Looking forward to this.

I think it would be fun to release my own bullet-shielding-only robot to compare against the other bullet shielders, but at the same time I'm not sure I want to skew rumble results further by adding more bullet shielding.

Eh, I wouldn't worry about that. :-) The bots you're "skewing" are from inactive bot authors, too, so it seems silly to sacrifice any of your own Robocode experience for people that aren't even paying attention.

Or bots no longer in development. Like Nene. Which is actually a nice test bot for this, since it is an otherwise strong robot.

Surely you're going to put your own gun on Nene eventually?

I was going to, but Nene got very bloated and its structure isn't as good as I would have liked. I can try to retrofit my current development gun on it, but I am not sure how well that would work.

I am currently writing a new robot to see if I can correct some of those issues. I found that migrating its movement is somewhat difficult. So I might just rewrite that too, but this time with a better idea how a good movement is put together.

That´s why we have a secondary PL ranking. This ranking system is designed to not be affected by the presence of specialist bots.

Interesting stuff with bullet shielding lately... it's getting me a bit interested in coming back to robocode perhaps

Just thought I'd chime in to note, PL ranking isn't resistant to all kinds of specialists. One could argue that a bot which barely but consistently beats non-surfers, but is great against surfers, is a specialist of sorts.

That would be great. I hope you do, it would always be fun to see what you can do with it.