Do you like pooping? Well then, our ninth update is for you. It includes a new achievement, speedier matches, and a bit of help for new players.

(It really has nothing to do with pooping. I just like talking about pooping. Poop poop poop. (If this is too lowbrow for you, you can skip ahead to the Elizabeth Cady Stanton joke.))

Let us know your thoughts on the forums (http://demiurgestudios.com/community/), and if you run into any problems, let us know at support.arenakings@demiurgestudios.com.

WHAT'S NEW

Arena Kings is updated weekly based on the feedback we get from you. You can check out the full list of updates on our forums, but here's some of the major stuff:

* Noob Aid: To make things a bit fairer, new players get a health bonus which phases out over the course of the first four levels.
* A new Steam achievement for finishing a match during the beta
* Faster Matches: Sped up games by reducing 3-player and 4-player victory conditions.
* A bunch of bug fixes and improvements, particularly related to scoreboards and the challenges introduced last update.

COMING SOON

Five words: Freeze Ray. (I am now encased in a block of ice and can't say the other three words until I am unthawed generations from now in my country's darkest hour.)

YOUR FEEDBACK

Okay, I'm not going to pretend to be frozen anymore. Here's some of what you've been saying:

"Pretty hard to play with lag."

Addressing lag is one of the two most important things we're working on, along with giving people that don't use Facebook the ability to sign up for an Arena Kings account. In the previous release, we added a warning when we can tell that you're about to join a high-ping game, but we're not getting reliable results from that check. We're working on improving that, as well as a bunch of other changes to networking.

We expect that in the long run, we may need to change the game so that it's hosted by dedicated servers. Lots of folks have asked for that. That's a very large engineering task, though, and in the near term we think it's better for the game to spend those hours adding features and fixing bugs.

While we're working on improving things, the number of people playing the game at any one time has a big impact on whether you can find a nearby, low-ping host, so keep on inviting your friends to play.

"Had to leave because the game was way too long."

We've reduced the 3- and 4-player score limits to help with this. Let us know what you think of the new game lengths!

"What's the 19th Achievement?"

It's the one that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made, but were never allowed to unlock. Not really. It's a little thank-you achievement for you (valiant beta testers all) enabled in this latest release.

"<3 <3 <3"

Y'all also said lots of nice things about the game (shucks, thanks!), but those aren't as interesting to talk about.