So the only game "players" play is all out war. Little short sighted imo, I play a lot of variations of the game and don't think anyone one style of play is any better than the other. Play all variations to get the best feel for the game or there is no way to make a unbiased decision on game balance across the board. Plus since I know you have played a building game or 2 does that take away from you being a "player" ?


Cause only "real players" use TWX/Scripts?

Not to drain your puddle or anything but have you ever worked on a car? Have you ever wondered what the engineer that designed it were thinking?

Can you image what would happen if the engineers ever tried to .....

Well, never mind........ lol

Cause only "real players" use TWX/Scripts? [/quote]

TWX and scripts, maybe not, but scripts are used by most. If they use a helper that runs a ppt, they are basically using a script. If they use the helper to find a near fig, same as a TWX script. The helpers simply do not have the offensive/defensive scripts that have been developed for TWX unless they are add-ons. I think SWATH loads 1200+ TWX scripts that I have that covers a lot of different things including special purpose that you don't seen in every game.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

They were thinking if I design it this way, you have to take it to the shop or buy a special tool to fix it. They were also thinking that they (the engineer) would never have to fix it.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

I think Vid is trying to suggest a different perspective for JP than
the view of 'scripts have killed the game.' I think there are two
groups of players that JP is trying to satisfy; the players who have
been playing and have adapted their play to current 'levels' and those
who wistfully remember how the game felt back in the time they
played.

The current player base has/had a pretty short list of requests
to 'fix' the bugs in TWGS. JP addressed most if not all of these
requests in his recent release. So they (current player base) are
being addressed.

The 'I remember when' crowd is Far harder to please. They want
to put in enough settings to tame the current version back to pre-
TWGS or at least less combative games. If I interpret their wishes
correctly, they want more TRADEwars, and less tradeWARS.

Very difficult to make both crowds happy, yet JP is trying.

That is a very excellent synopsis of the current cultural climate, well spoken.

I am more confident that it will work out positively than some are. But that's okay. Most of the changes that have been implemented this summer are for the best IMO.

Creating a hybrid move delay, giving the option to limit logins in certain ways, a game enforced truce mode, and maybe some kind of gridding limitations are all good changes. As long as they're all optional, which so far it all has been.

There needs to be a way to play at keys (or at least MORESO) and more battlebots style, where you program your dude to go through the universe doing its thing, and the best programmer wins. Well I guess that style of play is already pretty well supported.

I agree this will, at least temporarily, slow down the aggressive
players. Unfortunately, it could also 'splinter' the current player
base, where the ultimate result (no pun intended) is one
player per server....

Another unintended consequence is the 'dumbing down' of the
player base; take away competition and people get even more
lax about base security and gridding.

I actually like some of the options being added, but have some
concerns regarding where it will end and how it will affect
the community.

From my perspective the game was already splintered when I returned. With the highly scripted/bot games at one end of the spectrum and the truce/builers games at the other. I feel the style that was missing falls somewhere in the middle of that pack and was how we played in the 90's.

Now that I have a server I can create games that will startout near stock, plenty of ports and easy to defend Gold bubbles, and each edit will become progressively a little more challenging.

I'm going to re-bang the lobby game today. This one has new player planets that go L5 in one day, and the same delays that are going to be standard on all my games. This way you can bring your scripts and test them. I want players to try to planet drop each other here to see what the settings allow now. Planet drops are still possible, but now even players at the keys can get out of the way fast enough. I want them to feel comfortable testing this before they commit to a full game.

Well to be honest and no offense to JP but the twgs server itself splintered and fragmented the community. Back before twgs i remember playing 2-3 games and while there were several there was only usually 1 game per MBBS and a crapton more players.

Once twgs came around and especially recently with 5,10,20 games per server. Hell you die in one game you just go into another of the 15 games on that server or another server. There are by far more running games then players probably 10 fold as many active games as players.

No real way to fix that.

I think most servers that host more then 5 games do an injustice to the pool of players. I know I may get flamed for this but less games more people in each game. Just say'n.

What's up with this phrase? Is this a new fad? Remindes me of the song, "I'm so much cooler online."

is it "cooler" or "Kewler"

fad sure is a interesting word isn't it?

[decided to completely ignore the entire content of your post as well and concentrate on one word].

As for that one of my youtubers says it all the time in videos so it kinda of got thrown into my lexicon.

Lord Talon, no offense taken, and your point is certainly valid, that there are too many games for the player base. However, there was no limit on the number of games that an op could run on a BBS, so the decision was always in the hands of the op, not the author. Recently I've created an artificial limitation on the number of games per server by charging a per-slot cost, with the hope that this will encourage more sites with fewer games.

I also would point out that about 30K BBSs licensed TradeWars (probably closer to 90K actually ran it) back in the day, and I think we're at about 2500 total TWGSs in existence since 1998.

The MBBS example is an anomaly. That game was sold for about $500 per license to a very small pool of MBBSs, and this tended to drive up the player count. If I wanted to achieve such a result today, I think there would need to be maybe 3 sites with everyone gathering there, and I'd have to charge about $20K per license to make it worthwhile. Another alternative would be to discontinue sales and support of public TW servers/games at all and just provide one site where everyone plays. Or maybe just one game and make everyone play there?

I'm not convinced that's a better approach, however, because a big part of this game has been smaller, private games for groups of friends. I've never felt that the public game site is the backbone of the community. It's just the most visible.

Vid, most heart surgeons I know haven't had a heart attack themselves. What I see is a thousand different perspectives, and I take them all into account. Yours is but one.

Yeah. But the flip side is that the learning curve can't be too steep. Too much competition and there won't be any newbies to replenish the player base.

I just started playing again a month or two ago, after being away since 2003. Even though a lot has changed, I still have a foundation to build on going back to the BBS days. Without that, I would probably be too intimidated to play at all. My first game was a week old when I joined, and I got totally destroyed. If I didn't already expect that based on the game age and fighter count, I'd probably have given up right then and there.