Trench wars is dying.... Help?

[Colonel]

I say we just end this already. Just kill the game, some people could use the fresh air

[Money]

i think its funny they complain about how its dying yet ppl still sit in ?go afk while they dont need to anymore


PPL, GO WHERE EVER U WANT TO BUT PUBS, ARROGANT IS GONE OR CANNOT KICK U ANYMORE...

[Money]

Take this stupid USAGE LIMIT off elim. I mean, let ANY new player have the chance to play. Yeah their might be one player ranking a ton of alias names, but WHO CARES? Does anyone seriously care about elim rankings? I doubt it. Especially not at the expense of having elim or TW die...

Take this stupid usage limit off. It's pointless.

agreed

[Galaxy Turbo]

Maybe put the elims back together, you'll have more people AFKing in one arena to make the game look really popular in concentrated areas, thus having more players playing, rather than having a lot of players dispersed in different arenas. If you get a good reception then you can play around with death limits, random ship selections, arenas, and you can have a hell of a lot of possibilities.

Yeah, I think it'd be wise to completely abolish/reduce hours required to play elim, more newbies will be able to enter...I think there are new players out there that think "36 hours is too much"...We all know it ISN'T really, but to them it feels like a lifetime. Sure it puts value to elim and trying to play for that many hours to be able to enter would help, and give newbie players something to aim for, but they can just as equally leave because they won't value a 2D Spaceship game THAT much, and they can then turn on WoW or something instead.

Bring back Nightwasps! They are bloody amazing.

Just ideas, don't hate, appreciate.

[Louis XV]

cont is broken

alternately, if someone had ever got the linux port completed or priit decided he had moved on 100% and released all code to a trusted coder to port...it could be a trendy game to stick with any distro cause of small size. offering in the repositories could keep random interested people coming by.

I've been using continuum with wine pretty consistently over the last few months. (cont doesn't work with vanilla wine - you need to patch one line of code first). Works just fine, though the framerate is a bit lower than it would be in Windows.

PriitK can't trust anyone with the code because Continuum is client-authoritative. The client does what it wants and the server checks for very obvious hacks. If the client source gets out, you can kiss the game goodbye. I could just add a line of code that says 'ignore every other bullet' and the server wouldn't know jack. This is actually already theoretically possible. The protocol is fundamentally broken in terms of security.

The alternative, however, (totally server-authoritative) would probably introduce so much latency that the pace of the game would have to be slowed down considerably. I wish I had the time to re-write cont (server + client) from scratch using this approach and research ways to decrease latency while maximizing security. Also, can we say cross-platform and arbitrarily sized 3d models for ship graphics? Unfortunately life is more important.

[Louis XV]

Things that I would like to see changed in TW:

Problem: baseelim is dead. Jav elim (after pub) is where I learned to jav ages ago. It was great getting the opportunity to play TW's best javs.

1) Even though it's fun, ?go javs has to go to. It has killed baseelim and offers an utterly uncompetitive alternative. I wonder what would happen if we had a ?go wbs..

1b) OR re-consolidate elim and baseelim. There is currently too much of a divide in wb/jav skills. Force people to be good at both (there's tons of overlap in the skillsets required anyway).

2) At least remove random picks from baseelim. Whenever I manage to get a belim started, the next round is a random pick and everyone leaves. If you guys are even able to modify Robo w/o PriitK...


Other things I personally don't care for:
- ?go base <- circle jerk consisting of people who think they're good at basing, as a result very few people can actually play this

- elim ?usage requirements. Drop them. Elim rankings aren't all that important anyway.
( several people in this thread agree)

- Timed pubs with tons of ship restrictions. Blech.

- Levs not allowed in TWBD/TWLB. Something that has irked me for a long time. What's the matter? Can't handle a little blue bomb?

Ideas that are awesome:
- Tutorial arena!

[Money]

- ?go base <- circle jerk consisting of people who think they're good at basing, as a result very few people can actually play this

rofl


NICE u described my very thoughts everytime i see some newb spamming GO BASE



ROFL ROFL

[Heroin Bob]

i cut most of the bullshit out but this stood out to me and ill tell you why

you probably havent played the game long enough to remember, but the game used to be called subspace (after sniper anyway)

and i forget what version ended it but there used to be an offline tutorial training mode where you could float around in all the ships and test out the controls with a big help screen to tell you what to do

and you could shoot at CPU drones and collect greens, and learn how to use thor and decoy and all those cool things

and it was actually very nice to be able to learn how to basically control your ship OFFLINE so that when you actually DID logon you knew what you were doing



and if you really want to know how to get new players into the game instead of being faggots and all doom and gloom like, and you want it to actually work where the whole community can help.....then put it on a online game voting site and have the community vote the shit out of it, thats how i learned of the game, back on some obscure website MPOGD (multiplayer online games directory) or something, continuum won 1st a few months in a row, and i was like "maybe i should try this game out, it has really good reviews" and it was actually a fun game that you DIDNT have to pay for, which was probably the biggest plus of them all, now that was back in 2000 but 2000 wasnt THAT long ago if you ask me, and it was still WAY past this games actual market value in terms of graphics, so obviously it wasnt the "high-tech" bullshit that got me into the game, it was the gameplay, which kept me playing still to this day

also, on a side note, anyone remember the game infanty? basicly the same game as subspace just used ww3 type graphics and it was pretty fun in itself, but it turned paytoplay and i said screw that, but a fun spinoff of subspace nonetheless, wonder what happened to it

shit i remember voting for it on MPOGD

so im part of the reason your here

[SpaceHiker]

"Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

Trench Wars was invented by a small group of dedicated individuals who had great forethought and a lot of balls. There was little to no discussion about what was best for the game or what was going to come next. The pubs were changed, the map was changed, events and bots were invented, basically at the whim of these few people. Luckily, they were geniuses, and so they were not only doing a great job of inventing things but also bringing new ideas in at just the right times to keep interest and keep things moving forward.

Those people have moved on in their lives.

Now, Trench Wars is run like a corporation. And, believe it or not, MOST corporations are run extremely poorly, with ideas that seem to make sense but in the end fall apart. For every successful corporation you see in the world, do you have any idea of how many thousands of terrible, failing ones exist also? It's not the best model to build upon. This is why many companies use corporate governance only in the middle stages of their existence (which supplies them with necessary funding to grow), then buys back their shares and re-privatizes in their maturity, to bring the number of leaders back down to a brilliant few.

Trench Wars is based upon a gaming system that can basically be made to do whatever we want it to do. It has just the right mix of gaming and social interaction with it's chat system. The subspace server can still serve as the basis for cutting edge online gaming for the foreseeable future, as long as people have the forethought to keep pushing the envelope.

Trench Wars' advancement has stopped since PriitK, Dock>, Arilou, and a few others stopped doing their thing. With stagnation comes eventual defeat.

Don't get me wrong, staff has some brilliant thinkers and if they would just do their thing and get it over with, this game would move forward. But with this game being run like a committee and everyone afraid to step up and take the potential risk of ruining the game or tiskk... getting razzed by the naysayers or other staffers, not much is moving forward anymore.

This game has the talent to move forward. For example, maybe a year or so ago, someone, and I believe it was Witness, showed me a whole new concept that he had invented. The map and ships were unbelievable. Why isn't that our new pub? It completely blows away what we have now, and its a good evolutionary step in the game, similar to all the other evolutionary steps that were taken in the past to bring this game forward. Think back to the old maps and old shipsettings for awhile, lay them out on a timeline, and consider how we have evolved. It's time to move forward. But no one will do it.

In a way, this forum is one of the biggest problems. I can't stand the fact that the whiners that are afraid of every little change have such a huge voice in this game, and it's mostly because of these forums. Pretty soon, they will be the only players we have left.

I got interested in this game back when it was still evolving and thus generating a buzz in the world. There is no better marketing. Those of you who think that creating a poster or banner or TV Commercial will save us, are committing the same fallacy that so many marketing departments fall into. They believe that they can sell ANYTHING with the right tactics (and occasionally they can, but mostly they fail). The best marketing is the buzz that is created by moving forward and pushing the envelope. That's how I got into the game, think back to how you got involved for a second, I bet the reasons were similar.

Since this post has already turned into a booklet, I'd like to finish it with a quote from an interview with Dock> from many years ago. I've been spreading around this quote lately because I think it is critical to TW's survival:

DoCk>: The toughest job is trying to figure out what is good for the public, and not what is public demand. Sometimes decisions can be extremely unpopular but then grown to be accepted later on. This is a fact of life of being Sysop, and every little change or move, simply because of the size of this zone, causes a lot of heat to be turned on the zone's staff.

[Facetious]

We know TW was a success when we had fewer arenas, and less people on staff. Even back then, there were much more fun games to play, but people enjoyed relaxing and playing a really simple game. Since then, a lot of "innovation" (stupid mini-games) has occurred and the zone population is dwindling tremendously. Are you really saying that you think that adding more trinkets will help? It worked much better before there were any trinkets.

[SpaceHiker]

I am not at all in favor of trinkets if you were talking to me. I'm talking about the core of the game itself. Pub/TWD/TWL, the individual ships and the respective events that bring out their qualities; such as ?go base, elim, and belim.

That is where the improvement is needed, perhaps I wasn't clear. Really it all begins with pub and trickles down from there (new pub is at first hated, then gradually accepted, new players discover the game, old players think it's cool and come back, then TWD/TWL/gobase inherits the changes).

I agree completely that mini-games are a detriment. I haven't supported distractions like strikeball and the like, my apologies to their creators but they need their own zone. I like events that bring out specific Trench Wars qualities. So for instance, I think hosted events such as ProDem, JavProDem, Teamkill, most dangerous game, turretwars (not the versions with crazy ships), and hunt are good for the game when hosted in moderation. But many events stray too far from TW's concept and/or TW's normal ship settings. I'm not going to name specific events other than SB, but there are a lot of them. Think about how many Trench Wars events take place in cars or racetracks, for instance

[Galaxy Turbo]

I'm not going to name specific events other than SB, but there are a lot of them.

Hockey. Has it's own zone, yet lives in TW.

[Doc Flabby]

The only thing i disagree with it

elim is worth ranking for, now the ranking site is fixed. the ?usage requirement is good as well, it keeps it fun, its boring playing against people with 1 hour usage they end up dying 0-10, even people with 36 hours go out with that kinda score sometimes.

Other things I personally don't care for:
- ?go base <- circle jerk consisting of people who think they're good at basing, as a result very few people can actually play this

- Timed pubs with tons of ship restrictions. Blech.

- Levs not allowed in TWBD/TWLB. Something that has irked me for a long time. What's the matter? Can't handle a little blue bomb?

Ideas that are awesome:
- Tutorial arena!

Agree with all of these. Seroiously Kill the timed pubs completely. And make the weasel back to its stealthy self. Its current form in pub is an abomination, its meant to be an assassin ship.

I don't think people are going to see me much in TW if this lag continues. I am considering starting my own zone, with TW-like settings (not the same obviously) ie. 1/2/3-hit kill zone.

TW was great in 2005, whats gone wrong since then?
Countless "improvements" to pub.
Removal of themed pub weekends
The weasel having its balls chopped off and then being fed crack.
The flagship of TW being negected, often its impossible to find a pub where you are "allowed" to play the blue ship.

Staff have listened to much to the people who whine, they whined about the levi so it was removed from pubs,they whined about the weasel and it was weirdly changed, then they whined about the javs, they got limited, next will be sharks or terrier limit.

[Evul Fly]

#distension will kill tw

[Fluffz]

Since then, a lot of "innovation" (stupid mini-games) has occurred and the zone population is dwindling tremendously.

i dont think the minigames are as much of a problem as the ammout of parallel games avaliable. if everyone is able to play everything he wants at the same time it gets boring fast for everyone.