By Espark on Sun 27 Aug, 2023.
Ai-Mo Times
August, 2023
“The only literate tribe deserves the best in information and entertainment.”
Tribe Duels
The Tribe Duels are an annual tradition in the Official PolyMain server. The games are structured as a series of tribe brackets, with pairs of tribes pitted against each other, and individuals assigned to represent their tribe in a set of 1v1 matches. Best two out of three matches earns a point for their tribe. The tribe with the most points in each bracket will advance to the next round, until a final winner is decided.
In addition to playing for the honor of their tribe and the ?besttribe title, players will earn a chance to win many prizes. At the end of the duels, there will be a raffle to win one of 50 steam keys. In addition to this, players that played for the winning tribe in the finals will be entered into a raffle for three nitro prizes - a one year nitro, a six month nitro, and a three month nitro, all of which come with a Steam key and a Polytopia merch care package.
This year has had fewer players participating than in the past. So far, 75 players have competed in Round 1. In 2022, Round 1 had over a hundred players.
There have been some complaints about how matches are arranged. Some players feel the first come first serve method of finding opponents is unfair, matching very strong players against very weak ones. Tanya wrote:
“What is the point of a server event like this if not to encourage players to play together and enjoy the game? What's stopping me from simply lurking until a pair-up that provides a more fun experience occurs? What exactly is wrong with seeing an enormous rating gap and saying "nah i don't want to play this"... Shouldn't Directors support fair playing fields whenever they can, over an utterly lopsided matchup with a difference of over 200 elo? Because when the elo disparity is that large, what the deuce is the point of playing?”
Directors and discussing adding an initial sign up phase of a couple days to the beginning of each round to allow directors to pair opponents based on skill or elo rating.
Sound Board
On Aug 14th, Robin asked in the feedback forum “ can we add sounds relating to polytopia”
According to the Discord FAQ, > Soundboard is a voice channel feature that allows you to play a short audio clip that can be heard by all participants in the same voice channel. Much like Reactions and Super Reactions, Soundboard is a way for you to express yourself and react to the voice channel’s conversation or Go Live stream.
Although the feature has been slowly creeping through Discord channels over the last few weeks, the Official Polytopia server started using Soundboard on Aug 23rd, 2023.
Now you can hop into a VC and play over 20 distinct sound effects from the game, like capturing a ruin, healing from a mind bender,enchanting a polytaur, and attacking with a swordsman.
There are still 27 slots for sounds in the server sound board. Mods plan to host a contest next month to allow server members to submit sounds, both original and sounds from other sources. The top sounds that meet criteria in the contest will be added to the sound board.
Road Population Bug
One Aug 2, 2023 the Exponential Road Population Bug was reported by Arvis. This game glitch gives extra population when connecting a city to the capital with roads and taking an explorer with that road connection.
Arvis said, “From my own observation, it would seem that it works because of a mistake in the upgrade trigger checks. It re-awards or gives out pop before and after the explorers resolve, not exactly sure why. And it checks it again after each explorer resolves“
The bug has something to do with revealing fog while connecting with roads.
Joe said, “If it helps, I reported this same bug a while back through the use of the border expand upgrade as well, revealing fog tiles through border expand while cities were connecting. Much harder to replicate but still has the same effect/bug that is described here”
The community manager responded on Aug 3rd with, “Yeah, this is really interesting. We are aware of the bug and hope to fix it soon.”
Many players have taken this bug as a challenge to see who can get the most outrageously large city. GullYY did a great video showcasing the bug and getting a level 61 city.
As of the date of publication of this article, the bug is still not fixed.
Mind Bender Fan Art
By mixiispioch
Credits
A big thanks to Artemis for setting up and maintaining the website for the newspaper. Thanks to Espark for contributing articles.
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Keep up, Ai-Mo!