Just for everyones information, I don't think I've ever been hit with a photon while exit/entering clearing limpets from the shielded planet surface. I have been plocked, but if you clear a couple of limpets at a time and wait a bit, they'll eventually bring thier planet in and reveal thier hand. You can either leave and come back later, or wait on them to leave and continue to clear the limpets, so there really isn't much of a risk involved there, and no turn/cash cost at all.

Oh no no, ship delay and attack delays have been widely
considered. They aren't used because people won't play
in games with them. They're boring and horrible, they're
imbalanced and make the game suck.

I've never actually seen an effective multi-player strategy
game. Eve? Not hardly. WoW? Not even close. Travian?
Not a chance. Starcraft? Very very tactical.




PPT depends on the edit, but maybe 4k a turn at most.
SDT makes 19k a turn. Nobody in their right mind would
PPT longer than is absolutely necessary.

So yea, that is very different than expected.



It would be an interesting change. Worth exploring, that's
for sure. As it is now, you can cash all night, thousands of
turns, on just 2 ports in some distant part of the uni. That
would change a lot of the game.

I got hit doing it in that moo2 game on UTW. Sage
cranked down the CPC to like 2, and I got hit doing
an exit-enter.

You can always play around with them and get past
their tactic, but the problem is that isn't fast enough
to be effective. You need the ability to clear out large
groups of sectors, otherwise it's just too slow. People
will switch into offense mode and take out more than
you can claim.

Bro He does get the game or the community as it has evolved to today...He has already said he does care in a few different places... why is everyone trying to spend all this time to give him positive feed back and HELP fro free... when we should all just be banding together....and saying NO thank you, you have already proven you don't have anyone's best interest at hart and spend our time convincing sysop to just not upgrade...these changes are so ridiculous on so many levels and so many points have been made as to why.. the people that have his ear know the game about as well as he does, and we are obviously not them. it’s simple sysops that don't upgrade will have a player base and as the sysops that have upgraded have already proven with have LOT's of headaches and lose players. Seems to be the intent of the beta anyhow.

Sure if cpc is 2. lol Who in thier right mind would set cpc to 2, and what player would actually play it if they knew it besides players that want to play by hand.

Who would set it? Sage

Who would play in it? We did

Did we know? No. The settings changed randomly and w/o notice.

LOL. I didn't see it set at 2, but that does explain a lot.

Yeh, was usually right after he banged a big
truce unlim game. People would be wSSTing,
and to keep the load down the server would
crank down to some very low (4 most common,
but I could swear I saw a 2) CPC. Made it
impossible to grid because of the frequent
rebangs and the long truces until like 4am when
everyone was asleep and the load went down.

I ended up writing a set of bot-based gridders
for this reason, so at least I can compete in
games where ppl grid at 4am w/ an advantage.
I hate gridding ppl via bot tho.

One, you guys live in a pretty small world. You have no clue what my perspective is. Two, you guys don't understand my priorities here. That's not meant to be a dig, just it's kind of odd how you guys keep telling me my business. Honestly, your vision on this is pretty limited. That's fine. It's not necessary for me to convince you of anything. I do value your insight into the game (well, Sing's, since he actually shares info instead of just harassing me), and that's why I'm here. But I always take that advice in its proper context.

"Sucks your going to throw the people who do know the game "under the bus" but you have done it before so no big suprise there."

Ok, I'll bite. What's that in reference to?

Oh, and I don't expect to finally break through your reality shield by asking this once again, but how is providing options harming you in any way? It's not. You're just dead-set on finding fault in me and what I'm trying to do here. Honestly, I'm not sure why you're even here. There are a lot of people here who don't care for what I'm doing, but they respect my right to do it, and they don't accuse me of having some kind of ill intent in doing it.

Kewl, if you're a gameop, please allow me to offer you a refund on your registration, because I'm clearly not living up to your expectations for this product. If you're not, well, not much I can do for you. The games you play in are between you and your gameop. If you can't find games that meet your expectations, that'll be the gameop's fault, not mine. I'm not forcing this stuff on anyone. Honestly.

Well yes and no. A lot of us come from the old style
play too, but we grew out of it. I have friends that
played TW. Run into people all the time from that era,
and some have came back. We may have a small
world, but we're well-connected to the bigger world too.

From my experience, the pdropping, the gridding, the
scripting, none of that has hurt the game or has chased
off many players. *THE* thing that has chased off the
most players is the time requirement.

The time requirement causes people with jobs and real
world activities to grow to resent the game the way
it's played now. That's because you can't play part time
and win. The game rewards those w/o a job, and w/o
a family, and often strains family relationships. I've seen
it happen, I've seen marriages dissolve under the
pressure of THIS game. I once had a wife come into our
chat and cuss me out for it, and I've had others that
were incredibly supportive. I had one family where the
wife would play for the husband while he was at work.
Same account, obviously not duping, not sure what that
is.

That's what makes this game both strong and weak.
It's a social game, it's a fun game because it's social.
People don't play it because it's a game, they play it
because it's a social experience. I mean heck, traitor
just came back in a few days ago and posted a merry
xmas message. What do you think brought him in to
do that, the ability to make 19k per turn or the friends
he's spent hours with on the phone?

I'd imagine in your own memories of how you played
the game, you probably had your own group too.

What we need is a way to expand THAT experience
while reducing the time commitment to something
that people with jobs can play. I would like to make
it easier for sysops to post custom messages with
each game, and I would like a way to better manage
the time requirements.

I have no clue how to do either. I have a few ideas,
but they aren't without problems and I'm sure there
are better approaches.



This is true, but there's a human-nature to consider
too. More servers w/ fewer people means more money.
While I doubt it'll ever be a substantial stream, it's hard
to imagine anyone turning that down, or at least not
considering it once. Unless we should refer to you as
Saint John?



Options are fine. My only concern is that you will spend
time on things that aren't used, rather than things we
really can use. That's why I participate here, hoping to
shape that so we get the tools to make our games
better.

Still, it is your time, and you'll spend it however you want.
Obviously, that's your prerogative.

I don't think some understood what I proposed considering this topic. I'll explain further

If limpets only activate when their is no limpet on the ship, or another corps/players limpet is active on that ship, that wouldn't make it easier to lock up a grid. That would actually make it harder to lock down a grid. For instance, if 1 corp laid out 50 limpets in every sector for their entire grid, say 50% and there weren't any other corps limpets out there to speak of, after the gridder picked up 1 limpet, the corp that owns the limpets wouldn't get more activations until the gridder scrubbed or hit another corp/players limpet. So basically the only message the sent per sector would be the fig hit message. That would actually make it easier to grid against the corp that laid out all those limpets and would discourage deploying that many. Of course the gridder would be carrying a limpet that could be tracked, but unlikely that would happen since the corp that laid the limpets would have so many deployed that it would take 5 minutes to go through the list to see where the active limpet was, and the gridder would be 10 sectors down the line by that point.

This method would pretty much stop the exit/enter clear, and would have some sort of cost at removing the limpets whether it be cash or turns.
Sure you could swap ships with a blue and have him clean it, but that still costs someone turns on the corp to do that.
You could have a corp member lay a personal limpet, but you'd have to do it after every limpet activation and not at the end of clearing the entire sector.
You could use a planet to pwarp to a class 0 and clean, but that would take more gas and cash to remove it.

So there would be a good bit of cost involved to clear a sector of 250 limpets as compared to the way it is now.

A few other methods could be:
1) Not allow limpets to activate on game re-entry.
2) Not allow limpets to activate twice in the same sector making the user have to move to activate additional limpets.
3) Some sort of time wait before another limpet could activate in the same sector (Causing the player to take more time to clear a sector)
4) Activate limpets on a percentage basis. Say 25% of the time, making it take more exit/enters and time to get the job done.

Limpet pdropper. They are pretty effective because
the active limpets at the end aren't computed until
that line prints. Atleast for unlims.

For turns games, this times 10. People don't have
massive limpet grids and often track limps to mow
out and take out their return jump. Even w/ cannons,
mow adj and photon.

And it was my understanding that the tag message
would still happen, even if you didn't pick up the limpet.
But maybe not.



Yea, but a gridder ship won't be high TPW. Just grid
around, then at the end, swap and scrub. 4 turns
versus 0, true, but that's not substantial.



If there's no tag message, then people won't bother
to clean them out. They'll just scrub at the end.

LOL, or a timestamp-based relog penalty. If you log out,
then log back in within a minute, you get a 200ms login
time penalty after the entry but before any commands
execute.

Edit: Actually this would have to happen right at the
end of the sector entry event. Do it before and you can
logout from the cit. So you'd need to do it right after
entry triggers stuff, but before you can execute a landing.
But any kind of substantial delay here, 200ms+, would
more or less stop turns players from scrubbing limpets
this way.

Exactly, discouraging the usage of massive amounts of limpets.