Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 188: Another Set of New Year's Resolutions for 2025

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 188: Another Set of New Year's Resolutions for 2025

Happy New Year 2025 to all my fellow Automationeers! This time, I'll discuss my most important New Year's resolution as an Automationeer: to explore the Al-Rilma update for Automation, which finally introduces superchargers (along with other forced induction setups) to the game. In addition, nearly every aspect of the game (especially engine outputs, reliability, and efficiency) will be tweaked accordingly, and there will be even more new body sets for us to work with. There is, however, one caveat: it is still currently in its open alpha stage, and as such it still has quite a lot of annoying bugs. In the meantime, I will continue to use the most recent stable release - but I will opt into the update as soon as its stability has sufficiently improved for my needs.

Along with this, my other major New Year's resolution is to improve my hosting skills on the forums (and Discord). The best way I can do this is to be more conscious of how much time will be required for long-form challenges lasting more than one week; as such, I must adjust my daily workload accordingly if I am to have even the slightest chance of finishing them on time. In addition, I should also apply this approach whenever I host any challenge that doesn't follow these longer formats, just to be sure. 

Finally, I pledge to stir up less controversy and use the correct scoring system every time I host any Discourse forum or Discord challenge. In particular, when hosting Cool Wall 7, I concocted a proprietary rankings system on the fly recently, and made some unnecessarily disparaging remarks on some of the entries - only to retract them and adopt the standard Cool Wall scoring method after massive backlash from entrants. It came at a time when I had completed several rounds of scoring, so I had to adjust the entries' rankings accordingly. The experience left me burned out for a while, until I realized how long it was taking to finish the challenge, so I picked up the pace near the end and got the whole thing done before New Year's Eve.

Those are my Automation New Year's Resolutions for 2025 - I hope you've defined yours, and pledged to keep all of them, as I plan to do for this year.