State of Pub

[Rab]

How to fix pub:
1. Remove levis
2. Make weasel big
3. Remove attachmode
4. Remove ball powerup
5. Ban freespirit
6. Get some staff in eu timezone
7. Remove super
8. Remove thor
9. Remove shield
10. Fix afkcheck
11. Make people who arent basing get off freq 0 and 1
12. Make roofturret duration and rebuy duration equal

[qan]

They say brevity is the soul of wit. Can you state what you'd like to propose in 1 short paragraph, ideally no more than 100 words? This respects your readers' time.

Hookecho worked hard to create a system to set up polls for our existing bot-based polling system. This might be a good test run. We don't yet have rules around how we'll use the polls. But it seems like if a substantial portion of the population agreed to your proposal, it'd be worth trying.

So, can you:
1. State your proposal in very brief terms (removing justifications for the time being), and
2. Get a few people to second/third the proposal? Have them reply to the thread after you've very concisely stated what you propose.

[Poseidon]

my proposal solves all of these problems and would improve the quality and consistency of pub.

id like to revise my CS analogy: TW pub is the equivalent of a nightmare version of counter strike where a single player can nuke players into oblivion and Esc+Q'ing, and instead of fixing the problem the devs create a gimmicky game using a system of money they called AWPbux and then force the players to participate by making it their only means of fighting all of the other gimmicky bullshit that is ruining their experience and that of the majority of the people who ever try to play it.

for me, this is spot on how TW pub feels, and i find it incredibly frustrating.

i know im a non stop crybaby so let me pause the whining to say lots of great and ingenious improvements have been made over the years with things like attach mode and the widened base. and my hate towards pubbux aside, its a wonderful addition to pub as a whole and everything biet does to maintain and expand the system of rounds and rewards and etc. adds a much needed sense of vitality to the place, so kudos.

When TW pub was originally created, they were designing greater than they knew - they had no conception of TW as an 8v8 or 5v5 competitive game. What ended up happening is this zone originally designed as a supremely casual place quickly became a hugely competitive environment on multiple levels and it wasnt long before its very existence came to rely mainly upon the competitive playerbase, as it has remained. There is still a clinging to a certain design philosophy that was created 22 years ago to cater to 12 year olds in a slapstick environment with little genuine competitive pulse. im not saying to throw this out the window, i value TW pub for how inclusive it is. im simply saying we can do better, for both pub and for the long-term health of TWL

[Rab]

There are simply no terrs in pub, and those who do terr are horrible. It is what it is. Pub is more fun when attach mode is activated. It’s not rocket science. One solution is to obviously revamp pub so attach mode is permanent, or maybe extend attach mode for the remaining of the current pub game? make it more expensive, and it lasts the whole duration of the game.

Something needs to be done, pub is so much fun.. it’s super sad to see 15v15 games and within 10 minutes see it die because the terr is in la la land.

attachmode causes fewer terrs. if I'm terr and someone buys attachmode, people are attaching to various people instead of just to me, so my role is reduced, so I tend to change ship or just leave.

[Unlimited]

There are simply no terrs in pub, and those who do terr are horrible. It is what it is. Pub is more fun when attach mode is activated. It’s not rocket science. One solution is to obviously revamp pub so attach mode is permanent, or maybe extend attach mode for the remaining of the current pub game? make it more expensive, and it lasts the whole duration of the game.

Something needs to be done, pub is so much fun.. it’s super sad to see 15v15 games and within 10 minutes see it die because the terr is in la la land.

[Poseidon]

if this thread accomplishes nothing else it can at least serve as a space for documentation:

5.20.2021

- 9:00pm est. attachmode is on and pub is hopping 13v13
- 9:18pm est. attachmode ends, poseidon doesnt have enough $$ to rebuy
- 9:23pm est pub is now 6v6

of course this is early enough that the population might rebound, but like... is this really how we want things to be?

[Poseidon]

just an update:

yesterday in my few hours of playing pub i saw two different players -publicly announce- in frustration that they couldnt tolerate the levis and were quitting pub, and then leave. one guy was "manly trousers" or something and forget other.

i myself routinely quit pub and go do something else in the game because at a certain point it just gets to be too much - otherwise i wouldnt be writing this post write now. it boggles the mind trying to imagine the potential population had pub been cured of the problems that have been plaguing it since its inception 22 years ago.

Counter-Strike 1.6 is the only other game with which I have competitive experience. Imagine if someone had infinite nuclear bombs that they could effortlessly detonate on half the map and completely disrupt the players trying to have a pub game; this would be the exact analogy to what a levi is doing in TW pub. the pubs of these games are kept with a relatively competitive focus for a reason: this is what most of the players want. TW is no different and its obvious by paying attention to the population flux in pub. we can do a lot better than we are doing now. it will benefit the population, and over time, TWL.

[Vehicle]

Step one of fixing pub: Get rid of leviathins. At a certain point we have to accept that the ship is not a net positive to pub gameplay. Never were, never will be.

[Poseidon]

The problem with voting is, as you said, there's a huge preference for attach mode. A straight 50% vote would mean it's run pretty much constantly, and traditional TW basing in pub likely makes its final bow.

i wish ud read the email i took the time to type, but its okay ill just repeat myself where necessary - as long as we're communicating im happy.

i proposed a list of !buy items to mitigate the problem you just mentioned. for instance, if its purepub, a player could !buy exemption for some amount of $$$ and be able to levi for 10 min or whatev. there are more details in the message i composed.

its important to consider why there is such a huge preference for attach mode. why is this important to consider? because its directly related to the population numbers, the consistency of these numbers, and the overall enjoyment of the players. again, you didn't touch on the problem i mentioned before and why i feel a major change is so needed. ill quote part again in hopes it may be addressed:

its not hard to understand why [players prefer attachmode]. its qute rare that there is a balance of the number/skill of sharks/terrs, which means one teams terr is usually going to be dying a lot more. thus not only is the game less balanced but its often movng at 1/3 the pace and stuck in cram phase. most people find this much less enjoyable, as one would expect. attachmode alleviates these problems, allowing for more fast-paced, fluid gameplay. compound this with the nuisance of levis and TKs also feeling softened thru the action of attachmode...

it becomes quite clear why any cursory glance at general population trends vs. the two game types reveals a huge favor in the preference of attachmode...

in fact... i want to take this qualm of yours for a wild turn and propose that, at least during peak hours, a vote system might allow for less attachmode and more traditional pub. during peak hours, the game is often in attach mode the entire time because a single player has all the power. i think a voting system could actually behoove traditional pub, especially if allow one to !buy an override of the entire vote (600k?) (currently its difficult to override attachmode... you have to time buyblock, and its not very effective period).

I agree that pub's a mix of casual and competitive play. It should still be a bridge to competitive play, as well, including standard basing. Running attach mode almost constantly would burn that bridhe.

attach mode generally provides (significantly) better practice than traditional pub because it moves much faster and there is a lot more playing in the flag room and constant action. in many ways its often better practice than twbd.

Truly, what burns this bridge most is levis, as evidenced by a prior thread here where u have turban and 3 other people all saying they dont play pub solely because of levis; and as i mentioned, for every 1 of them you probably have another 15 who will never bother to speak up about pub.


~~

so again, i only see benefits in this proposal. i like what uve suggested about limiting ships but im trying to keep things simple here and least work intensive as possible so im just going to stick to the topic. i didnt realize there were sponsor for shark, i knew terr. its good, i think the bot doing to sponsoring and putting up the $$ would be more effective howevs

[ronaldinho]

I am strongly against limiting the choice of ship in public arena. I hate the Leviathan but I don't want to deprive those who love it to play it because if we start to ban this one we will end up forbidding me to jump in the javelin under the pretext that there is already enough and that a spider will help more the frequency. I will not go as far as to boycott if that were the case, nevertheless I would play less for sure.

[qan]

The problem with voting is, as you said, there's a huge preference for attach mode. A straight 50% vote would mean it's run pretty much constantly, and traditional TW basing in pub likely makes its final bow.

I agree that pub's a mix of casual and competitive play. It should still be a bridge to competitive play, as well, including standard basing. Running attach mode almost constantly would burn that bridhe.

Maybe an interesting (and expensive) buy would impose fairly strict ship restrictions to scale a standard competitive basing game up with the population. Some games do this to impose a certain style for a mode. The problem with scaling would be the constantly changing player counts, but it's an engineering problem. Once X number of players are on a freq, for instance, a Jav or WB slot opens up past the standard basing roles. Probably allowing Lancs instead of Spiders as that's a pretty standard substitution. I don't know how much more than half the normal pub crowd would like it, but it might be a way to get competitive basers to pay to put together a pickup base game more controlled than normal pub, perhaps also disabling many buys while active as well. Would do well to monitor the other freq to determine if a 3rd shark would be allowed, for instance, if there were only 1 on the other team. Needs hashing out but is a decent kernel of an idea.



For the last point, there are !st and !ss commands to sponsor a Terr/Shark as they play, and it's advertised if you issue the command and the position is lacking. I don't think they're used by hardly anyone. The bot advertises it but maybe not ideally.

Switch rewards tend to be abused heavily by certain people. They even gloat about it when using it to the detriment of the game. Bizarre, self-centered human beings...

[Poseidon]

its not hard to understand why. its qute rare that there is a balance of the number/skill of sharks/terrs, which means one teams terr is usually going to be dying a lot more. thus not only is the game less balanced but its often movng at 1/3 the pace and stuck in cram phase. most people find this much less enjoyable, as one would expect. attachmode alleviates these problems, allowing for more fast-paced, fluid gameplay. compound this with the nuisance of levis and TKs also feeling softened thru the action of attachmode...

it becomes quite clear why any cursory glance at general population trends vs. the two game types reveals a huge favor in the preference of attachmode. dont get me wrong, i actually prefer a good game of pub with no attachmode, good terrs, balanced sharks, etc. .. unfortunately, without some major reworking of pub, this will remain largely a fantasty, and to try continue to try and chase is it to continue to gimp pub from what it could be.

the problem as i see it lies in what i stated above. i really wish you would address it.

is there a reason you dont see the voting system i proposed as superior to the system we have now? i see only benefits, no drawbacks. its egalitarian; no more switching modes mid game; it allows the game to cater to whatever vibe the current playerbase is feeling, etc. etc. etc. the only apparent drawback is that people have to vote and spam pub chat.. so it will be like elim... but can be way less frequent. and anything to clear the tinfoil trump bullshit of the screen is okay with me

you mentioned in your message to me it seemed like my proposal would take a lot of effort. as far as i see it, all it takes is re-coding the store, and programming in a vote system like elim PUREPUB: yes/no; ATTACHMODE: yes/no ... as an ex-staffer, im happy to learn how to do what it takes to program the bots and make it happen. so if volunteers was your problem it is no longer.

here's the thing: Hooknecho told me yesterday that pub is not a place for competitive play, he said it was for casual play. this was in response to my proposal above about voting. i really hope this is not the attitude of the entire staff. pub, as much as we can possibly walk the line, should be the place for both COMPETITIVE and CASUAL play simultaneously. when you look at pub at any given time, 70% or so of the players are usually competitively engaged, meaning they are trying to win for their team and playing the flagging game. the large majority of the playerbase feeds off of the competitive aspect and we should be doing as much as we can to cater to it while keeping the spirit of TW in tact

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



another thing.


a way to help balance the game: offer $$$ incentive for ship change.

say its 10v10. 3 sharks on one team, 1 shark on the other, making the game totally suck for everyone, stuck in cram, etc. Offer a $15k reward for any player on the team to change shark to help balance.

you could even allow players to offer custom rewards with their own pubbux if they think they need a certain type of ship on their team, etc etc.

[qan]

I've added a simple system that notifies freqs without Terrs 3 minutes before Attach Mode ends that it's about to end. It does this every minute until the end, with a more pointed warning as it finishes. If a freq has Terrs when Attach Mode ends, the bot will show their names.

!terr will now show all players in base during Attach Mode.


I took this on as a reasonable compromise to alleviate the problem somewhat. A lot of the issue has to do with people just being unaware that Attach Mode is about to finish, and so they get discouraged when nobody changes to Terr and many people quit. With plenty of warning, there's time to reorganize strategy, or to decide to re-buy. It's much simpler than organizing an elaborate voting system.

[SpaceShark]

and the ball powerup shouldnt exist
and super should not be buyable
and shield should not be buyable

arnt you a real buzz kill
the powerball should be free the last 5 minutes of every hour
super should be rewarded at the start of each match to the last games MVP
shields should be rewarded at the start of each match to the person who captured the flag the most the last game

[Rab]

and fix afkcheck, atm most afk ppl cant be removed with afkcheck