Take that outfit tag off your Darn signature, you freak...

to the subject...

TW is going to evolve nomatter what, honestly, a begining scriptors guide isn't gonna help alot of these new guys... they need to learn the game, and then learn to script, or maybe, just learn the game.... scripting isn't ruining the game... its the lack of help from other players that is.

would you play a first person shooter if you couldn't figure out how to reload, you wouldn't play anymore, kinda the same thing... you guys (I'm guilty of it too) would rather shove off a noob than play or help them...


lets work on that

then discuss whats wrong with tw.

Yes TW has evolved in order to survive from the 1980's into the 21st century. The next logical step is a 2D and then a 3D universe using graphics. That does not mean that the text based Tradewars has to die. There is still a market for text based Tradewars. The graphical Tradewars is for the noobs and all of the WoW/Everquest, etc players that want a new MUD or some graphic game to play in.

I am glad that some company licensed Tradewars for a 2D universe, or is working with EIS to create one.

Imagine a 3D Tradewars shooter that flies ships and the player has to dock with ports to trade cargo. Ship battles would be different you can have lasers, missiles, instead of figs, and you have to fly the ship and aim at the target to hit their ship. Figs are used for protecting sectors or collecting tolls and can be programmed to attack if a ship enters, or just block its path.

I agree with Graz, we need to be kinder to noobs, so we don't scare them off. If they learn the game enough, maybe they will register their own TWGS server and buy some scripts and TW Helpers to help out the TW community. This forum is one of the places they can ask help from. Maybe have a "Tradewars for Dummies" type eBook that they can read and learn from, so they aren't podded as easily? I figure most noobs get podded, get upset, and then quit the game without learning more of it. They do a Google search for Tradewars and don't find much but that old 3D MUD and the EIS web site. They go to EIS Forums and post questions here, many just make fun of them, others just insult their intelligence. So they never play Tradewars again due to their negative experience with it.

quote:Originally posted by Traitor

* And I do get complaints. One of the perks of running http://www.tw-cabal.com is I get hate mail from every sap that can't figure out how to play, and somehow I'm to blame. Heh. You guys pod them. They cry. You tell them to go to my site. They read it. They come back and get podded again. They send me hate mail and go back to playing WoW or whatever. Go figure. And OMG, if I happen to roll over some newbit...sheesh, it's like I shot their dog.


Just wait until the first time you have to suspend someone.

Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to that.

you take outfit off YOUR sig

I should prolly put outfit IN my sig.

i removed it from mine along with the foundation tag.

quote:Originally posted by Slim Shady

you take outfit off YOUR sig


You went awol, I took over. I really don't like my team spamming the EIS forums with "Play our crap game over here", it's annoying...

i didn't go awol, i just went on extended vacation

Chances are nobody here will know me since all the people I played with have retired already.

Anyway... I was stuck by something while reading this thread. I get the impression that many of you started to play TW2002 after scripts became a necessity. Do any of you remember playing a game of TradeWars and being successful without using a script or macro of some sort? It wasn't so long ago that you could do just that. Scripts and macros may have been around since the 80's but it has only been recently that they evolved to the point where you could walk away and have the game play itself.

This game has survived a long time because the concepts were sound. What has evolved has been the method in which you connect to the game itself. In the BBS days it was difficult (but not impossible) to get a good script/macro tool. There were some around but they were unpolished and the BBS itself limited players to a local area in which most people did not have the skills to write their own anyway. With the flourishing of the internet came telnet protocols and the ability of people from remote corners of the world to connect and play Tradewars on a global level. With that influx of players came a huge increase in competition and the drive to give each person a competitive edge. That drive to innovate has left tradewars in the state it is today.

I remember playing against Xide and his corp-mates before TWX was something everybody could get their hands on. That was a really exciting time because there were still new strategies being found and people were busy developing the scripts that are so dominant today. We had a LOT of new players at that time... it was still fun to play because you still could be a newbie and do well. The scripts were considered ways to enhance your skill by improving your reaction to situations, but you could still learn the game and do well just doing things by hand.

The situation now is that it's almost impossible to start out from scratch if you don't already have experience with the game. New players are turned off, and after a while the old players get bored. That happens with any game... people get tired of it and move on. The problem is that if there are no new players the thing slowly dies out. That's been happening for the past 5 years now.

So where do we go from here?

Well... the strength of TradeWars is the design of the game itself. The weakness of the game is the tedious-ness of the command system (which the scripts were first designed to fix) and the fact that the playing field is biased towards those with the tools. (as opposed to those with the skills)

There is no way to really stop the scripters while the game is in its current form. So maybe it's time to look beyond telnet. A stand-alone client for tradewars would be a way to standardize the interface and limit the functionality users would have access to. Most likely the technological challenge would be changing the connection protocol to use something besides telnet.

A longer term solution would involve taking the client approach and actually making a real game out of it. That would probably include some changes about how the game is actually being played. Would it still be tradewars? Technically yeah, but the final product may be much different than what it is now.

Bottom line is that in order to actually make this game friendly to new players you will need to make some major changes. Many of those changes may alienate the current users... but like I mentioned in the early part of this post, current users eventually become former users anyway.

This game shouldn't be about scripts... so you need to find a way to take that out of the equation. There's many other games where you can write scripts just as well, and most of them have other things to offer the user as well. Like graphics and actual gameplay. After I retired from Tw2002 I wrote macros to help me play StarWarsGalaxies... until I got sick of that too.

While I wrote my own share of macros, that wasn't what got me involved in TradeWars to begin with. I got involved for the player interaction and the strategy aspect. This WAS a strategy game at one point... not a speed contest. Once that was gone I moved on to other games. And so far I haven't seen anything that would make me want to come back.

Maybe you guys need to take a step back from TWX and look at the game itself and see what you're missing.

-TK
(Talon - Team FEN / BOTE2001)

scripts do not make people stop thinking, or sucking if they cant think. sure, in an unlimited turn game someone could run WSSM or WSST and make a ****load of money, but if they dont know how to use it, who cares? and if you dont want it to be a speed contest, play low turn games. This still is a strategy game, even more so i think, because you have to be fast and smart enough to get around all the scripts being used. at this point the only thing we could do for new players is 1) have servers that protect new players from being attacked (like ice9) and 2) if new players join a game that has no noob-protection rules, the other players should stop trying to get free cheap kills and try to teach them something, because the funnest games are those with real competition. It is no surprise to me you are from FEN, back in the 90's the people there were *******s and if you asked them how they did what they did, or for alittle help, theyd basically tell you to F off, wonder how many players quit because of FEN.

You don't know me and haven't played with me, so please don't steriotype me based upon your preconceptions. I was chosen to represent team FEN at BOTE, but I played many places. You say yourself in your post that you have to be 'fast' and smart enough to get around all the scripts being used. When I was referring to 'speed contest' I meant reaction time and the speed of the kill scripts. Not the pace of the game. If you have to try and have your script be faster than your enemies script, that's a competition on who can write the best code... not strategy.

You don't address my main points that the game is no longer about the game but it's about the scripts people use to play the game. If you really want tradewars to evolve, you should try to find out something about the game by actually PLAYING it the way it was designed.

-TK

Edit : And please note I never said that the new 'version' of the game cannot have some automation built in. In fact I encourage it for the more tedious parts of the game. But do it in such a way that everybody is on a level playing field, and that people can concentrate on actually playing the game again.

when i said fast, i was referring to typing fast, like if you warp into dock as a red, land fast before a script can kill you, then make a macro to twarp out. and i did play before there were any scripts, i just have the ability to adapt, unlike you apparently. you tell me not to "steriotype" you, yet you make it sound like all the players now are mindless and crappy because they write/use scripts.

One of the things I miss about Trade Wars is the Fed conversations. In the day, you turned on a script, and turned it off when you were done and just talked on Fed Com. Sure winning, made you a winner, but the conversations you had with other players is what you took with you from that game.

I have enjoyed TW since the late 80's on and off over the years.(more off than on).RL gets in the way..and so played at the small BBS servers where i could run my turns a few hours on the weekend ctc.I am new the the fast paced new sytle game and new to scripting.In fact i got TWX 3 months ago.Scripting and learning something new has increased my enjoyment of the game 10 fold.However your complaints about scripts winning games is overstated.Playing a game at AB 3 months ago with a telnet client and stored macro's only I was constantly podded by a team running a kill script 24/7.I took great enjoyment out of being podded over and over watching for the reaction to various input untill i found the weakness.1)i triggerred there script over and over to run them low on gas...they tnen turned cannans down to compensate as they were running it AFK(I took Pods on purpose).Then after that i towed a corbo trap which they got with a cit killer type script and shield rode back to their base and wiped out the entire corp leaving them nothing but the pleasure of CBY apon reenty the next extern.This is just one example of many where reliance on scripts is foolish.Go ahead and write all the scripts you want because i will find a strategy to beat it or I will write a script to beat it....Remember its all in fun.