Steam's winter sale's been going on for a week now, and Cogmind was featured on the front page Thursday (US time) for an entire day. ASCII represent! I'm pretty sure that's first time a 100% CP437 logo image ever appeared there
Much of the week was spent dealing with the usual release aftermath--taking feedback, fixing a few minor bugs, planning the next set of features, and working on stats etc.
LeaderboardsAs with every new major version, the scores and leaderboards from the previous one (in this case Beta 3) have been archived. The leaderboards were reset for the new Beta, and I also compiled some notable player-specific stats from the score data submitted over the past couple months.
You can read the text version
here on the forums.
Because the leaderboards have been getting pretty crowded by all our new players, I added section links to the pages. Here's a Beta 3 archives sample:
And new leaderboards sample:
StatsIn addition to the usual stats, this time we've got so much data following the Steam release that there's room for interesting comparisons, so I did a more in-depth blog post: "
Player Metrics: Stats and Preferences on and off Steam." Within you'll find aggregate data and analysis of tens of thousands of Cogmind score sheets, including both performance and preferences in a dozen graphs. Here's a little collage to give you an idea:
In the StreamI'm finally back into a bit of
streaming, starting earlier this week with a Beta 4 run I haven't quite finished yet. I wrote a summary of what's happened so far on the forums
here, and
uploaded it to YouTube as Part 1. Wish I had more time to stream--it's fun! Don't want to leave the run sitting too long (we already have a new seed!) so I'll probably finish it up soon, like... today.
I like to have at least one win per Beta before fooling around with even more suboptimal strategies (my preferred play method itself is not all that optimal
), so I'm actually going for a win this time. I've just entered the late-game with backing from Zion. We'll see how it goes, but in the past a combination of overconfidence and extra attention due to Zion has always ended my Zionite runs. I more easily win when running solo
MiscellaneousTiggerbiggo made a trippy animated version of Cogmind's Steam header image.
Long-time player and self-proclaimed master trapper DDarkray played the "Trapped" Challenge Mode and made a mess of the place.
I should definitely stream some of the new Challenge Modes later. Maybe after I've got my Beta 4 win in. Although maybe I should wait until the actual selection UI is in? They are very tempting, though... (I've enjoyed playing them in the past, but never streamed any of those runs.)
neutral found a crazy bug allowing them to summon nearly unlimited hostile squads to their position!
2018Today's the final SITREP of the year, but we have 2018 to look forward to! I already mentioned some of the things to come back in my
Year 4 annual review, and honestly sales have been going well enough that I think I'll be able to keep adding features for at least the next year. Certainly the idea list is long enough
It's going to be a busy 2018. Thanks all for the help.
Next week I'll be working on Beta 5 so we'll have a progress update on that!
Since a lot of the relevant SITREP discussion happens on Steam rather than in the forums, for reference here's a link to this same news on Steam. But feel free to post replies here, too 
