We are retiring the Community Update that we did on reddit. It was a rollup of what we accomplished lately and what we were considering doing. We feel like being more active on the blog accomplishes communicating our updates much better. Just going to the home page of the blog and scrolling through it gives you a quick glance of what’s recently changed.

That said, we still want to communicate what we’re working on and thinking about. So we’ll still make periodic posts about that. This is one of those posts. Something to keep in mind is that we sometimes dump projects we are working, for a variety of reasons – it happens. So something you see in one of these posts may never get released.

PrivateMajor will still be operating in a community management role. On a monthly basis, I’ll be meeting with him and he’ll be distilling down what should be priorities, from the community’s perspective. If something warrants an official response from the development team, those will be included in this posts as well. So if you’d like to make sure PM sees a post, please continue to tag /u/PrivateMajor on reddit.

What have we been working on?

Platform and Framework Upgrades

We have been upgrading the technology that runs TagPro. That means the platform and frameworks that TagPro depends on. Upgrading these created a lot of breaking changes and we’ve had to address those. The payoff will be a more stable and performant product. Plus, it will unlock a lot of new language features for us to use in future code and projects we want to take on. We hope to be deploying the upgraded TagPro in the coming month.

Mod Tools

The tools the moderators use needed a big upgrade. A lot of progress has been made in a complete rewrite of them. The new tools will help moderators in their daily tasks and help keep the trolling and toxicity at a minimum in-game. We hope to have moderators testing the first versions of the new tool in the upcoming month.

Flair Stream

As part of a proof of concept for a larger project we want to take on, a flair stream was built. This will add a streaming list of flair being acquired by players to the home page of TagPro.

What are we thinking about?

Improvements to No-Script for Leagues

Chasing down cheaters is always going to be a challenge and a cat and mouse game. No-Script added some layers of protection to allow leagues to attempt and disable the use of outside scripts in league matches. We (and the leagues I think) have been pleased with the results.

That said there are concerns that some players may have defeated the protections – totally possible. We’ve looked into this and can’t give a definitive yes, but it has gotten us thinking about improvements we could make to strengthen no-script.

Single World Joiner

We’ve been putting a lot of thought into this. A single world joiner would mean no more named game servers. Instead you’ll just go to tagpro.gg, and hit play now. It will find other people with similar ping and experience level and put you in a game on a hidden game server.

This would solve some problems. It would solve the “everyone is on radius” problem and more players would play more games with an optimal ping. Next it could solve the newbie problem by given us the opportunity to group new players with other new players. More long term, we could consider separate joiners for events and maybe event game modes.

Full disclosure: This is a major rearchitecture of TagPro works. It’s going to be a lot of work, a lot of refactoring and a lot of new code. It’s one of the reasons we decided to do the platform upgrades mentioned above. If we tackle this, and it’s highly likely that we will, you can expect it to dominate a large portion of the development time.

Bumper Tiles

Basically a tile that a player could bounce off of. We’ve tested it as a round element and it was pretty hard to use in a consistent way. There may be more potential in a square form factor.

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