Hey guys, Nath here. It’s been many months in the making, but Guardian V2 is FINALLY here and ready to help!

To summarise, Guardian V2 currently does pretty much everything Guardian V1 did — but now, our developer Void will be able to sprinkle in some cool new features and commands on top. We’ve got loads of ideas, so without further ado, here’s some deets from the developer himself, VoidInVoid!

So it’s finally here! Guardian V2 has been many… many months in development. In fact, development stems all the way back to the end of January this year. It’s also worth noting that much of Guardian V2’s codebase is based on that of the 95 Degrees Radio too, to at least be able to avoid building an entirely new system straight from the ground up. Plus, it allows for radio integration to be made more easily in the future, stay tuned!

As for why development took so long, I feel it’s a little understated just how large of a project and how much effort was put into the original Guardian by Jae, so it really was a long and tough feat to replicate that whilst also upgrading the systems Guardian uses internally. For example, one of the new features which you won’t really see is the new transaction system — basically every single transaction in and out of your Degreecoin balance is logged along with details, in order to make it easy to trace back for example any exploits, and rollback account balances. I really put a focus on creating robust back-end systems such as these to make future development easier, at a cost of a longer development time.

One of my aims with Guardian V2 was also to improve on some of the shortcomings in the original Guardian, such as an improved command management and help system (try it yourself with !gc), native support for replying to suggestions by staff members, improvements to parties and much more. I’d love to hear your feedback on some of these changes too!

That’s not to say we weren’t able to throw in some new features too, such as achievements, streaks (!streak), and the new profile system (!profile!). We’d also love to expand these features in the future, so stay tuned!

So, we made it. Many months and 62 GitHub commits later we’re here. It’s definitely taken me longer than expected, and with uni and… life getting in the way of things I’m glad we’ve finally got to this point. As cliche and corny as this sounds — this is only the beginning. -Void

I also wanted to throw in what Jae had to say, it was beautiful in a way.

“It’s one thing, writing a bot, being able to inject some personality into it and call it your own. And also, I am delighted to have had the opportunity to help shape the server in such a way. But also on a personal level. It helped me learn and grow. It taught me a lot of things, as much as it hurt me sometimes. Sometimes it was why I got up in the morning, and others why I couldn’t sleep at night. Especially at the time when my last year at uni was falling apart around me, this was the only thing I truly felt I was making any progress with, as slow as it was sometimes. And beyond that. This is probably the only way I had enough experience to be comfortable trying to go for my job, even if it’s not directly why I got it. so yeah, this bot is kinda a big deal to me😂”

Thanks to Void for doing all this for us. We have loads and loads of plans and future ideas for Guardian, I can’t wait to see how they turn out. For now, go try the !gc, !profile and !streak commands!