Welcome to Mr. Robot’s redesigned site, chalked full of features that users have been asking for.

User Accounts: Now you can save settings for each character, and use them on any computer and any device. There are a few other nifty things user accounts lets us build in for you, like removing characters from your recent list.

The Mobile App will is moving to the web. If you already own the mobile app, you should really read this.

New Features: We think you’ll really like the new stuff we’ve added.

• Lock any gem / enchant / reforge! You asked for it, we listened. Now you can lock in that expensive enchant you’re sick of Mr. Robot changing. Or that 150 gold reforge swap that only moved around 10 int and 10 hit to get your closer to the hit cap. No worries, just lock in what you want and Mr. Robot will optimize around it. You can also select new gems (etc) and put lock them in as well. You will see a gray dotted line around anything you locked.
• Shopping list: Look for the shopping icon on the menu bar to pull up the shopping list. Mr. Robot tallies all of the gems and enchants you need (and associated materials) to go fishing on the Auction House or beg your friends.
• Exclude any item: everyone wants different filters, and if we add them all the tool would become bloated and confusing. Instead, we give users the option to exclude any item(s) from the optimizer, so that Mr. Robot never suggests them for BiS.
• Remove characters from your recent list: that’s right, now there is a big X next to everyone on the recent list, so you can get rid of the ones you never use.
• Optimal bar: we added a snazzy colored bar to show how optimal your are, based on your settings. The width of the bar (in any view) is the BiS score for your settings. If you’re on the armory tab, it will show you how optimal your actual gear is, and show a little arrow indicating where you could be if you optimized with Mr. Robot. When you’re on the optimized tab, the bar shows your optimized score, and the little arrow indicates where you were with your last optimization. That way, if you change settings and re-optimize, you can quickly see if it’s better or worse.
• Updated filters: we did a little house-cleaning on the filters, removing the ones that weren’t very important (like exalted rep) and adding in more relevant ones (like include/exclude molten front rewards).
• Epic gem rules: we added in an option to control when Mr. Robot will suggest epic gems for your gear. You can tell him to only put epic gems in T13 heroic gear, or if you’re rich you can just tell Mr. Robot to put epic gems in all of your gear.
• Stat weight updates: we have a new UI for editing stat weights, we hope you like it. We also added in the option to automatically change the stat weights between raids and 5mans (since the caps are the only thing that changes).

Miscellaneous Little Stuff:

• Healer filters: we updated the healer preferences to show what it changes, instead of being a black box.
• Gem sockets: the gems now have a colored border around them to indicate the socket color. Enjoy!
• Generic characters: we still let you load generic characters, we just moved the option to the load menu.
• Automatic optimization: there is no more optimization button, we hope that’s ok. You will just be optimized all the time, whenever you change something. That’s actually how it worked on the old site, we just ‘hid’ the changes until you pushed the button… Robots know humans like pushing buttons. But he removed it now, to make sure the UI wasn’t cluttered.
• Faster load times: we optimized a lot of the code to make your characters load faster. We’ve grown from 10,000 users in January to over 4 million 11 months later! It was time to refactor the code for scalability.
• 4.3 Bugs: there have a been a few bugs on the site after the 4.3 update, like valor items not categorized under the right filters. Those have ALL been fixed with this launch.

Mr. Robot’s Premium Features: For those of you who love the advanced tools, or just love our favorite metallic friend, you might want to upgrade to a premium account. Every premium account comes with every feature, for every game, we ever make. Just $12 / year (that’s $1 a month for those of you who leave math up to the robots).

• No Ads! (he might put his own smiling face in the ad spots instead, if you ask nicely)
• The Mobile App
• RoboCouncil, on the web and mobile
• Protection during the Robot Apocalypse (a smart move, human)
• Coming in early 2012: The Gear Planner ($5 when bought separately)
• Coming in early 2012: SWTOR tools! Woohoo!

You can get a free trial of any of those products. In fact, Mr. Robot insists you start a free trial for the mobile app, just to make sure it works on your phone before you spend the money. Each premium feature can also be bought separately, and if you later want to upgrade to a full premium account, Mr. Robot will put your original purchase toward the price of the premium account (he doesn’t want you to waste your money).

Mr. Robot’s Beta is here and will last about a week. There are a few rules.

1. We are emailing the link because we don’t want it posted anywhere… since the link isn’t permanent, we don’t want search engine crawlers picking it up. So please don’t post it anywhere crawlers get. If you share it with friends, please email, IM or PM on facebook or PM on twitter. If you didn’t get an email and want to test the beta, email fanmail@ (you know our site).com. The autoresponder has the URL in it.
2. Every time we update the beta site, you’ll need a new link. We will try to email everyone as soon as the link changes. In case you don’t get the link, try emailing fanmail@ (you know the rest).com. We set up an autoresponder email to shoot back the beta URL.
3. We want your feedback – tell us what you love, hate, or if you find bugs. Post them in the comments of this post. If something isn’t intuitive and it took you a minute to figure out, TELL US! If something was much more intuitive than the old site, tell us that too. We want to hear it ALL! Walls of text are welcome
4. Also, please vote for us on the “Crunchies“ – it’s a big deal in Silicon Valley and we’d love to make it to the finalist round, as the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” (That means we haven’t taken money from rich people to fund the company, we’re doing it ourselves… and we’re not rich). You can definitely post and retweet this! Vote here! (once per IP address)

Known issues with the beta:

• Our top navigation isn’t finished, we are still working on the layout of that.
• We have a few animations we want to ad.
• Check out the stat weight editor… change a stat and see what happens. Cool right?
• If you have a 2H equipped, we also recommend an OH. That’s an error, ha.

Reported Bugs:

• When selecting T13 LFR as your gear settings, some of the gem slots are empty, which also affects the score. (confirmed)
• Spirit = hit might not be working on shamans
• Take a look at dodge/mastery for bears, it’s acting different than the original site
• Can’t select PVP stat weights for warrior.
• On selecting PVP, a user got an error message
• Valor gear isn’t categorized right

Suggested Improvements (which we have not necessarily committed to)

• New favicon for browsers
• Review the ‘save’ button on windows (Leon reported clicking on other buttons and forgetting to save, and said an autosave might be nice).
• Add hovers to the buttons
• WoWhead links on gems / enchants lists
• Show required mats for patterns / crafted gear in a tooltip.
• Add item level to the gear (like the mobile app has)
• Add a mouseover tip to explain the progress bar
• Highlight different gear between armory and optimized(?) – a way for someone to play around with a guildie’s gear, then show them ‘this is what you should change.’ We likely add this in to the gear planner feature.
• Always keep the save buttons blue, cancel buttons red, apply buttons green.
• Add the food and flask name that we choose for characters in the stat window, add ability to change food / flask.
• Make a faster way to browse gear between slots (like ‘next slot’)
• Make sub-windows go away if you click outside their area
• Now that we drop people into the armory tab (instead of the optimized tab), people can no longer click on an item to get the item list. It isn’t obvious that an item would then be clickable on the other tabs.
• Change the language of “Do not Reforge” back to “Remove your Reforge” that the original site has.

Favorite features! Please tell us what you really like, so Mr. Robot knows not to mess with it. He also gets a warm, fuzzy feeling from compliments.

• Animating stat weight bars. ooooh, aaaaah.
• Exclude items
• Gem socket colors (the outline)