By Espark on Fri 29 Sep, 2023.
Ai-Mo Times
September, 2023
“The only literate tribe deserves the best in information and entertainment.”
New Challengermode Tournament System
September 2023 saw a new official Polytopia tournament system in ChallengerMode.
There are eight weekly tournaments, a total of 24 monthly tournaments. Your seven best results throughout the month will contribute to your standing on the monthly leaderboard, granting you a shot at the top 16 positions and entering the monthly tournament
Each of the 24 monthly tournaments had a €10 prize pool. The new ladder system was plagued with problems. There were issues with player scores not getting automatically added to the leaderboard. On the Sept 18 tournament, there were issues sending scores from Polytopia to Challengermode so wins were not processed by the app. Players were asked to report their wins in the Discord. Then, the wins were manually added by Simona, the CM admin.
The new system suffered from its own popularity. The most common complaint was that many people who wanted to play could not get a slot. In order to get a spot, players needed to confirm participation 15 minutes before the tournament started. However, way more people registered that slots were available which means it was a race to confirm.
Cora complained, “Polysseum is broken. I've been trying to play 10 times but it's always the same players getting in... like c'mon. Spamming the [join] button like crazy.. that thing is broken
Pixel said: “I personally don't like the new format because it profits of a small bunch of very active people”
McGoon suggested, “Just be there before the confirmation period starts, and click when it opens. Not 10s afterwards.”
Gerenuk replied, “In the first 1 sec 17 ppl joined”
After 24 Quetzali Polysseum tournaments, the top players on the leaderboard were permitted to sign up for the Top 16 tournament. At least one player who had earned a spot on the top of the leaderboard could not attend the Sept 30th tournament and their spot was offered to a runner up. The final monthly tournament is planned for Sept 30 and the top prize is €200. In addition to the monetary prize, the top 4 winners from that tournament will qualify for the Fall Season finals, which will be hosted the first weekend of December. The top 4 players will qualify for the Fall Season finals, which will be hosted the first weekend of December.
As in previous Polysseum tournaments, highlights from the finals will be recorded and posted on the official Polytopia YouTube channel.
Game Update Fixes Bugs; No New Content
On Sept 12th, the game got Update 2.7.2.10983 . This updated the user interface (UI), added some performance improvements, and fixed some bugs, including the road population bug and a glitch where many games were frozen with “Error; failed to load.”
While the bug fixes and other improvements were welcome. Many fans expressed disappointment at the lack of new in-game content.
Memeats said, “I've been waiting for this for a while * Performance improvement when sending out Explorers * Performance improvement for city connections, hopefully reducing loading lag * Player sorting in win screen adjusted * Resigned players now show as bots
Fans continued to ask when a new tribe would be coming. It is one of the most common requests from new server users.
Jamariousquangledangle said, “Make a new tribe. I don’t even care what it is, but it’s been like 5 years, please”
LostBrickPlacer said: “I doubt that's gonna happen. Next update is gonna be about the naval rework iirc”
Thebot said, “Problem is the incredibly slow development speed. Not rushing them though. Just saying. The fact that the lightning tribe won’t be released until 2 updates (from what I gathered) naval rework and aqua rework.”
The community manager confirmed, “Don't let anyone think we've stopped making the Ancients. They're very much on the TODO list, but some stuff has to happen first, and that stuff is the Naval Rework”
Declining Server Activity
September saw new lows in activity in the official polytopia server. There were eight days in September with less than 2k messages. The lowest daily activity amount was 1512 messages on Sept 10th. Server activity hasn’t been that low since Dec 14th, 2018.
The fall in activity and membercount is due to many factors. Partially, the drop in interest is because the game is old and Polytopia has not had any in-game content updates since diplomacy was added in May 2022. The two most recent new tribes were added over two year ago; Cymanti was released in February 2021 and Polaris was added in June 2019.
Bloop summed it up this way, “No update. Game dies.”
DestroyerofClock added, “Polycraft is certainly dead, might just have died of unrelated causes though.”
Akashiee said, “[The drop in activity] is noticeable, there are still some people chatting but a lot of the active members are accumulating infractions and getting banned so it's certainly worsening. I think the only fix is finally getting a big update again really. A new tribe would definitely improve the activity a LOT in my opinion.”
Some server users blamed the recent bans for the drop in server activity. Cody said, “Bans active people, wonders why activity is dropping.”
This isn’t the first time server activity has fallen. A previous admin said in 2022,
Look the point is, activity in the server rises and falls regularly. Y'all can think the server is dead all you want, but activity will definitely come back up in a couple months like it always does. It would be dumb for us to overreact about the recent low activity or do literally anything special to address it. That'd be like getting worked up about the tides
Fan Art
By gml
By Erie_dini
By Grimdorables
By DirtyFrog
By Pinkie
Credits
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