The board, right now
Here's the snapshot as of this morning. Five ideas sit above everything else on the board, and the gap between them is nowhere near as settled as we expected when the week started. Number one is a request to add a spectator camera to RUSH so squads can watch a teammate's run after they die instead of staring at a respawn timer, sitting at 412 votes. Number two, a ping wheel for the DOMINION RTS mode so commanders can call out targets without typing, is right behind it at 398.
That fourteen-vote gap sounds comfortable until you remember how the board moves. Three days ago the spectator camera was down by six. A cluster of votes came in overnight, most of them from players who'd just finished a RUSH run and clicked through from the results screen, and the order flipped. Fourteen votes is nothing on a board where a single Discord post pushing an idea has swung fifty votes in an afternoon before.
Third place belongs to a pitch for a photo mode in the Loadout Lab, sitting at 301 votes, mostly from players who like showing off skins they've grinded for. Fourth is a request for a small map built specifically for the 24-mission campaign's stealth missions, at 274. Fifth, and this one surprised us, is a pitch to bring back a Classic-only weapon skin as a cosmetic unlock in the main game, at 260, which tells you there's more nostalgia for the original 2020 build than we assumed.
We're not going to pretend this list is stable. It's a browser shooter played in short sessions between classes and work breaks, so votes trickle in all day instead of arriving in one wave. Check back this evening and the top five could read differently, which is the entire point of showing it to you instead of just telling you the final result later.
One vote from flipping
Every idea on the board sits in one of three columns: Pitched, Planned, or Building. Pitched is the open pool where anything anyone submits lands first. Planned means our small team has looked at it, scoped it, and confirmed it's actually doable with the people and hours we have. Building means it's in the current sprint and going into the game.
The spectator camera for RUSH crossed into Planned two weeks ago, and it's the one closest to crossing the next line. We've got a rough estimate on the work, we know which of the three of us would take it, and the only thing holding it back from the current sprint is that another idea is still ahead of it on total votes for the slot. Right now that's not guaranteed for long. If the camera pulls further ahead of the ping wheel this week, it takes the next open slot and we start on it the day the board locks.
The ping wheel isn't far behind in scope either, and if it overtakes the camera, that's what gets picked instead. We only carry one new mode-affecting feature into a sprint at a time, because we're a handful of students, not a studio with six teams working in parallel. That means these two pitches really are competing directly for the same seat, not just for bragging rights on a leaderboard graphic.
We've seen this exact scenario before, where an idea sat in Planned for a cycle and a half before its vote count finally cleared the one ahead of it, and the wait turned out to matter. Players kept voting through that stretch because they could see the count was close, not because we asked them to. That's what we're hoping happens again here, because a fourteen-vote lead genuinely isn't safe.
Why one vote each, and why it locks
Every account gets one vote per idea, full stop. No buying extra weight, no premium currency that moves you up the board faster, because both currencies in the game are earned by playing missions and RUSH runs, not purchased, and we didn't want to break that logic just because voting felt different from loadouts. A player who's logged forty hours and a player who signed up this morning carry the same one vote. We built it that way on purpose, because the moment voting power scales with spending, the board stops being a real signal and starts being a leaderboard for wallets.
The lock matters as much as the vote count. Every few weeks we close the board, take a hard look at the top of it, and commit the next build slot to whichever idea has cleared the bar. Once it locks, that's the pitch going into development, and the counts reset for the next cycle. That's the deadline behind this whole post: the board for this cycle locks soon, and whatever's sitting at the top when it does is what we start building, not what was leading last Tuesday.
We get compared to open source shooter games sometimes because of how open the process is, even though the code itself isn't public. What is public is every pitch, every vote count, and every decision about what gets made next. That's rare for online multiplayer fps games in browser generally, where roadmaps usually come from a closed-door meeting and players find out what shipped after the fact. Here you can watch the decision happen in real time and change it while it's still happening.
We've also noticed the board's mood shifts with the calendar the same way seasonal marketing topics for small business tend to spike around holidays. Pitches for Halloween-themed RUSH waves and winter map skins climb every year around the same weeks, then fade once the season passes. It's a small thing, but it's one more sign the board reflects what players actually want to see next, not what we think should trend.
Go move the order
If the spectator camera or the ping wheel is the mode you actually want next, this is the week your vote counts the most, not because we're saying so for effect but because the math says so. Fourteen votes is closer than it sounds on a board this active, and either pitch could be sitting at the top or the bottom of that gap by the time you finish reading this. Open the idea board from the main menu, find the pitch you're backing, and cast your one vote before the cycle locks.
And if none of the current top five is your pick, that's fine too. Scroll past them and vote for whatever's climbing further down, because that's how a pitch reaches the top five in the first place. Every idea currently in the leaderboard started buried in the Pitched column with a handful of votes, and got there because enough players who play online multiplayer shooter browser games decided it was worth backing over something flashier. The board doesn't reward the loudest pitch, it rewards the one enough people actually show up for.
We'll post the locked result the moment this cycle closes, camera or ping wheel or something else entirely if the order flips again before then. Whatever wins goes into the next sprint, and we'll show the build as it happens, broken parts included. Go vote.