Why are people continually putting games on their servers with ship delay and rob delay. I don't know of anyone who enjoys a lagging server and why sysOps want to simulate that problem is beyond me. All I can attribute it to is newbie sysOps that don't have a clue to how frustrating it is to watch a screen move at simulated 500 ms lag.

A server announced rebangs today for a time limit game that has ship delay and 15k (I think) moves. Oh boy, I don't have a life and all I want to do is sit at my computer all day... Yeah right. Scratch that server.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

It just might be because those are the default settings.

Cerne

True, but they know they are there because they post, in some cases, the delays settings.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Some people just don't know, or think, to change it. There's a few people that think that somehow these things make the game more fair in some way against scripters or reds or whatever the enemy of the day is... so that's why some do it.

I've just learned something about ship delays, but havent' tested it.  If you turn ship delays off, all ships run same speed.  If it's on, you can have barges move slow, and fed ships move fast, kinda adds to the game I guess, but you have to be aware of this, and program the settings accordingly.
 

Uhm, that's what ship delay means... laff. Ship delay is... seconds to move and attack = X*tpw

Where X is 1 for full, .25 for quarter, etc. So a 4 tpw ship (like an ISS) at quarter delay is 1 full second before warping, or in order to power up. That's per sector.

And uhm, you better have planets that can't pdrop and have photons disabled, or you're dead in the water. Ship delay is broken, an artifact of the game before scripts.

The effects of ship delay are well documented. In a turns game it's annoying until mobiles, then it's game over. In an unlim it's just plain unplayable, game moves too slow to be fun for anyone except the slowest of farmers (which won't survive long anyway).

Also, some of these servers, the players don't have a clue what pdrop is. It serves a purpose, but not in the ultra comptetive TW world.

Thanks for clearing that up Sing,  So I learned what it was intended to do, and now learned that that too is broken  
Oh well, guess I'll go back to my old stance of leave delays off, and not bother with experimenting.

I still think if the things that don't have delays now were fixed to have sensible delays like ship warps do, delay settings would have a place in certain games.  But then again, one of the appeals of TW to me is its slow pace.  Most of the community (at least the subset that's active on the forums) only finds the fast-paced settings appeal to them.  I like games that last months, where people *aren't* online 24/7 (not one person, and I don't mean sitting at the login prompt to get around a time limit either, you literally LOG OUT OF THE GAME and have no CPU cycles on your PC spent on that game in the meantime...I know, a shocking concept to heavy scripters), where even with full delays it only takes 15 minutes to play out your daily turns because you only get 300 of them, where the fact pdrop has no delay doesn't matter because no one's online with you TO pdrop, etc.  In the situations where two people are online at the same time in these games, delays make combat dynamics more interesting, as low TPW ships get a real combat advantage you never get to see when it's all about script speeds and not ship speeds.
There are plenty of active games of the slow-paced type out there, they just don't interest this community so that subset of TW players don't really hit the forums.  It's too bad delays are a global setting so sysops have to choose one subset or the other to cater to and never the two shall meet.

I know that certain people are going to argue with me, but I can make a game that scripts will run no faster than if you key the strokes by hand.  Then only advamtage a script would have is that it would take out the repeatative key strokes.
This type of game is how Tradewars was originally meant to be played.  The problem is, you won't get players.  Everyone complains about scripts except the scripters (by the way, I'm a scripter) but no one will play a game where the game is designed to not be able to use scripts.
This isn't a complaint, it is a statement of truth.
 

Laff and half of the people *ing about "Script Kiddies" use scripts them selfs its a tool, its not cheating. Everything develops one way or another.

I for one love scripts as they help with my hands not craping.

No one HERE plays without scripts.  Why would anyone that enjoys a hand-typed game of TradeWars post here more than the once before they get ridiculed off the board?
There ARE plenty of servers out there with plenty of players that play the game "old style".  You can choose to believe that's not true if you wish.

You can adjust the CPC, but that messes with macros too. All of that counts on the players... 1: Not wanting to win, and 2: Being very uneducated. There are some commands that count in the CPC, and others that don't. I guarantee I can do " p 2345 * y " faster by script than you can do " m 1234 * a 9999 * " by hand, low CPC or not.



It's how the BBS days were played, TWGS changed all of that.



Very few people, even in the BBS world, play w/o scripts. I've played on some BBSes, places where people log out at the end of their turns, and most of them have a helper or 2. I've seen telemate scripts and macros, I've seen putty macros and scripts, even stuff like twhelper.

Back when I came back afew years ago that's how I played. And I won a few games doing that, too. I'd come on, run my 1000 turns divided up into colonizing, cashing (ppt and neg to a port in sec), probing and gridding out blocked sectors. Then log out and go to bed. I used telnet and copy-paste macros, putty and then attac. In those games other players use scripts to mow around, colonize, ptrade, do red stuff and probe.

What you didn't see was aggressively targetted gridding, pdropping and ptorping (area of denial stuff). That's because most of them didn't really care to win, they just played for the fun of being there.

That's all well and good until you get 1 player in there that wants to kill everyone. Then suddenly the game becomes aggressive. It's not that the people here use scripts, it's that the people here are more used to playing for the kill. And once you have one shark in the water, everyone else has to grow some teeth just to survive.

And that's why people here use scripts. Those players that come here and don't want to use scripts find themselves getting killed... a LOT. That stinks, so after throwing a hissy-fit most people start asking "ok, how can I not get killed?"

I was thinking (radical concept) about how we have information regarding game play available on some sites, but I have not seen anything similar for gameOps. Maybe beause I really haven't looked for it.

It would be nice if some of the Ops and game creators created an "Op Guide for Dummies" file similar to what TW-Cabal had for players. I could see a section on the various effects of settings, such as delay, one on creating an edit (red/blue balance - alien (yuch) settings and how they impact their actions). And finally something on general rules including a subset of what is generally acceptable for truces.

I don't remember if Rexx was working on something like this or not.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Hmm, so you dont have to sit for that?