Please save this game

[Best]

I know there's been a lot of discussion and controversy about this game dying for a long time now. Making a new forum thread every few months clearly isn't solving anything. I'm not going to sit here and bash staff because it's getting old and I feel like as a community something should be worked out.

I'm going to try to not make this as long as possible but personally to me I never understood one thing about staff, and that's the lack of communication they have with Priitk. I still feel till today that there are tons of ways besides emails to get a hold of Priitk that staff don't want to reveal to the public. I'm not entirely sure, but that is how I feel. Cripple and I decided to dig in a little deeper and did some investigation on this dude.

We went on PriitK's wiki page and it says that "He currently Works for Ambient Sound Investments" so we googled Ambient Sound Investments and this is what popped up: Address: Toompuiestee 33A, 10149 Tallinn, Estonia, Phone: +372 529 9950. Why hasn't anyone called this number in attempt to get in contact with PriitK? Now, to me what I don't understand is after all these years, it took 2 players a total of 5 minutes to find out all PriitK's information at 4am. The best part about all this is that his Skype username is included with this information. A lot of this stuff is just research for the most part it seems. If staff really didn't find any of this information, then that to me is just really pathetic.

Furthermore into this investigation ambient has a website: http://asi.ee/

PriitK has a profile for this company as well which technically means he is still working here and is a founder. How can staff be so sightless into not seeing something like this and sending pointless emails? I know it’s insanely weird but how hasn’t anyone else found this or even attempted to call the company he works for and ask for him? Better yet why hasn’t someone shown up to this company and ask to talk to him just makes me realize what a POOR effort has been made in attempts to contact PriitK for any help. Do you honestly think a man that develops programs will have the time to respond or even go through the hundreds of emails he receives everyday? Half of our population is European, and so is half of our staff and sysops. Why hasn’t anyone even picked up the phone to call his company and ask for him?

[Jones]

tl;dr: someone should call to another country and harass the person who has been paying for the server

[Crescent Seal]

tl;dr but i like ur forum sig lol

tictac dough ya feel me

[Fork]

The title was tldr but i did read everything else in fine detail. I think it wouldn't do any harm if someone had the balls to contact him but would need to plan what to say to him. I'd be like "oh shit, it worked! erm erm... ... ... join my squad zoo Priitk?" then he'd hang up .

[forwards]

I'm not going to sit here and bash staff because it's getting old

You had no intention of trying to save this game, did you?

[Jerome Scuggs]

man it sucks because when you think about it - what could priitk do?

there are people far more invested in the game, who are trying to code a new client for subspace, and it seems like they aren't chugging along too quickly. i can't imagine priitk would devote much more time than them

something that WE could ALL do right NOW is look at TWL/TWDT. two of our biggest population draws, and we've basically thrown it all onto one dude's shoulders, and then we sit here and complain about "bias" when klaus has to cap/op/writeup basically everything. it was fun making fun of him when i could do it from the fringes but now everyone seems to be shitting on him and so it's not fun anymore. All this drama is going to drive people away.

[forwards]

man it sucks because when you think about it - what could priitk do?

there are people far more invested in the game, who are trying to code a new client for subspace, and it seems like they aren't chugging along too quickly. i can't imagine priitk would devote much more time than them

something that WE could ALL do right NOW is look at TWL/TWDT. two of our biggest population draws, and we've basically thrown it all onto one dude's shoulders, and then we sit here and complain about "bias" when klaus has to cap/op/writeup basically everything. it was fun making fun of him when i could do it from the fringes but now everyone seems to be shitting on him and so it's not fun anymore. All this drama is going to drive people away.

Here, have some cheese.

[Jerome Scuggs]

Here, have some cheese.

Just some advice, people usually change up their gimmicks after awhile to keep it fresh

[Jones]

man it sucks because when you think about it - what could priitk do?

there are people far more invested in the game, who are trying to code a new client for subspace, and it seems like they aren't chugging along too quickly. i can't imagine priitk would devote much more time than them

something that WE could ALL do right NOW is look at TWL/TWDT. two of our biggest population draws, and we've basically thrown it all onto one dude's shoulders, and then we sit here and complain about "bias" when klaus has to cap/op/writeup basically everything. it was fun making fun of him when i could do it from the fringes but now everyone seems to be shitting on him and so it's not fun anymore. All this drama is going to drive people away.

this. everyone hates claus for some "trades" etc yet no one is willing to take the burden off his shoulders

[MHz]

I've found that sending a group text message is a reliable way of getting players online. If we could start to collect all the cell #s of people who have, in the past 5 years:

1) Played in TWL
2) Played in TWDT
3) Played in TWD
4) Played in a league of another zone

that would give us a vast database of experienced players to tap. Contrary to my initial doubts, I've found that people are generally open to giving me their cell #, and I send through Skype which is very cheap and doesn't cost the recipient, so it wouldn't be too much effort to setup. This could add some immediacy to the email campaigns that I know a few zones already do. Realistically, with most pub arenas unpopulated 85% of the time, retaining the current player pool is a better strategy than pinning our hopes on attracting fresh blood.

[An UnKnOwN KiLLa]

best- thing is no1 can speak estonian too complex

[forwards]

best- thing is no1 can speak estonian too complex

this weaboo is right

[Jerome Scuggs]

this weaboo is right

I hate to disagree, but my middle school best friend wound up moving to estonia for a job and is now married to an estonian.

Literally dumb as rocks but half of his status updates are in fucking estonian now

[qan]

If staff really didn't find any of this information, then that to me is just really pathetic.

Which is why the actual explanation -- that we've known about it for many years -- is the more likely of the two, no?

What this tells you is that Priit just does not have the time to care about his ancient pet project. He hasn't had the time to care in about a decade. He does indeed still keep the server running from a tiny pinch at the interest on his Skype millions. When something serious happens, we try frantically to contact him. The only response we ever get is that the server in question comes back up. Steam Greenlighting was stalled for a very long time because we couldn't get his permission to put it up, but eventually, somehow it still got through. Finally, in the past he has made it clear that he will never, ever release the code to Continuum.

Even if we contacted him, as jerome points out, he couldn't really do anything. Would we want him to rewrite the client? To do anything remotely useful, I don't think we need a new, backwards-compatible client; it would be much better to have a new client/server package based on Subspace. Everyone wants to have a backwards-compatible client, and then expand the protocol from there, while maybe use fancy lighting effects and so forth afforded by modern graphics processors. There are some pretty substantial issues with that, though, as all who've attempt a rewrite have all encountered... too many unknowns you run into. One in particular to ponder: random shrap appears to go the same direction on all clients. However, this information is never passed to the clients directly. (Nowhere does the server say, "Oh, this bomb burst here, so 2 pieces of shrap come out, one at 230 degrees, the other at 10 degrees.") So how is it determined? It's probably calculated from unrelated data inside the weapons packet. But what's the calculation? Get it wrong, and your client isn't backwards compatible. So you can have all the shiny graphics you want, but in a Continuum client, the shrap will go one way, and on Continuum Upgrade Client it goes another. (Possible solution is to just say to hell with it and require the new client.)

If we went with a non-backwards-compatible client/server combo, we'd need to have zones adopt that new client. That would mean tweaking and rewriting bots to work on the new client. If it's significantly different than the SS protocol, it's a ton of work for a dev staff that is close to nonexistent. Pretty hard sell there. So we're pretty much stuck with what we have.

If you want to save the game, work on what you can, yeah. Look at your skillset and see what you can do with it, whether it's rejoining staff (or joining, for the few of you who have never been), finding a need, like an overworked stat cruncher, doing some map/graphics work to spice up arenas, talking to people you know about the game and walking them through starting to play 1 on 1 ... There are things that can be done.

[roxxkatt]

also keep in mind the people that actually possess the skills to move the game forward are worth far more irl, and forward progress only happens when they feel like doing free unpaid work, which can only occur while they dont have real work to get done instead