1.
First of all, on the left hand side of your screen you'll notice your profile. This shows you information about your account and character that you need to pay attention to in order to play stickfight. Experience is how much XP you have. You gain XP by winning fights. Ki is a measure of skill and honour, and you also gain it by winning fights, or by purchasing it in the
stickfight store. You need ki in order to use weapons (weapons are important if you want to earn more XP per fight.) Your level is also displayed, along with the amount of XP you need to reach the next level. Your rank indicates how well you're doing at the game overall.
Underneath your general stats are your fight stats, which detail how many fights you've won, lost, and drawn.
Your weapon skills follow your fight stats, and show you how well trained you are at using each weapon. Your progress is indicated by the blue bar to the right of the weapon name. You can get a direct indication of how many times you've used a particular weapon, and how many times you need to use it to attain full skill, by hovering your mouse pointer over its name.
The first thing you probably noticed after logging in is the live chat window in the middle of the screen. This is where people get together to talk about stuff, to request challenges, or to scream "HEYE HOW d0 I PLY THIZ GMAME" while mashing the keyboard with their fat, hairy palms. Feel free to introduce yourself and say hi; people are pretty friendly. Try not to be vulgar and don't harrass anybody, or you'll be silenced, which means you won't be able to chat at all. If you're a seifu and you're silenced, you lose access to your seifu abilities for the duration of your silencing, but will regain them when you're unsilenced.
Underneath the chat window you'll see your challenges table. It has four parts to it: incoming challenges, outgoing challenges, recently completed incoming challenges, and recently completed outgoing challenges. An incoming challenge is one that was sent to you, and an outgoing challenge is one that you sent to someone else. When you're sent a challenge, click the Y or the N associated with that challenge to accept or decline it. If you accept the fight, you'll be taken to the move selection screen. We'll talk more about that
later.
Below the challenges table is a list of all the users currently stickfighting. Click a user's name to view their profile, or click the message or challenge links next to their names to message or challenge them.
On the right hand of the screen, at the very top, you can see a list of active threads on
our forums. Feel free to register and join in on any discussions there; everybody's welcome.
After that is a box that lists how many private messages you have. If you have unread messages you can read them by clicking the Inbox link. You can send private messages to people by clicking the message link next to their username in the challengers list, or by opening your inbox and clicking the send link at the bottom of the list.
Finally, underneath the private messages list there's a small box reserved for snippets of the latest stickfight news. Pay attention to this box as it's updated fairly regularly and often contains important information.
2.
It depends largely on how risky you want to play things. The amount of XP you win or lose in a fight is partially determined by the level of your opponent, so if you're a low-level fighter who chooses to fight a stickgod, you can potentially lose hundreds of XP and drop a level. Of course, you could also gain hundreds of XP and gain a level!
It's up to you to decide whether the risk is worth it or not.
3.
The new fight engine looks intimidating but is actually pretty easy to use.
Instead of a fight being won by the height of the attack like in the previous engine, the winner of each round is determined by whoever puts more amount of energy into it. As in the previous engine, weapons don't affect the outcome of the fight; they determine how much XP you win or lose in each round. Each weapon is more powerful than the one before it, starting with punches which earn the smallest amount of XP per round, and ending with katanas, which when fully trained earn the largest.
After choosing what moves you want to make (remember that you'll need ki to use weapons!), use the three sliders underneath the drop-down move selection menus to distribute all 100 points of energy among the three rounds, and click the submit button.
Note that to send multiple fights to the same person you must use the "Issue Challenge and Return" button, and not simply hit your browser's back button.