Genre: Fighting, Strategy, Tactical, Indie, Card & Board Game
Babble Royale
Season Zero Champions Dictionary Update
We are honored to announce that the official Babble Royale dictionary was updated this evening in recognition of the Season Zero Champions.
As you all know, every season each of the top ten (or so) most successful players gets to permanently add a word of their choosing to the official and, we repeat, permanent, in-game dictionary used by the game. Forever.
It could be anything you want.
It could be your name. It could be your boyfriend or girlfriend's name. That's the one that we, personally, would do. It could be the name of a product that is sponsoring your promising eSports career. It could be, oh, we don't know, a clever pun. In Latin. That sort of thing. The sort of clever thing an erudite word-lover might think up if they were planning to permanently deface the sacred tome that governs the holy ceremony at the center of a small but growing mindsport that some people are calling "the next Pickleball."
Well, without further ado, Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you...
THE NEW WORDS
LIGMA
added by 5CR4BB13
WOOGLES
Added by AXCERTYPO
POG
Added by FIZZIX_IS_FUN
AIAIAIA
Added by BYNAK
AIAIAIAIA
Added by BEST459
UWU
Added by WANDERER15
II
Added by MORRACONDA
BBQ
Added in honor of BBQ, Season Zero Cybervillain
Ok, this one we should briefly explain. BBQ is a bot. And that's bad. We mean it's bad, in general, to stick bots into online games. It can ruin games, and that sucks. We know a lot of people will be disappointed with our decision to include BBQ in this list, but here's the thing - BBQ had the decency to not play all the time. They only played some of the time. And that demonstrated a certain amount of consideration, an indication that they knew they could spoil the game and were trying not to.
And they played in a style that, while clearly automated, wasn't using map hacks, exploits, or lightning-fast inputs. It was just good at certain aspects of the game. Too good. Better-than-human. But not in a way that was trivial to describe and prohibit. Like, any simple "speed limit" we applied to catch BBQ would also have, occasionally, caught many of our best human players.
And, with all due respect, BBQ sucks in every aspect of the game that isn't raw anagramming. In positioning? In look-ahead? They're beatable and we've seen humans beat them. We've seen games improved by BBQ's presence. We've seen expert players turn and surgically remove BBQ so that casual players could continue playing. We've seen steel-hearted competitors sacrifice their own MMR, joining hands and throwing themselves on BBQ to protect high-level tournaments from being spoiled. We've seen Will Anderson shift gears to deal with BBQ. And let us tell you - that's a beautiful thing.
It doesn't say, in the Babble Royale Rulebook, that you have to be human to play. It's just a game. The rule is don't be an a--hole, and BBQ followed that rule.
BBQ was a heel, but they were a true heel and we salute them.
Also, it's a good new way to get rid of Q's. ;)
Speaking of which...
QBAP
Added by ANCIENT COSMOGRAPHER
YEET
Added by NML
VI
Added by BIGGIEMAC42
OK
Added by ASIANPYRO
Congratulations to all the Season Zero Champs. We love you. This is your game as much as it is ours, and we love the crazy changes you just made to it.
As always, we invite everyone to join the discord where we're sure these players will be happy to personally respond to any questions you might have about this update. :)
-frank and james
SEASON ONE
SEASON ZERO CHAMPIONS
First of all, congratulations to our official Babble Royale Season Zero Champions!
Each of these heroes will be allowed to add one word to the official Babble Royale dictionary. As soon as we have received them all we will make an announcement with the final list of new words.
NEW FEATURES
In addition to re-setting all player stats, the Season One build posted today has the following changes:
- new MMR algorithm (now takes number of players into account) - tweaked scoring rules (nerfed bingos, buffed non-bingo big word bonus) - non-paying players can now choose their drop letter - non-paying players now have access to basic emotes - AIR DASH (hot drop evasion tech) - some small bug fixes and tweaks
We are still planning to transition from early access to official release sometime in early '23 with custom lobbies and more. Stay tuned for additional updates.
Drop by the Babble Discord for more info and discussion, and to salute the Season Zero champs.
IS EVERYBODY HAPPY? GOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
-frank & james
Babble Royale - Season One
SEASON ZERO COMES TO AN END
In two weeks, on July 1st, we will officially close out Babble Royale Season Zero and begin Season One. The game will still be in Early Access, we are planning to transition to full release in Q1 2023.
The season reset will include the following changes:
All players will have their MMR reset to 0
Players will now be able to unlock drop letters without paying money
Non-paying players will now be able to emote
Air Dash - new evasion technique to avoid getting hot-dropped
Additional small tweaks and bug fixes
Season Zero Champions
At midnight on June 30th we will declare the top 10 players on the MMR leaderboard to be the BABBLE ROYALE SEASON ZERO CHAMPIONS.
Each of the Babble Season Zero Champions will get to add a word of their choice to the official Babble dictionary. This could be a proper name, a slang term, a made-up nonsense word, or anything you want (as long as it's not offensive).
If you have any questions or comments, join us in the Babble Discord to discuss: https://discord.gg/8xjsyFjgpC
-frank
Early Access Patch 4
Hey Babblers, here's what's in this week's patch:
- Added about 6,000 words to the dictionary. These are all inflections (ie. plural forms and different tenses) that were missing from words that were already in the dictionary. For example, "crowdsource" was in the dictionary, but "crowdsources" and "crowdsourced" weren't. This was an artifact of the way wordnik (the open-source dictionary we are using) generated their list. We have been very conservative about making changes to the wordnik dictionary, but this seemed like an obvious inconsistency that we should fix. (Thanks to Fizzix who suggested this fix on the discord channel and put together the list.)
- Added some infrastructure that will enable private tournaments.
- Fixed a bug where you could upgrade beyond 10 rack slots.
- Fixed a typo in the "How to Play" screen.
- Tweaked the main screen to reflect which buttons are disabled when you are in queue or playing CQC Practice Mode.
Early Access Patch 3
Early Access Patch 3 ---------------------- Hey everybody. This patch has a few small fixes and tweaks:
- Ultimate Survivor Achievement. The achievement for winning a Golden Royale should now be working.
- Arrow Key Input. Added a "Slow Arrow Movement" setting in the options menu. Turn this on if you have problems with the arrow keys being too sensitive.
- MMR Tweak. You can no longer lose MMR for coming in first, no matter how high your current MMR is.
- How to Play Screen. Fixed a couple of typos in the How to Play screen.
- Anti-Cheating Measures. Did some preliminary work to identify and deal with bots.
- Custom Kill Animations. Lowered the volume on the sound effects for custom kills and tweaked the animations slightly to prevent them from impacting gameplay.
Thanks for playing!
-frank and james
Jeff Gerstmann declares Babble Royale one of the Top Ten Games of 2021
Jeff Gerstmann, the famously good-taste-having Giant Bomb games journalist, just posted his top ten games of 2021 and Babble Royale is number 7 on his list.
Here's what Jeff says about the game:
The idea here is to turn Scrabble into a multiplayer, battle royale style game. And it works shockingly well. It's easy to laugh about it for how ridiculous it seems on paper, but Babble Royale is an incredible idea that has been executed extremely well. This is the sort of game that just makes me feel like an absolute idiot. I would never come up with anything this smart. Me dumb in head, hit rock.
On the contrary Jeff, we think you're a frickin' genius.
Early Access Patch 2
Patch Notes:
Early Access Patch 2 ---------------------- Hey everybody. Here's what's in this patch:
- Custom Kill Animations. This is a new customization feature. When you have one of these equipped, every time you kill another player you'll play a special animation and sound instead of the default kill effect. You can find these in the store and equip them in the customization menu.
- How to Play Screen. At long last, we've added a screen that provides an overview of the rules of Babble Royale. The button for this screen replaces the "practice" button, which has been moved to the options screen.
- Additional Stats. We have added win rate percentage and current streak scores to the main screen stat display area.
