Accessibility on our website is very important to us and we are working very hard on improving the experience for all players. In this release we have improved some ARIA specifications to make things more accessible for individuals who rely on assistive technologies. However, the biggest change for this site update is that we've added an option to help users with different forms of color blindness.

To access this option, go to your profile and click the "Color Blind Assistance" checkbox.

Throughout this website, a lot of information is conveyed with color. For example, red buttons typically mean destructive actions or things that cannot be undone. By enabling this option, an additional layer of decoration will be added to buttons.

If you don't have a form of colorblindness, this may look strange to you but this is what buttons would approximately look like to different forms of colorblindness. Our goal is to make our buttons easily recognizable and the type of actions they will be performing.

The patterns and colors of buttons across the website have been standardized to the following:

• Destructive actions: red buttons with a diamond pattern
• Modification actions: grey or yellow buttons with diagonal stripes
• Creation actions: green with vertical stripes
• Submission actions: blue with diagonal stripes

This is an opt-in feature for players and is still in the testing phase so feedback is welcome!

It took us a few months but season stats have finally arrived! Thank you all for being patient as we got this feature implemented and thank you for keeping us in check by always asking about the status of the leaderboard. It's really helpful to know what features you, as players, actually care about so we can prioritize them.

The new Season page is available in the top navigation bar and will always display the current season leaderboard. As promised, we have implemented this feature so it can retroactively display results such as the Fall 2017 Season Leaderboard.

We had a grand total of 944 matches, fun and official. Bertman and Easy Tank participated in over 200 of those matches alone; now that's awesome! Congratulations to click click boom who finished the season with an outstanding Elo of 1422! And congratulations to Kenshin, Monster, and Miro who all ended the season with an Elo over 1300!

Elo Discrepancies

You may or may not have noticed that the Elos listed in the leaderboard are probably different from what you remember. If you don't notice a difference, then pay no mind. However, if you did notice a difference, here's why.

With the introduction of seasons and player Elo ratings for each season, the player Elo changes need to be categorized based on season since every season the Elo resets at 1200. The incremental Elo calculations worked just fine. However, whenever an Elo recalculation was executed, this would cause an incorrect base Elo value to be used in a number of situations.

Explain like I'm five? There was a chance that instead of starting your season with a 1200 Elo, you started with a value higher or lower giving you an advantage or disadvantage from the start of the season.

So what does all of this mean for players? If you started with a disadvantage, you'll likely see a boost in your Elo balancing out the disadvantage. If you started with an advantage, you'll likely get a drop in your Elo balancing out the advantage. Don't worry, these are the real Elo ratings you should have always had. Because, maths!

Moving Forward

The Elo recalculation bug has been fixed (I think hope) so this issue shouldn't happen again. Congratulations to our top players on the leaderboard and thank you all for participating last season! Didn't make the leaderboard last season? Well the Winter 2018 season is just getting started!

gl;hf

1st place: MILK with 13.
2nd: Poison with 10.
3rd: FF with 4.

Thank you to all who participated and special thank you to our hosters!!!

MATCHATHON:

A weekend event where League Teams (ie BerZerk vs Minimalist) match throughout the time frame listed and the team that matches the most in that time frame: wins the Matchathon.
Match on any of the maps offered on our match servers.
WIN LOSE or DRAW ....it's the total number of matches played by a League team.
PLEASE NOTE: LU vs MIXED…..only the LU team gets a point added to their total. This is not an individual event.

Begins: Friday, January 19th NY 3pm EST, UK 20 UTC, Paris 21 CET, Berlin 21 CET

Ends: Sunday, January 21st NY midnight EST, UK 5 UTC, Paris 6 CET, Berlin 6 CET

Where: LU official Match servers:

• allejo.leaguesunited.org: 5196, 5197. 5198
• BRL.ARPA.NET: 5196, 5197, 5198
• Meliodas.leaguesunited.org:5196, 5197, 5198

Triple Hix event is coming: Remember that Consti will be using ELOs for ranking! Boost your elos with officials!

Macsforme (formerly Constitution) has been working on updating the old doubles site... this is what it looks like now: http://fairserve.net/~josh/bzflag/doubles/dummy/?event=2
He is inquiring whether there would be interest in having another event soon? I know at least a few people (myself & OP that I know of) have approached him about it recently.

If you are interested in such events, please pm macsforme on the forums (http://forums.bzflag.org). If enough respond, he will schedule one (and possibly more if this proves successful.)
Ball is in the players' court now. You snooze, you lose the opportunity for fun.

-k