bog said, “I think they should add more features maybe to the current game.”

The server manager said, “And, of course, Midjiwan decides to post about a new game when I'm on vacation....”

Sticker Contest Winners

In June 2021, Discord announced the option for servers with level 1 nitro boosting or higher were able to add custom “homemade” stickers. On Oct 16^th the winners of the Sticker contest were announced. The top winner was Beauxtron for his animated crab rave sticker. Some of the static sticker winners are showcased below. About half of the static winners were originally made by Kat, a fan artist who was most active in 2019 and has since left the discord. You can see Kat’s original comics on imgur.

Fan Art

by Klibe

Interview

The following is an excerpt from the Polytopian Interviewer, a weekly podcast with occasional bonus content. You can read the full transcript or listen to the podcast through the RSS feed.

Tntmasta: Welcome to The Polytopian Interviewer, where I interview people on their experiences and views on the Polytopia discord community. I have Sofiacastle with me today. First question, how did you first get into the polytopia Discord?

Sophiacastle: I joined in, I think it was June, maybe July 2019. They had the summer skirmish, and I just found out about the game and been playing it for maybe a week or two. So I joined the discord and got involved in the summer skirmish. Did terribly. But then I started looking around the discord setting to talk about all things and discover the different groups, and I ended up joining Aquarion because that was the first tribe I think I bought. That was what I was interested in.

Tntmasta: I was in the summer storms as well. I just had no idea how to do any of my games. So at least you played games.

Sophiacastle: Yeah. I had not played multiplayer at that point. I think it was just against bots, and then I started doing the summer skirmish and had no idea how different it was. It was fun to watch other people or hear about other people trying to.

Tntmasta: You've been a tribe leader on Polytopia main before, what were some of your tasks and responsibilities with that?

Sophiacastle: I was the only tribe leader during the last round before they got rid of it. It was kind of cut off for me. I only had a month and a half I think. But the Aquarion tribe were interested in contests. We had a joint contest with Ai-Mo. Wasn't much other than the tribe leaders might announce something. I had some people in Aquarion and also in just random, different chats. Because I had the tribe leader role, they would ask me questions about the challenges in the challenges section or games. It's kind of like a leadership role. They expected me to know things, and I guess I did. I'd been around for a while at that point. About maybe six months. I did have answers to their questions, but the only reason that they thought that was because I was a tribe leader, which was interesting. And then it got cut off because they switch the system recently. No more that.

Tntmasta: Yep. What do you all do on main now?

Sophiacastle: I don't know. I just see them around, and it wasn't much different talking to other tribe leaders, even while we were all having that role. There's a private tribe leader chat that you get access to and also all the mods and everything have access. So sometimes there's just more interesting conversations there that don't have spam or whatever. We just have those conversations in the other chats now. It's just not one space where they're all there. It's not much different. Tribe leaders didn't do much towards the end anyway. I heard before, back when they were appointed by the mods and admins, they actually had more responsibilities. But before the end of it, tribe leaders didn't do much other than have that special name. Wasn't too much of a change going back to just being normal people.

Tntmasta: Well, not everybody welcomes new members though.

Sophiacastle: That's true. I guess there are a lot of people who are tribe leaders who are the welcomers. Actually recently I haven't been on Polytopia main that much and all I've been doing is going on to the new members channel and just welcoming people every time I go on Discord.

Tntmasta: That's cool.

Sophiacastle: If I'm not able to talk about other stuff.

Tntmasta: So the reason why you joined Aquarian was because it was your first trip you bought?

Sophiacastle: Yeah, it was the first tribe that I bought, and I was interested because of the water theme of it. The colors and everything. The other ones definitely were cool looking too, especially Polaris, because that was the newest one before Cymanti. I joined Aquarion and I stayed because the few people there do talk. Not as much as say, Ai-Mo. I've discovered that I'm super active. But Aquarion is still up there, and the people there are nice and the Aquazine was also something that kind of made me stay. Because I ended up joining us are in a role on the Aquazine because I was interested in writing stuff. And that kind of gave me more chances to talk to people there to look at the discord in general. Just because someone who's trying to search for information, you have to go through different channels, talk to people, ask questions. And that kind of was one of the reasons I pretty much stayed. I don't think I would have otherwise if it weren't or the Aquarian tribe and people were talking to there. Tntmasta: What do you all do in the Crab Cult besides research for the Aquazine?

Sophiacastle: So in the general chat, when I first started, it was kind of in a lull I think ‘cause sometimes people would talk in general, and sometimes people would do roleplay. There's roleplay sections in the tribe server and they have different roles. You had to sign up for the character. They had a bunch of different channels meant for different roleplay, but recently, that became way more active because a couple people were interested in doing it. One of them was a tribe leader with me in the last election period, Jkenney. Few others are really integral playing on the server. Now they've made a new section for it and it's a lot more active. I don't look at the roleplay because I'm not personally interested in that, but they've had many interesting conversations and events happening in the roleplay server. I think it's a reason a lot of people joined that server as well. Is just to either watch the roleplay, or be a part of it, which is very interesting.

But other than role play, the active people just kind of come and say hi and be silent for a couple days, except for one long conversation between two people. And then it'll go back to being silent for days. A couple of the other mods started a tournament of some sort. I'm not in that either. But this polytopia tournament is kind of like summer skirmish, but on a mini scale. Having competitions, or battles, you see who's going to be the winner of that whole competition. That's also something that's been going on. So even without tribe leaders, there are different people stepping up to do activities. It’s actually kind of nice.

Tntmasta: For the Aquazine, do you usually focus on research? Or what do you do?

Sophiacastle: At the beginning, it was more of just writing and making sure that it was all smooth. It was me and the owner of the Aquarian server, Tamarissz. Mostly he did the research, and most of the writing before and then I took on more of that actually going out and interviewing people. So that was back up until maybe December, but because both of us who were the main ones working on the Aquazine have University, it's kind of gone dead recently, and I apologize to everyone for that. That's how it’s been doing so far. It might be nice if someone else will be interested in taking it up, but it's part motivation and part availability.

Tntmasta: I heard from some sources that the Aquazine changes every few months. Is that still true?

Sophiacastle: Yeah. We were thinking of making it an online thing where people would send articles wherever they want. That's actually what we said in our most recent article that we were going to switch to an online thing much like the Ai-Mo Times. But because there wasn't as much individual interest in writing a full article and uploading it. Everyone there isn't really interested in writing articles. We don't have very much planned right now, but we hope to maybe come back at some point, if there's enough interest. I can't make any promises and Tamarissz said the same thing. Make any promises about when the Aquazine will be coming back, unfortunately.

Tntmasta: What got you into Polychamps?

Sophiacastle: After the summer skirmish, I kind of got into doing elo as well, and I did two games very slowly. But I eventually got up to some point where I think I got sent an automatic lot message DMs saying, “you got into this elo point. You should join Polychamps.” And so I did. I've been hearing about it since I joined the discord. But I wasn't interested in doing a formal game scenario because that's a time commitment just like I wasn't interested in being competitive. I joined the server and started doing some games and I really enjoyed the different ways of playing. Because in regular games, you just have to fend for yourself in the scenarios that you're in. And maybe in elo, you're in team games, but those are so unreliable, because you're matching with random people. They can drop out at any point. Maybe they'll timeout for days and just disappear. Or maybe they’ll be there, but they're not very good. Or they'll completely forget you're on a team and start just attacking you, which defeats the purpose.

So Polychamps is a lot more organized and it's full of people who are actually motivated to play the game properly, I would say, or at least play team games properly. Communicating with other teammates like their whole system is that before you can even join one of the teams, they have to see if you're good at communicating. They'll choose the people who are best at actually talking and making things clear with your posts. I ended up joining a team because I was really into saving every screenshot because you have to send screenshots of your screen, because they don't have any sort of team option on the game so far. I really hope that's something they'll add in the future to have team games. Maybe having vision of what your other team can see as well. That would be super interesting. Also kind of difficult to implement. But so far, you have to screenshot every single turn, tell your partner what you're doing, figure out and negotiate how each of your tribe’s abilities to advantage in the game. Say one person will attack the team one turn, and then the next person will do it right after things like that. Very interesting.

Tntmasta: That's all the questions I have.

Sophiacastle: All right. That was very interesting. It kind of was going into the past for me because I haven't been doing very much recently.

Tntmasta: Alright. Well, thanks very much for your time.

Sophiacastle: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Read or listen to the rest of the interview in the Friendly Polytopia server.

Mute Ban Column

Disclaimer: Many mute and ban commands are executed in admin-only channels. Some fields below will show “unavailable” if the commands were not performed in public channels. In some cases, the data can be inferred from context and will be enclosed in parentheses.

Editor’s Note

The Ai-Mo Times began as a daily summary of activity in PolyMain in March 2020. 1Chill enthusiastically wrote a review of the day’s happenings, often quoting members and highlighting the day's events. Druid and I helped with proofreading and, as 1Chill became less active, we took over writing.

The newspaper has gone through many changes since it started over 18 months ago. PolyMain has seen roles, channels, and staff come and go. Modmail is now available for members to anonymously report concerns. Also, the community is far less active than it once was.

Working on this fanmade newsletter has brought me joy and pride. I am grateful to everyone who has contributed—writers, artists, and proofreaders. If there are things I can do to improve, I want to know. If the newspaper’s reputation or my writing is harming others, I also want to know.

This edition was very hard for me to write. It did not bring me the joy I usually feel. I may take a break. It is important to know your limits and step back when you feel overwhelmed. I wanted to thank everyone who has supported me and this fan endeavor along the way.

Art by Klibe

Credits

Thanks to all our contributors: Espark, Noru, Tintin, and Tmas. A big thanks to Artemis for setting up the website for the newspaper. Also, thank you to our faithful readers.

Keep up, Ai-Mo!