“Twas” a week of scorched.
Howdy Howdy my favorite pyro psychos! Last time we wrote one of these we had a whole new wave of cannons upon us with the launch of Scorched Bot Season 2! We had some fantastic statics to go along with and had our inaugural clip, hate, and wholesome-mail of the week! This Twas’s may be a years apart from its predecessor, but it certainly isn’t devoid of my bad puns! A question arises though; if the Twas is returning that must mean we have a significant enough announcement to write one. What could this possibly mean?!?!
STAGE 3: IGNITION
Buckle up folks, cause the team behind the scenes has plenty of news to how your scorching experience will be changing in the upcoming weeks with Season 3! Once again with the lovely Lord Gerbsnail making our implements of inferno, joined by a new apprentice, the lovely Lady nblock igniting the code behind the scenes, and the ever present SCORCHED KING and newly appointed QUEEN to make sure this blaze burns just the right amount of out of control! (And ya know, I’m here too writing this so I count too!) Without further ado, let’s get into the dehydrated details! (Is this too many puns? noooo..)! ⠀ With the launch of Scorched Bot Season 3, we have a new apprentice joining in the cannon making craft! Lord Gerbsnail has been working tirelessly alongside them to get everything running an up to speed, but why don’t I let the man speak himself:
GerbSnail: Ahoy! Your favorite scorch kitbasher here!
This season I have continued my standards for cannon art, however I’ve broadened my horizons due to the fact that for the most part we’ve run out of usable exotics. You’ll see some familiar themes and old classics as I take you down memory road with the second half of the season, ending with my two new favorite cannons.
Most excitingly, Uniq has joined me in building scorch cannons! Cannon #6 was their first contribution, and I hope that in the future we’ll be able to expand the team to even more people.
You’ll notice that the art is slightly different, as this time and for all future seasons I will be adding a background to the renders. This is for a number of reasons, but the main one is because of every artist’s nightmare: additive transparency.
While this is a small change, you will see a big impact in the fact that all the time that I spent making good looking bloom and transparent effects won’t go to waste. It’s too much of a task to go back and re-comp all the old seasonal stuff, so the jarring change between old seasons and new seasons will be apparent. Anyways, I hope you don’t mind it too much, and I hope you enjoy the new cannons!
Happy collecting!
Thats right folks Uniq has joined us and crafted some of the very cannons you will soon be chasing! Be sure to give them plenty of recognition for their work, because they have certainly earned it! Why don’t we ask the scorcher turned engineer themself to say a word?
A UNIQ INTERVIEW
Howdy Uniq, why dont you introduce yourself and what you do!
Uniq: Hi everyone, I’m “uniQ” and have been playing scorched exclusively for ~1.5 years now. Otherwise I mainly do photography, cs and everything in between.
How did you get involved in cannon engineering with Gerbsnail?
Uniq: Gerb reached out to me to give it a try and it was a lot of fun. It feels like cutting up paper models.
What is your favorite upcoming cannon you’ve designed?
Uniq: Only designed one this time, since I’ve had to put everything on hold for my exams. There are going to be more in the future however.
What cannon is your main from Season 1 & 2?
Uniq: The heir apparent one, “Hierloom Cannon” cuz it burns through ammo like I do
Any words for your fellow scorchers before Season 3 launches?
Uniq: Hope you’re as excited as I am for this season. Spread the love for scorched during valentine’s week!
A FRIGID RENDER
While on the topic, Uniq has another special project they’ve been working on; The Scorched Server Render!
If you haven’t heard about it, lets get you up to speed; Uniq has been crafting a render featuring the members of this server with their favorite cannons. Want to be included in the SSR? Well you can! All you have to do is provide Uniq with your guardian’s transmog, and your favorite cannon, and you’ll be on the render! See our #scorching-looks and be sure to post your own for Uniq to use! Though I said I’d be going for Scorched Cannon? last time, I think last seasons secret cannon will be my go to. Who knows, maybe theres another one this season MAYBE TWO? You’ll just have to find out :3.
ITS A SECRET TO EVERYONE
While on THAT topic, my secret cannon has been found! It was quite the race to watch and I thank you all for participating this mini-scavenger hunt. The Coriolin Cannon as I call it, or as it’s actually known as “The Scourge Cannon” was a crossover from a D&D item, crafted by my players, whom happen to be your SCORCHED KING and Lord Gerbsnail, with some assistance from your QUEEN. Together they scavenged parts from constructs in the city of Coriolis and crafted a powerful item.
From a rift between worlds, Kuzu reached out and claimed the cannon from the sealed vault of the devil’s lair, a pod marked 10201. The exceptional light within drawing from the a paraversal world beyond what we know to grant a new weapon. As such they also claimed my 20$ steam gift card! Congratualtions Kuzu again for being the first! See the announcement for a bit more lore.
KING: Can you tell he’s a writer?
Oh one last thing! As a bonus I’ve wrapped up the cannon’s stats for D&D 5e in a nice little homebrewery package for you! There are two versions as both browsers have different rendering of CSS causing visual issues. Hopefully it can bring as much chaos into your game as it does mine! There is totally no secret cryptic hints hidden here :3
The Scourge Cannon (Chromium) ⠀
SCROCHING STATISTICS
Now it’s time for the number crunching, which don’t worry, we have your kills this time around for Season 2! Why don’t we let our resident code wizard Lady nblock take the reigns for a moment and share the stats yall want to see!
nblock: There have been multiple “incidents” in the roughly 6 month time period that I chose, so there will be spots of nothing followed by a change in color, indicating an “incident”. Everyone’s still in the same place, just a bit of the colors got shuffled.
Scoins
This time the per-player scoin graph is in logarithmic scaling in base 10, because if I still had it set to linear, there would only be 5 visible lines.
| Name | Amount |
|---|---|
| @TheZombieReborn | 896,458 |
| @uniQ | 606,314 |
| @Naze | 404,187 |
| @Hiraeth | 219,785 |
| @B2 | 134,190 |
Total Scoins
Current Total Season 1&2 Scoin Count: 2,788,355 on 02/13/24
Highest Total Season 1&2 Scoin Count: 2,876,683 on 11/11/23
Kills
Last time, we weren’t able to track everyone’s kill count. This is also in log 10, for the same reason as the Scoins graph is…
| Name | Total Amount | Last 6 Months |
|---|---|---|
| @TheZombieReborn | 120,445 | 16,005 |
| @Hiraeth | 86,670 | 19,517 |
| @Naze | 61,984 | 20,694 |
| @Wolf | 56,414 | 9,318 |
| @uniQ | 55,177 | 24,491 |
Most Played Maps
| Name | Amount |
|---|---|
| The Burnout | 774 |
| Bannerfall | 746 |
| Widow’s Court | 743 |
| Fragment | 736 |
| Exodus Blue | 717 |
nerdy behind the scenes time
Before about a month ago, the bot was being hosted pretty primitively on a VPS somewhere on the east coast. (And by primitive I mean the bot was running as a bash script I had to manually restart, on the root user) It may be a tad overkill for now, but the bot is now being hosted locally on a Kubernetes deployment, to hopefully reduce downtime when possible. I had originally planned for this to be on an off week, but it turns out I got it “finished” about 6 hours before the first scorch of this year, only sacrificing a little sleep…
Scorching Support: Update 3.0
nblock: For Season 3, we’ve decided to change up how Seasons and Scoins work a bit. To access this season’s cannons, you will first need to buy the Season Pass for Season 3, with your scoins that you’ve gained from the past two seasons, priced at 2500 scoins. Starting this season, scoins will be stored and gained per-season. This means you will start Season 3 with 0, but all of your previous scoins will still work in the previous seasons, and you will only gain scoins for the season you have selected.
This comes with another change to how winning or losing matches will effect your scoin balance. Winning and losing a match will use the same equation for giving/removing scoins.
- win: (15 - fireteam size + level bonus + equipped cannon intrinsic scoins + equipped cannon masterwork amount * 2)
- lose: (remove 10 + fireteam size) But, it will only give the scoins to the currently selected season, same with losing.
This will no longer include other season’s scorched cannons that you have equipped.
Ecdragonz: So to summarize;
- Scoins wallets have been separated based on Season.
- Note, Season 1 & 2 scoins are still combined.
- Season Passes going forward will now be bought for scoins.
- Season 3’s Season Pass will be bought for 2500 season 1&2 scoins.
- The command to buy the season pass is: /scorched season_pass
- Scoin gaining and loosing equations have been changed, they will now only give scoins for the currently selected season.
- Wins: (15 - fireteam size + level bonus + equipped cannon intrinsic scoins + equipped cannon masterwork amount * 2)
- Lose: (remove 10 + fireteam size)
- Cannons equiped from other seasons no longer grant bonus scoins.
Regular TWAB TWID TWAS Activities
Once again, a completely original idea!
King: So for out hatemail of the last… a while I’m going to go for one submitted by ari! Now there was more context to the conversation that was had between ari and this wonderful person. I hope butch and their son are doing alright
Link
King: Now for our wholesome mail! We love to see that nugget of kindness every once in a while and uniq got quite a good one. Them airshots must of been quite impressive to see
Link
King: Finally we have a sir Mac and cheese classic clip. This injoint with naze, is a great showing of a returning map coming into the mode and the tricky spots that can be achieved on it. Thanks to their efforts however we Now know it can be a little tricky to get out of the spots.
Link
King: Thank you all for sharing do much. It really is great to see each and everyone of you get so much joy from a mode I cherish so deeply. I hope you all truly enjoy season 3 and here’s hoping you’ll be around for so much more, we have some fun mechanics in the work for season 4 which will hopefully keep you scoin gremlins busy with something to do Hiraeth.
Annnnnd thats the game
And so we’re done! We hope you’re excited for the new scorching activities you’ll have upcoming. Once again these Twas are likely only going to be with major updates so with season 4 we’ll have some more highlights for you to breeze through. For now, happy 2024 and I hope to see this blaze burn even brighter for the next while to come!
Your local TWAS writer and lurker - Jon
Oh and one last thing, Gerbsnail, nblock: >:3