Chore Wars :: Older News

Older Chore Wars News

Every adventurer can now get their own Character Badge graphic, which they can put onto any web page they like. It'll be regularly updated to show the latest adventures of your character, as well as their current level, XP and gold.

Chore histories are now listed with dates, rather than as "X days ago", and gold account users can now browse them by month instead of paging back through manually.

New parties now have access to pregenerated adventures when signing up, to help them get started more quickly - they can pick an initial set of chores from a list of the fifteen most popular household chores on the site, rather than having to enter the obvious ones manually.
If any low-level parties are still starting out and want to bolster their range of adventures, they can import them here.
After feedback from family users, the wandering monster images have been toned down to have fewer spikes and teeth.

A few parties have been reported problems with inventories becoming corrupted - this has now been fixed, as far as possible. Adventurers may still have some weird, enchanted hybrids in their backpack, but it's all uncursed and droppable now, and they won't come back again.

Adventures can now be retired on their "edit" page, if your party no longer requires them.
Quests have also been implemented, for adventures which only ever need to be claimed once - they're the same as normal adventures, but they automatically retire themselves as soon as somebody has claimed them. You could use this for logging one-off events, or for creating extra-incentive "someone should really clean the kitchen" type quests, which give more XP and treasure than normal kitchen cleaning would, for the first person to brave it...

RSS feeds are now available for all parties - here's the feed for . If you're using a feed reader like Google Reader or My Yahoo, you can now be alerted whenever a chore is claimed within your party.

A new adventurer role has been added: that of the NPC. A party's Dungeon Masters can claim chores on the NPC's behalf, without the NPC having to log in - this is intended for parties with young children, but can be adapted for whatever you can think of.
We've got five new avatar images, and some new monster pictures - check your settings page if you want to change your icon.

Dungeon Masters can now assign locations to adventures (such as "kitchen", "bathroom" or "the Poisonous Jungle of Kraaagh"), which will make them easier to find in the claim dropdown.

There are now five roles that characters can be assigned to, which give different access permissions for creating and editing chores. From today, all new accounts are Dungeon Masters (if you're creating a party), or Apprentices (if you're joining one). Previously existing accounts keep their previous access rights as Adventurers.

Adventures can now be given descriptions to warn other party members of what terrors await, and the treasures for a given adventure can be marked as stackable if you're running a voucher system and want people to be able to stockpile particular objects.
Permanent invite codes are now available, as well as the usual three-day-expiry ones.

The leaders of parties from the trackless deserts to the frozen north can now set their local timezone in the party settings.

Due to a subtle infestation of grid bugs, a number of adventurers have been walking around with their constitution and dexterity mixed up. This was resolved today, but a few people will have found themselves shifted into an unfamiliar character class, as a result.
This will be corrected when you next level up, but if you want to sort things out straight away, you can take a potion for it at the Hall of Realignment.

Adventurers can now spend gold and use treasure items - this removes them from the player's inventory, and adds a message to their character sheet and party views, to alert the rest of the group (who can then deal out whatever real-life reward or exemption has been agreed in advance). Find out more.

Unclaiming a chore now removes any gold and inventory that were claimed as part of that chore, for chores made from today onwards (the rewards are also listed in the chore logs, as well; basically any chore that lists rewards will have those rewards removed - any that doesn't, won't).
There'll be a way to dump equipment and gold before too long, so if anybody in your party is carrying around inventory that should have been unclaimed, just bear with us.
Chore Wars was on Boing Boing and MetaFilter yesterday, and actually had an entire Penny Arcade strip devoted to it. Sorry for any outage while we were casting fire-resistance enchantments onto our poor server.

Gold pieces now work very differently in Chore Wars - where they were originally assigned at random for defeating monsters, you can now specify the exact amounts that each adventure pays out, and that reward is given whether or not you defeat the monster.
This makes gold a more useful and predictable resource (you can even set the range so that an adventure pays out the exact same amount every time), and we're planning on adding a way for adventurers to "spend" their gold in the real world, at the agreement of the rest of their party.
It's now no longer possible to gain multiple copies of the exact same treasure item; if you find a piece of treasure that you've found before, then your character discards it.