Pixel Progression #11

Welcome to the eleventh edition of Pixel Progression!

We're going to start with some information about yesterday's economy balance update, follow up with some sneak peeks, and then we'll be done!

Yesterday we released Update 2024.11.0, please go read about that changelog before reading this section so you don't miss any context!

Truthfully, I'm writing this post WAY later than normal and I'm tired, so rather than trying to format this in some crazy digestible way, I'm going to just throw all my thoughts into bullet points and quotes. Enjoy?

Work star achievement

• This could have been communicated better, but we plan on changing how work stars are obtained in the near future (next major update or balance patch, whichever comes first)
• I don't have exact details for you right now, but we don't enjoy how long it takes to obtain stars and we want to speed it up and make it more of an obtainable short term grind to get multiple stars.

Leveling Nerf

• As we've mentioned countless times, leveling is broken. Sure, you have to be a certain omega for it to be OMEGA MAX ULTRA PROFIT, but it's broken none the less.
• We've repeatedly reigned this in, and this patch was no different. We took out a few items suffering BADLY in value because of the mass leveling so they could recoup a bit, and we cut some coins, but not many.
• There will be more nerfs, but there will also be more new exclusive things for leveling that give it a NEW reason to be worthwhile. However, it'll never be entirely unprofitable to level, just less... "why grind anything else when I could level for 2x the profit"

Freemium Nerf

• In the grand scheme, this was actually pretty minor. Freemium is still printing massive amounts of item value, which is to be expected. We're still monitoring and doing anti-abuse for people cheating this system. We'll likely need more adjustments later, but we'll sit with how they are for now.

Profanity

• We had a poll in DMC lately, in which many users (over 70%) made it clear that when we toned down on profanity last year we went too far, and took out some fun.
• In this patch, fighters got some rare profanity back in fight logs. We'll be adding more casually as time goes on elsewhere in the bot, making sure it's never overbearing but just a fun bit of personality.

Taxes

• Taxes are ESSENTIAL to the economy staying healthy. That said, we heard people saying they still miss the old user to user trading days. We decided to try incentivizing more of this via lower taxes in private offers, and we're monitoring what people do with it.
• Fighters got it lowered too, but ONLY so they don't go back to market offers instead of just using the wager system.

Fishing Adventure

• It's been a point of contention that the fishing adventure felt too hard and not rewarding enough. We improved this a lot this patch.
• Since the patch, despite having 1/4 the runs of the space adventure, fishing has 1.5b made compared to space's 2.5b. That's a good sign that the fishing adventure is actually worth grinding now!
• As more people explore it we'll keep watching data with eager eyes on what we can change to find that perfect balance.

Here are a few small sneak peeks of WIP content.

Pirate Guidebook Skin

A lighthearted and classic pirate vibe is something I'm very excited about!

Dank Memer Game Jam

We hinted that we're going to host a game jam on itch.io soon with a cash prize. That's still happening this summer, and our art just landed for it!

Title Box

We showed art for a title lootbox in our sneak peaks channel in DMC today.

We plan to have titles be more fun, and more important in the near future as well. A few ideas that we've thrown around are:

• Equip 2 titles at once?
• Show titles in fight embeds and images?
• Show titles on leaderboards?
• Have titles that give certain passive boosts when equipped?
• Total titles unlocked leaderboards?

Which do you like? Do you have other ideas? Let us hear about them!

This is to give information on ongoing known issues or common points of confusion.

Known Issues

These are issues we know about, and don't need reported right now.

• The default grind flow is un-usable
• Valentines fish guidebook skin has broken pages
• Some commands aren't working in some larger servers, like user leaderboards
• Get the full list here: Public bug tracker

Something I'd like to do each time we post one of these, is take a moment to call out cool things happening in the community.

Someone is watching...

Posted by u/userrandomguy

I made this easter egg myself. God I laughed hard about it. Have you noticed before now?

Gem box my beloved

Posted by leonesdormiebant

I know it's not the most valuable item, but god I love gem boxes. Something about the art, or them being tied to premium currency but for free. They just hit diff.

Now, we're back to the grind on new content. Recently we've had meetings about gambling release ideas, a potential bot x bot partnership, and allllll about fishing season 3. It's going to be a REALLY REALLY good summer.

Drink your water, and don't forget: pls bj max