It's a colorful Motley Monday! ?

Over the years, there's been some talk of reducing the number of players needed to trigger a campaign prize. Currently, 4 players are needed. Do you want this number to be reduced or stay the same?

Disclaimer: the results of the poll will not necessarily dictate any changes or lack thereof on this matter.

PR2 v167: Colorful Following

This update contains adds some new features and quality of life changes, as well as some bug fixes and optimizations.

Changes/Additions
- A slight tweak to the welcome message is now shown in main chat. It says "Type /help for a list of commands." Thanks for the suggestion, @Shane1334!
- New moderation option! Moderators now have the option to "restrict" levels. This prevents them from being shown on pages other than Search and Favorites.
- Today's Best is now Week's Best. This will allow for more levels to be featured. Thanks for the suggestion, @Eternal!
- Loadout previews! Before a loadout is loaded from a number shortcut, the game will prompt you to confirm that is indeed the loadout you'd like to load. Thanks for the suggestion, @AlphaZ!
- User following! You can now "follow" a player, meaning you'll receive a notification whenever they publish or update a level. Thanks for the suggestion, @Northadox!
- Colored player dots! Players are now represented on the mini-map by 4 different colors. You can also mouse over a dot on the mini-map to see which player it tracks. Thanks for the suggestion, @"Mystery"!

Fixes
- Using and unusing rank tokens now affects your stats properly. Thanks for the report, @Benedani!
- The start blocks are here to stay! Hopefully there won't be any more issues with start blocks vanishing when doing some crazy undo/redo magic. Thanks for the report, @TRUC!
- Plus and minus symbols are no longer removed by the text tool. + / - to your heart's content... unless you're going to put calculus into PR2. Thanks for the report, @ThePizzaEater1000!
- Testing a level set to eggs mode with no blocks no longer crashes the game. Yeah... this was a weird one. Thanks for the report, @Camer the Dragon!
- The level editor now only displays the brush when intended. Another weird one. Thanks for the report, @Camer the Dragon!
- The mini-map now displays correctly under all circumstances. Yet another weird one! Thanks for the report, @Camer the Dragon!
- Further detection of impending crashes has been added. In an effort to stave off crashes from intense level loading before they occur, there is a new error that will be thrown only under the most extreme of circumstances.

Technical Changes
- Rate limiting on level deletion should now work as intended. Thanks for the report, @Camer the Dragon!

ICYMI
(In case you missed it)
- The servers will no longer show "down" for a minute after restarting. This comes with a bunch of other stability improvements to some backend scripts.
- More server info is now available! Each individual server will now list the hour a happy hour will occur and the uptime in the server status file.
- The Vault of Magics works again! Thanks to @AntEverything for helping me debug this.

Womp womp womp

Thats all.
Bye.

Introduction/Purpose: I'm going to share my personal thoughts and opinions, regarding people saying that PR2 is virtually dead because I hear people say this a lot. For those of you who are still enjoying this game, don't take this as an offense. This isn't an attack, just the truth. I'm going to provide my analysis of the situation and possibly solve the problem.

Truth/Problem: By now, it's no surprise that Pr2 isn't getting as much love as it used to. Mostly, people have migrated to a new game, they've gotten extremely bored, or there's nothing left to keep people on the edge of their seats, wanting to play this game everyday. All the legends have left over 10 years ago because all they cared about was macroing and ranking themselves up.

There's nothing wrong with that, I'm just saying that that's what you can usually expect out of them; you rarely see these guys play any levels, unless you either requested it, or if there was a prize that they wanted.

Now of days, most people are macroing their accounts up, instead of racing against each other like they used to. Once everyone reaches their rank goals, they're done with this game. Just like the legends were.

This game was essentially at it's peak during 2009, when you had a ton of people play the hell out of this game. Once it reached 2013, the games began to burn out. Why? Because people are tired of seeing the same layouts, backgrounds, play styles, animations, sound effects, etc.

At least 3/4ths of the current roster are unimpressed by the hats, weapons, and the levels. Obviously, that's not their fault. I'm not blaming anyone, just uncovering the truth.

Solution: How will I solve the problem or save Pr2 from dying any further? Well, by the end of this week, I'm going to show you what parts of this game could use a decent tune up, or what could be added to keep people from being burned out. I've decided to put off some parts from my second project, and focus on this, first because it seems to be more important.

This will be Project 1B instead, and should be done by this Saturday night, so stay tuned. Any thoughts or opinions you want to add, be my guest.

In addition to being able to set which items a player can get, it'd be cool if those items could have assigned probabilities, due to possible issues with floating points it might be best to do it in a way where you enter ratios.
E.g. if I allow teleport and super jump, and I put a "1" for teleport and a "9" for super jump, the probability for teleport would be 1/(1+9) = 0.1 and the probability for super jump would be 9/(1+9) = 0.9. Here the "no item" could be explicitly listed.

I'm trying to make a level that has alien eggs, but the majority of them that I place don't show up when I test the level or when I publish it.

Stay tuned for a PR2 live stream happening TONIGHT (Mon March 14) at 9:00pm EDT! (countdown)

Decided to reinstall MSI Afterburner the other day, ended up clicking the first link which was an ad. Had an odd feeling about it but trucked on and brushed it off as a separate landing page for Afterburner. Windows Security detected threats while it was installing and seemingly handled them, and I decided to uninstall that Afterburner install and get it straight from MSI. Had no issues with that one but the next morning I had multiple accounts compromised 

Someone attempted to order a 3080 Ti on my Amazon and someone successfully placed an order for a $2000 MacBook on Best Buy for pickup but PayPal did send me a text alert warning of suspicious activity and asked me to confirm if the order was placed by me. Confirmed it wasn't me and managed to get the order cancelled. I didn't learn about the Amazon thing till later when I tried logging in, and from there found out 3 of my emails were compromised as well. I found activity history of searches for "coinbase" and my main email had filter settings changed to mark "read" and trash anything from Amazon, Best Buy, and PayPal

Later decided to look into the Afterburner matter more as that's the only shady thing that I could think happened recently and sure enough found an article from last year detailing a similar site offering a Afterburner download with malicious stuff bundled in. Also scanned the malicious download as well as the official download with virustotal and sure enough the malicious download showed threats (and ofc the official download was clean)

Can't 100% confirm the malicious Afterburner is what led to my accounts being compromised, but it's most likely the case. Already changed my passwords and enabled MFA on all the compromised accounts, and going to be working on everything else (all done from a separate device). Gotta reinstall Windows now which is gonna be a joy making notes and backing things up (scanning anything backed up of course) 

Always get software from the official source or trusted 3rd party, always double check the url, use MFA/2FA, and use uBlock Origin (it would have blocked that ad I saw, but avoid any ad links if you see them anyway). Overall this has been a good learning experience, don't make my mistake

Made a post on r/buildapc with more detail and pictures if you want to know more: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/commen...terburner/

Recently, I've created a tier list because I'm curious to know what you people think about the racing modes in Pr2. Based on your input and ratings, this could be the leading reason why the game is DEAD. This will help me understand what I need to include in my next project proposal. Also, quite frankly, I think it's time for a new game level. It's either been so long since we've had one, or maybe there's never been a really good one that's very addicting. There's no poll this time, just a tier list that you can check out, here:

Platform Racing 2 – Game levels

Please, feel free to place the icons where you think is the most awesome or the most trash. Then when you're done, take a screenshot of your completed results and share them on this thread. Some of these icons aren't actually modes, but they've been inspired by all of you, to be a thing.

= Race Mode

= Frustration Mode

= Deathmatch Mode

= Traps Mode

= Objective Mode

= Hat Attack Mode

= Alien Eggs Mode