Good evening soldiers!

We are about two months away from the first movie teaser trailer (my best estimate), so it's time now for some major updates to Ender News Armies and Battle School. I want to give you a brief introduction for what to expect, the updates are currently scheduled to go live next weekend.

1. User Box

The green box on the top right of most EN pages. Whenever you're logged in you will see this box. It gives you a quick overview of your Points and Pixels, Task Progress, Current Task, and Private Messages. The version that is currently live will probably not be the final version.

2. Pixels

Pixels are a (mostly hidden) community currency in Ender News' Battle School. It measures community activity in pretty much all the interactive areas of the site, forum to battle room, quizzes to gallery, comments to I.F. Files, ratings to recruiting. Think of it this way: as Ender News' Battle School happens in a virtual online world, whenever you contribute something to this virtual world one or more pixels might jump over from your screen to your account. Pixels are primarily used in tasks where they will (indirectly) lead to points for your army.

3. Tasks

We are introducing tasks that have to be completed in order. The first few tasks are very easy and meant to be introducing site features to launchies and generally people new to the site. So you "oldbies" might find them a bit too easy, however they will still earn you a few points. And who knows, maybe you didn't notice that you can change your user image for Ender News on your private profile page. Doing that will be part of task #2. Each task consists of 2 parts, both have to be completed to move on to the next task.

Some of the tasks will include challenges, and completing the task will be worth points additionally to those earned in a challenge.

4. Challenge Library

All future challenges (and also most of the previous ones) will be added to the library where the submissions can be viewed and also rated by all Ender News members. Challenges are also widely used in tasks. We plan to ask you all for your extensive feedback on all the upcoming movie snippets, submitting your reviews for trailers and the actual movie, telling us all how you got into Ender's Game in the first place and so on... there is nothing more valuable and important for a big project like the Ender's Game film (possibly several of those) than feedback from the fan community, and we hope you will all participate and let us know what you think. Putting this feedback into a library, additionally to what is being discussed in a forum, gives it more value as in that it won't be in focus only for as long as it stays on the first page of a message board and that it is a momentary impression at the time it was written, preserved "forever" in library form.

5. Several Small Changes and Tweaks

Most importantly, you will no longer be dropped from your Ender News Army when you have missed four consecutive battles. There are plenty more points opportunities now and the battle room algorithm has been tweaked a bit so then number of soldiers active in battle has a direct effect on the total of points awarded in this battle. We hope to achieve both an incentive for soldiers to participate, as the number of points that can theoretically be won in a single battle is now higher than before, and also balance out the effect of the Battle Room on the total number of Army Points with the new additions like tasks and challenges.

However... you are still expected to participate in at least one battle every three months (12 weekly battles) to be considered an active soldier. Some of the upcoming tasks will include the requirement to participate in the then current battle which will make it almost impossible for any active soldier to be dropped from their army. If you haven't been around for more than three months we can safely assume you are no longer interested without being too harsh on anybody. And remember, you can always rejoin an army with the click of a button - the only repercussion of losing your army will be that half of your individual points will stay with your old army when you get dropped.

That's it for now. I will make a long blog post on the Ender News Blog when the updates go live.