Hello QONQRers.TLDR;Atlantis awards changeBlue maps are being removed, maybe foreverNew Forums AtlantisWe are in a win-streak for the Legion winning Atlantis. We have had many such streaks over the years. Swarm dominated in the early days, then Legion and Faceless seem to go back and forth for long streaks. In an effort to encourage shorter winning streaks, we are going to try a new award structure for the next 6 months, and hopefully beyond.Winners will receive a bonus for maintaining a streak, and a bigger bonus for breaking a streak. If your team wins again, you will earn a 10% bonus for every consecutive win after the first win. If you break a team's streak (or stop one from starting) your team will be awarded 20% bonus for every month that has passed since your last victory, minus 1 month. There will be a 200% cap on the bonus.Why minus one month? We know people will game the system. We don't want Legion and Faceless trading off victories every other month to trade the 20% bonus. In this model, if Legion has a 2 month streak, since the last Faceless win, both teams have a 20% bonus incentive to win the next Atlantis. Beyond 3 wins the bonuses are large enough, and I think this makes an agreement to trade wins is unlikely.For the next Atlantis:If Legion wins, they will earn a 50% bonus for their 6-game winning streak (1st win to stop a faceless streak, plus 5 wins that followed (5 X 10%).If Faceless wins they will earn an 80% bonus. The faceless last won in September. Another team won Atlantis in the 5 months between (Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb). That a multiplier of 4 (5-1).If Swarm wins, they will earn a 200% bonus. 11 Atlantis victories have gone to other teams since their last victory.Should there be a cap? Maybe not, but I'm unsure what will happen when 10 million plus a bonus 20 million qredits flood into the game for one faction. I think a cap is good for now.Since this is a "try it for 6 months and see" feature, all qredits will be awarded manually by me. Please give me up to 3 days to manually award the qredits before emailing support. MapsBlue Maps are going away. The map provider we have been using since QONQR Blue was release increased their pricing. It is now almost four times more expensive for maps than it was in December. The price is so expensive, we pay almost as much for blue maps as we pay to host all the other databases and servers to run QONQR. The cost was so high, we actually lost money the past two months. QONQR hasn't made enough money to cover even half my paycheck the past year, but this is the first time we've lost money two months in a row. Don't worry about me. I'm working about 12-20 hours a week helping two clients with their software development. I'll keep QONQR going as long as we can stop losing money. Shutting off the blue maps will fix the problem we had in January and February. I'll evaluate new map options at some future date.ForumsIf you read the blog last fall, you know I've been on a personal quest to find a way to enjoy working on QONQR again. 2018 and 2019 were full of software development frustrating for me, which I won't cover again here. Many discussions over the past 6 months both inside and outside of the game have all seemed to come back to the thing that has always made QONQR great: the people who play it.In December I started to investigate creating forums that are part of the game. By January I and determined it was going to be possible and spend the last two months working on them.The new forums will be tied directly to your game account and will be part of the web portal. You will not be able to post or comment in the forums if you have not launched in the previous 24 hours. Reputation you gain in the forums may lead to game features being unlocked for your account in the future.Every post and comment will have voting. This voting will create a "Community Builder Score." You can vote for something as being spam, trolling, vulgar, bad manners, disagree, agree, funny, or helpful. The first four hurt the post/comment score the last four help it. One note, the "disagree" vote is not bad. Debate that is done is a respectful way is good for a community. If someone posts an idea you don't like, you can disagree with it, but it won't hurt the score of the post. Healthy debate helps to build strong community. Bad comments, only affect the score of the comment, not the score of the parent post.Google and Bing have "Safe Search" options. Our forums will have a similar setting, filtering out all posts and comments with a poor Community Builder Score. Users can opt to change this filter from Moderate to High, to see only posts that have the best score for positive content. Additionally, users my disable the filter to see everything. Disabling the filter will reset on the next login.Toxic people on the forums often have reasonable complaints or ideas. The largest issue is that they often don't moderate their language well. That unfortunately generates toxic responses, and it snowballs. I have seen many times where someone had a legitimate complaint but expressed themselves in a super aggressive or abusive way.I have a theory that no one will spend 20 minutes or more writing a long complaint about a feature or another player if no one will see it because it is immediately filtered out. Instead, I believe players will take more time to soften their language, ask questions rather than make accusations, and offer ideas for solutions rather than just complaints. All of these things can accomplish the same goal, but in a positive and constructive manner. This is what makes great community. This is my goal.In previous forums, Moderators struggled on whether a post that had turned toxic should be deleted. The new forums will solve that problem. If a post goes toxic, the bad comments will be hidden, while the post is still visible. Everyone can see the toxic posts and toxic comments by turning off the filter. The debate can continue and the scores may come back up. The toxic stuff is hidden by default, but all content will always be available for those that want to see it. I firmly believe our community is what makes QONQR amazing. I always have. The old forums we had were a great place when they could be moderated closely. Once moderation took too much time, we lost control of the forums, which became filled with spam and vile arguments. I have built this new system to allow the community to filter toxic content. Because I built the forums from the ground up, we can make adjustments to the system and add more and more features to improve the value of the interaction. The forums were a huge part of how QONQR developed such a strong community. We are bringing that back. Consider the forums a beta, or even a super baby beta. I know there are things that don't work correctly yet. However I'm tired of being "almost ready." You can help me find the remaining bugs. You will see a link on the portal menu for the forums once it is released. Oh, I suppose I should have mentioned this, since I started off the discussion of the forums this way. I've enjoyed the past 2 months. It is nice to be building new things again. It is nice to have passion for what is important to QONQR. The past two months have helped me enjoy what I do again.See you on the forums.-Scott (aka Silver)
