Season 8 Details - Terminal Online Seasons de-prioritized

Announcement Update
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Overview
Terminal Season 8’will run indefinitely. The online season config will not change again in the foreseeable future. We are no longer actively promoting terminal online to sponsors. Feel free to comment below if there is a past config you think would be ideal to “lock in” for this.

I will continue to monitor the forum for the foreseeable future, and resolve issues and bugs as they come up, but it is unlikely that major new features will be developed that do not benefit the live competitions.

Ryans Message
Hey everyone,

It’s been a really awesome 2 years, and i’m incredibly proud that the work Me, Junaid, and the rest of the team did resonated so strongly with so many talented engineers.

We created terminal as an entertaining and engaging way for individuals to show off their coding skills, with the business goal of helping employers browse and hire from the talent that we attract. We expected the online aspect of the platform to be the main appeal of the platform, but found unexpected success via the student-focused competitions.

As time went on, correlation one has found even more success in other projects, creating more and more business pressure to move engineers to newer codebases where they can have more impact on the business. After meetings discussing our goals and best path forward in 2021, we decided that terminal online will be de-prioritized and I will be moved to assist with other projects.

I have always tried to maintain transparency around terminal online’s status and future. C1 and the terminal community have always hoped that terminal online would eventually have public sponsored competitions at the same scale as the student-focused “live” season competitions. With this de-prioritization, we are no longer pushing for this, so it is pretty unlikely.

Users who still want to participate in the competitive terminal experience will be able to join a public “kickoff” event we plan to host at the beginning of each competition season.

Again, it’s been really awesome to work with and support this community over the past few years. Feel free to share your thoughts below, i’m looking forward to the final terminal online stream next week.

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Well I can’t agree more, it has been a great time for me aswell.
As someone who played a majority of the time, this does make me sad, it is understandable that you would de-prioritize it.
I always hoped the terminal global competitions would go back to the way the first few seasons were, but over time as the number of players decreased I doubted this more and more and now sadly I will have to give up on hoping for this.

All I can say is that you did a phenomenal job and I thank everyone for participating and making me have a great time.

I look forward to these, see you there!

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This is understandable, it’s been a good fun run. I know this helped me expand on my python knowledge, and i suppose got me to actually take learning python seriously. The hype for this has seem to have slowly faded out, compared to the first season i played in (seaosn 2), and then i was in seaosn 3 and 4 and well then 7,

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Although I started Terminal in S5/S6 I didn’t take it seriously until S7. The kickoff competitions would be an interesting change for sure, though the focus on Terminal Live events does prevent some good players in Global from participating if they’re not from a certain school. Understandably, resources should be dedicated where they generate the most money. Terminal Global had a good run, and I’m excited to see what players will bring to the kickoff competition.

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That’s too bad that Terminal online is getting de-prioritized, it has been a lot of fun participating in the competitions and the community here. It’s also understandable given the declining number of competitors.

I think I would prefer to lock-in the pre-factory config, since it seemed to result in a more complex endgame. With factories, it seems to be more about who has the most factories up and running the earliest. That said, the factory config is also a reasonable choice.

Does this mean that matches will only be run during the start of season kick-off events? I guess the other thing this means is that the weekly competitions and the season elo/leaderboard will now stop?

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I thought it meant that season 8 would just continue indefinitely without any finale. So people can continue to joust for the top spots on the leaderboard, but there wouldn’t be any tournaments or prizes.

I’d also prefer going back to the config from immediately before factories were introduced.

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Adding into which config should continue: I propose we keep the config with factories.
Removing them now would make factories having too short of a run, they are a great addition to the game and forces players to consider prioritization more seriously. I really think factories deserve more than 1 season of use.

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Yep, I more or less enjoyed participating in S7 and a lot of that can be attributed to the new config changes with the introduction of factories. It forced players (old and new) to give more thought into coming up with robust structural defences. Even though the season ending wasn’t the best due to mass copying, I think that issue will be addressed in S8 with the season being run indefinitely.

With that said, it would be interesting for sure to see some of the new strategies that will be implemented in S8 after continuing with the S7 config. There has also been a lot of efforts that have been placed into coming up with such a config (introduction of factories being something unprecedented), so the efforts shouldn’t be put to waste by abruptly switching to a different config.

In past seasons, a fairly good decision simulator would have been sufficient to get into the top 10 however that has all changed in S7 which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (as discussed previously).

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