Pub Proposal

[Poseidon]

every 20 minutes the bot takes a vote after current game ends:

PUREPUB: yes(1)/no(2)
ATTACHMODE: yes(1)/no(2)

players can !buy exempt, !buy vote, etc etc., details can be worked out later

[Poseidon]

also, qan....

say this were implemented and you had a general trend where 80% of players voted for attachmode and 90% for purepub. what then? what percentage would be enough for you to consider significant changes to the levi, im curious?

[Rab]

I don't think people change their opinion on this every 20 mins. So asking them to keep voting would be annoying.

We could waste time building bot functionality to remember preferences, but it would end up with the vote outcome being always the same. As there's nothing dynamic about it, there's really no point having bot functionality for a vote, just pick a setting and apply it permanently.

It's obvious that purepub ON would win because the levi's are outvoted, which is why lolnope is a fucking meme. May as well just enable purepub permanently.

However... there's a compromise for levis... the main downside of levis is having them on your team, flying around narnia, contributing nothing. So if we had a "levis can't make kills on public freqs" that would remove that annoyance and allow people to levi just on priv freqs, and still allowing priv-freq LTs. Make the freq 99 rewards higher with more prompts to try and get LT hunters to actually use it.

The other issue that must be dealt with is the power-up ball, which turns sharks and javs into levis, and levis into thors.
Also the "this troll can prevent your flag victory using meme features" - small weasel, shield, super. Must be addressed.

I'm less certain what the vote result for attach mode would be, however I think before this could be taken seriously some changes are needed as attach mode is currently game-breaking:
1. You can totally ruin a game by attaching and not detaching.
2. You should only be able to attach to people in the base. Attaching to someone in narnia is frustrating for the player and very bad for the team.
3. Having someone attached makes your ship slow. People can keep attaching to you to make your ship slow. So you must be able to opt-out of being attachable.
4. Currently attachmode makes terrs useless. The terr must not become useless. Maybe give it loads of energy or something to keep the anchor role viable.

[Poseidon]

I don't think people change their opinion on this every 20 mins. So asking them to keep voting would be annoying.
...
We could waste time building bot functionality to remember preferences, but it would end up with the vote outcome being always the same.

if you look at pub every 20 minutes there is usually a significantly different group of players, meaning there would be an entirely different vote. its always in flux. im not sure what your point is. also i personally would not always vote the same. as ive said before, if its the right terrs and a good dynamic (and no levis), i prefer traditional pub over attachmode.

So if we had a "levis can't make kills on public freqs" that would remove that annoyance and allow people to levi just on priv freqs, and still allowing priv-freq LTs

i dont feel this would be enough. the benefit of my proposal is that instead of !lolnope buying exemption for the entire arena, the !buy exempt only works for one levi player at a time (and is cheaper as a compromise) ... this means less constant oversaturation of levis.

1. You can totally ruin a game by attaching and not detaching.
2. You should only be able to attach to people in the base. Attaching to someone in narnia is frustrating for the player and very bad for the team.
3. Having someone attached makes your ship slow. People can keep attaching to you to make your ship slow. So you must be able to opt-out of being attachable.
4. Currently attachmode makes terrs useless. The terr must not become useless. Maybe give it loads of energy or something to keep the anchor role viable.

2. is nitpicky.
1 and 3 is a bit of a bizarre complaint to me seeing as you can instantly detach people by pushing the attach button... tip from the sensei: bind attach to your spacebar. i never have problems.
4. i agree. i proposed in other post giving it an extra port and a single repel. whatever we can do to help keep terr alive more is better for the game, especially when its not in attachmode. perhaps a points race would be better instead of games dragging on forever, though logistically more complicated. also for terr L2 bullets at the same speed but slower rate as is current could be interesting.

regardless, all of these problems will exist in a similar capacity with or without the implementation of my proposal and are best tabled for later discussion.

[Rab]

I'll get u with 1 and 3 sometime. See how bizarre u think it is then

[Lizzo]

cool chat between 2 losers who butt hurt from levs cause they basic, BASIC

[Rab]

Just completely killed pub in 5 mins using #1. From about 7v7 to 1v1. Attachmode totally flawed.

[rothe]

Rab

[qan]

Seems as though it's pretty clearly stated, Poseidon. You'll just need to find some other folks who support it to the point where a vote on it would seem worthwhile. (We don't yet have a great metric for this threshold, but BIET and Hookecho and others were working on it.)

As for if people were constantly voting for purepub and attach mode, again, it's a community problem. We've reworked the Levi probably 20 times over the years. This is just the most recent compromise. It has reduced energy and slower bombs than the original while retaining L3. One probably much more viable option that retains freedom would be to charge people either per minute or per life for the use of the Levi. Most buys reflect this: to drastically change the game, perhaps sometimes negatively for certain players, you have to pay. Levis might be categorized as a kind of luxury that can disrupt pub (but is still a cornerstone of pub) that might warrant a charge to play.


Rab, for #3, there's no way from a code perspective to make a person unattachable (at least, without AS3), but if someone attaches to you, you can just detach them with the attach key.

[Lizzo]

Charging for lev is going to do anything? Pure pub already there and when it's activated numbers go down. Some one cancel and numbers magically stay up. Pure pub weekend equal big failure. 50% numbers during peak times.

People are going to quote numbers about levs killing games, when in reality there are good games going on (30 flag changes)which include levs, then finally a team wins. Then a few players go to sleep, imbalancing teams, then you get a downward spiral. By the way, after that team loses, a few racists going to post on the forums and blame the levs. None of the people complaining on this forum say "we can win" or "good game" when they lose. Just got mad cuz they don't like losing, and they don't like losing to a bbbw.

Before wasting time programming anti-community anti-ship laws. The real community focused strategy is to figure out how to bring the population up during non-peak times to build a base for sustainment.

As for lev power, things are already working themselves out. 3 months ago, only one player could consistently kill me. That number is like 5 now. Spoiler alert, they aren't the people complaining on this forum. I am differently abled so I know what I'm talking about. If anything, it is pointing to the lev being lesser abled ship.

Everyone knows lev are an easy target for low class low skill complainer wb spiders on forum. Biggest impacts to anti-competitive play are sharks, roofers, AFK, anti-warp, attach mode, spawners, cloakers. But this is the diversity the community needs. Haters going to hate complainers going to complain. Stop the downward spiral. We don't want PP, we want np.

[LF]

For the sake of clarity, I was directly involved in the last pure pub weekend and it was a resounding success. In spite of 3-4 very obnoxious, very loud children making a stink about it and refusing to play, base activity was at its highest point since my return last summer (Mid-Covid). Active players hovered between 26 and 44 consistently between "peak" hours of 7PM - 11PM eastern.

With that said, I imagine that the most likely outcome of this lev vs no lev debate is simply going to be the occasional purepub weekend and nothing more.

[Poseidon]

Seems as though it's pretty clearly stated, Poseidon. You'll just need to find some other folks who support it to the point where a vote on it would seem worthwhile. (We don't yet have a great metric for this threshold, but BIET and Hookecho and others were working on it.)

im not completely clear here; are you implying that this should be voted on by the community... and to even be voted on, i need to "find some other folks who support it"?

at any rate, ill quote myself in full from the email i sent you and other upper staff a few months ago where i first laid out this proposal:

Point being here - the average pubber today is leagues beyond the same of yesteryear, yet there has been relatively little of this notion reflected in the zone's policies or pub's evolution at large. The zone is still modeled in a way to cater to the noopiest of pub players, to the subspace of the year 2000, and to Priits & whomevers hypergratuitious game design. Purepub helps, attachmode helps as well as it keeps certain players like myself from getting bored (you would prob never see me flagging in pub if attachmode didnt exist), but its clear there is a philosophical divide and it appears to me pub has remained largely on the side of the noopis, noopis who generally have little in the way of the vision required to conceive of what would be good for the zone at large, let alone take any altruistic interest, mind you. This is why I dont take to the forums but prefer to email upper staff: leadership is needed. the voice of the normalcy, of the average TW pubber, of the clung-to past.. this voice is rarely going to yield the best option.


~~~


let me be clear. what i am fighting for here is the very lifeblood of trench wars. its obvious to me, someone who has spent 100s and 100s of hours the past year playing pub (likely more than the rest of staff combined), which pub dynamics = the most activity. Increasing activity should be one of the primary objectives of our upper staff. is there anyone who disagrees with this?

this is why i posed the question, which you ignored but i would really hope you to answer; again i quote myself:

say this were implemented and you had a general trend where 80% of players voted for attachmode and 90% for purepub. what then? what percentage would be enough for you to consider significant changes to the levi, im curious?

obviously here im implying at a shade greater significance than represented by any of these tweaks you mention from the past 20 years.



------------
to Rabbit Rapist:

the soltuino is easy. when idiots like people named Useless Baseterr keep abusing a mechanic to prove some bizarre, spurious point about the game - you ban them.

[Lizzo]

For the sake of clarity, I was directly involved in the last pure pub weekend and it was a resounding success. In spite of 3-4 very obnoxious, very loud children making a stink about it and refusing to play, base activity was at its highest point since my return last summer (Mid-Covid). Active players hovered between 26 and 44 consistently between "peak" hours of 7PM - 11PM eastern.

With that said, I imagine that the most likely outcome of this lev vs no lev debate is simply going to be the occasional purepub weekend and nothing more.

Bolding and underlining doesn't make it not fake news

[qan]

im not completely clear here; are you implying that this should be voted on by the community... and to even be voted on, i need to "find some other folks who support it"?

Yes, absolutely. Imagine you're part of a village. Anyone in the village should have the power to change the rules -- no gatekeepers needed. But, before voting on something, there are some basic checks in place. One person proposes something, which you've done. Another person needs to agree for that idea to be more than crickets in the dark. Or, if the village is big enough, a third person, and so on. Proposals liked by some very small part of the population should be voted on by the whole group, in other words.

We've tried this a few times before, usually failing. Here's the first one, a decade and a half ago: www.trenchwars.org/twps We're at least able to experiment.

There are several staffers right now very interested in this concept whose names you may have figured out by following the thread, and who would be very useful people to contact, if you'd like to try advancing this further. A way for TW to exist via its community's control would be an interesting development. I just think the biggest problem is that people aren't interested enough. It's usually too much of a test case that stands in for our real hope, to somehow improve what we see in our lives. But it's a very good and noble impulse, and we should keep trying to harness it. I think honestly that's most of what's kept us alive these decades. Nice work, spaceship people.

[Pineapple Express]

My thoughts on pub:

Allow players to donate toward game jackpots. It will make games more interesting and at times could generate huge games. I personally get bored and start spending my pubbux on random shit anyway. Why not make it more interesting?

Add buy item to prevent private freqs for 10 min. Kinda like purepub.

Take away rocket from Jav. It's long overdue. It's basically an item that's only purpose is abuse and "rocket lame".

Lessen the time between roofturret purchases. To many people going roof, on private freq and line bombing.

Just a couple ideas.