Thanks Drew, your screenshot makes it clear: a buddy's lines arrive twice on your end, while the lines you send yourself show once. So the chat window is drawing what it receives correctly, and the message is being delivered to you twice. I've handed this to the person working on the multiplayer connection side. They'll reply here once the fix is live. Nothing has changed in the live game yet.

Found it, thanks Drew. Your game tab had been open since Sept 22, so it was still running an older version of the game, from before we rebuilt the connection code. That old version had a bug: every time the game server restarted and your tab reconnected, it attached one more copy of the chat listener. So buddy lines showed twice, and would have kept climbing with each restart (3x, 4x...). The current version doesn't do this: we tested it delivering exactly one line per message across reconnects, server restarts, map changes and background tabs.

What to do: reload the game page once (F5). From now on the game notices when a newer version is live and asks whether you want to save and reload. If a tab stays on an old version for 6 hours, it saves and reloads by itself, so this can't build up again.

While tracking this down we also fixed a separate server problem: whispers and buddy lines sent to someone who had been idle for about a minute could silently go missing. That is fixed now too.

I'm leaving this In Progress until you confirm: after reloading, do buddy lines show once?

Marking this Fixed, since both parts are live. The doubled lines came from a game tab still running an old version, and the game now offers to save and reload when a newer version is out (and does it by itself after 6 hours). Whispers and buddy lines sent to someone who has been idle for a while now arrive too. If you still see a buddy line twice after reloading, just reply here and we'll reopen it.