I'm curious, when would you say was the start of the modern age of heavily scripted TradeWars play? Back in 2004, we had some pretty heated debates on this forum about a number of changes I proposed in an attempt to rein in scripting and attempt to return the game to the original gameplay that had made it so popular. Obviously, the anti-change forces won that debate (and I had my reasons for siding with them), because no major changes were made. I'm trying to analyze the last 10 years of TradeWars, and I wanted to try to put a date on this transition in gameplay. Was it too gradual a change, or was there a "revolution" after which the gameplay was significantly changed?

Scripting has been common since the early 90s. It was common back in 1995 when
using telemate, I had several telemate scripts and macros. Rev was writing zoc scripts
back in 2002 that were aggressive and capable.

When people think of heavy scripting, they don't generally think of macros, data mining,
automatic colonizing or even trading scripts. Most people complain about scripting when
they come into an old game that's got figs down, mow to dock, and get pdropped or
torped within 60 seconds of creating their account. Along the same lines, people who
play unlims may also think of the massive automatic world cashing scripts like worldSSM
and worldSST.

To that end, aggressive grid war and aggressive cashing scripts became popular with
TWXproxy. Release of TWXproxy 2.00 was probably the watershed event there. That
was April 14th, 2003. With that, you had a series of major tournaments that were
decided by TWXproxy. Cherokee, SupG, Xide, and a lot of heavy scripting and scripted
play. Many of those turnies were decided by grid play, hence Oz's old forum sig. Since
going free with 2.03, you won't find any serious players that don't run TWXproxy today.

Not surprising, there's hundreds of pdroppers, foton scripts, gridding scripts and cashing
scripts now. Without those, you can't compete. When training new people, the FIRST
thing to do is get them using TWXProxy. With that, came the release of worldSSM, and
then later worldSST. At some point ST Bot 1.09 became a script standard, and bot play
blossomed. Today just about everyone runs a bot (mombot being most common) and
TWXproxy. With all of that comes a set of basic scripts that make unscripted play next
to impossible.

In my own games, I script almost everything I can. I've got some edits, like subzero,
so completely scripted that if you don't get in within 60 seconds of bang, you can't
compete. Scripts mow to dock, get the right ships, get my exp busted up, mow out and
start cashing. After enough money it either gets a battleship and explores for alien
space, or gets colts and starts cashing. Within 5 minutes I'll have a full battleship, within
20 minutes I'll have an alien ship and a mobile C planet. Within an hour or two I'll have
an alien planet, a map, lots of cash, figs, and pdropper running. Been doing that since
2007, so it's been a few years now. There's a handful of other players that have similar
setups, it can be fun to play against them. But fun in a "script development" way, not fun
in a "game mechanics" sorta way.

This is a graph showing an estimate of active TradeWars sites since 2000 when TWGS really started to take hold. There was a modest growth between 2000 and 2002, and after that, a pretty steady decline. I'm sure everyone feels the lack of players. The question is, does this decline coincide with these changes in gameplay, or are they just a natural decline in interest in this game. Considering the game hasn't been "new" since the mid 90s, I don't attribute the early growth to the game being "new", or the decline to the game becoming "stale". Other old-time games have continued to maintain a low but steady player base. TradeWars has not.



So I'm faced with the same question I was faced with back then, but things have progressed much further now. Is there any value in trying to "fix" the game so it's fun not only for veteran players and scripters, but also for new and returning old-school players? Or would any changes I make just drive away the last remnants of the TW crowd without bringing in any new players?

My goal has always been to maintain this game as a bit of playable videogame history, and not to evolve the game and constantly reinvent it. But not doing anything has allowed the game to evolve on its own, "in the wild". I don't know if it's possible to recover the spirit of what the game once was, but I do know that the spirit is long gone today. And what remains is only interesting to those who made it what it is.

I'm not sure active websites makes the perfect metric for this. There's a lot of people that play in the BBS
crowd. There's a lot of churn in the TW world. People come in, play for 6 months, then get called back to
real life. The process repeats itself, but few stay long enough to create a site and get it indexed.



As long as everything is an option, I don't see why it would chase anyone away. If a sysop wants to bang a
competitive game, he can bang one. If he wants to bang a non-competitive game, how does that affect the
competitive bangs?

People come into the game all the time, it's keeping people that's tough.

Oh hey, found the link:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=25719&p=198010

This isn't a graph of active websites. This is a graph of active TradeWars game sites, including both TWGS and BBS games.

Yeah, that topic was a good step toward revisiting this issue, but it really got into questions of how to monetize the game. I don't need that. My interest in classic TW is to keep the game playable as it was. I have other ways to evolve the game. This game isn't about evolution, it's about staying the same. Right now, it's not the same. It's like somewhere players introduced bazookas and hand-grenades into the game of chess. There wasn't anything wrong with the game, but someone thought it would be cool to blow crap up. That doesn't make it a better game. How can we get TW back to its roots? Or should we? That's what I'm concerned with.

Oh. Well then that's pretty dang impressive. I didn't know there were 300 places to play... dang.

Ok, so how to deal with the perceived problem then?

I don't think most sysops here would be hostile to the idea of anti-script measures as long as
they're optional game-by-game. I'd love to have long-term building games, but they're not
possible w/o impossible rules.

I've been burned by the options approach. Making zero turn delay an option was a mistake. I don't know why, but few games have delays. It's one of those things that isn't popular, but the game just can't be balanced without it. Even if the turn delay was only a quarter of full delay, that would be so much better. It isn't a trivial difference to have fast moving ships with a variety of delays vs no delay at all or even a very small but uniform delay. Having big ships move more slowly (or planets, for example) is necessary to the balance of the game. The game as it was, a very well balanced and fun game, was not just some random set of rules. It was well designed. Changes like this take a sledgehammer to that balance. So even making those things an option was a bad idea. Gary warned me about it. Should have trusted Gary

But that doesn't mean I am deaf to the wishes of the current community. I just think the proper division needs to be either a) a new game mode to go with Standard and MBBS, Stock and Gold, maybe Scripter and non-Scripter, so that people can choose which game type they want to play. Or b) make a new game that's entirely anti-scripting, v4. I actually favor the second, because it opens up much bigger changes without having to juggle everything in one codebase. I'd be happy with a situation where heavy scripters continue to play their version, TWv3 (with some needed bug fixes, but basically locked in), and the new game is more for old-school players and anyone new.

This is nothing new. I've talked about doing this since 2002. I didn't know then if there was any value in doing the new game. Now I feel like the game is going to die out if I don't.

Delays simulate laggy servers, and for those of us with limited time to play games it drives us away.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

I've played in games w/ move delays. The problem is two fold. 1: It vastly imbalances gridders, making ptorpers very powerful. 2: It's server-wide, so I can't have one game w/ move delay and another w/o. Today's "zero delay" does have a delay. It's not actually zero. Even if you slow down planets, there's other ways to make move delay suck.

The problem w/ move delay wasn't that you made it an option. It's that you made it the only viable option, since it's server-wide and most people do not like move delay. Sysops have to build games for the bulk of their players.



New game mode is, effectively, the same as just having an option. If you want to make a v4 that's completely anti-script, that's up to you. It's harder than it sounds tho... much much harder. Would require a central server, an official client and a lot of encryption and a lot of anti-cracking work.



Maybe. But if I had a dime for everyone that said TW was dying...

I think you will find out that your "peak" in your graph will coincide with the introduction of broadband. People had more time to explore the internet.

One approach that might work would be to have an option on the server side to encrypt the data stream. This would require a client that was able to unencrypt the data. If the client only allowed the use of built in scripts when the data was in encrypted mode then you could control what scripts were used for. If the encryption option was a game level option a server could run both full script and controlled script games. As for the client, if an existing helper such as Swath were used, it could disable the custom script options when detecting an encrypted data stream. This would probably be the easiest solution without major recoding.

So I put some kind of progress indicator that says you're in the process of moving. And as for the time it takes to play, the key is fewer turns, not faster moves. If you play the same amount of time with fewer turns and more MEANINGFUL turns, that's going to make the game more fun for a larger audience.

Except some of us know how to use a memory debugger and can dump the encryption key to disk.
From there, write a proxy that converts and plug everything else into it.

The problem is motivation. If the motivation exists, it'll be done. WoW is a massive, multi-million
dollar game with a crapton of users. Even with all that money and resources, they're just barely
holding bots at bay.

"I've played in games w/ move delays. The problem is two fold. 1: It vastly imbalances gridders, making ptorpers very powerful. 2: It's server-wide, so I can't have one game w/ move delay and another w/o. Today's "zero delay" does have a delay. It's not actually zero. Even if you slow down planets, there's other ways to make move delay suck."

Sing, you're taking too static a view of this. With your knowledge of the game, you could make this work, and make it fun. It would be different, though, and that's the hurtle.

The reason it overbalances ptorpers is because there currently is no delay for photon launches. That's inconsistent. When you launch fighters, there's a delay. Why not photons? If there are delays, everything needs to have a designed delay that relates to its power and strength. If it takes a few seconds to fire the photon, then some ships are going to be vulnerable to that tactic and others will not. That would be great.

I don't want to eliminate scripting. I want to make scripting less of an imbalance. Anything a script can do, a person can theoretically do. If you make sure there isn't a speed advantage to scripting, which there currently is, then you have a situation where it's not about whether scripting breaks the game, it's about whether tactics break the game. Then you can address tactics without worrying about whether it's a smart script or a human that's using the tactic. So I don't see much value in finding ways to keep people from using scripts.