New Pub rules/changes?!

[DankNuggets]

This'll probably get ignored, but hey.

I've noticed some well-meaning Devs are conducting themselves inappropriately in this thread.

• As a Dev, you can't please everyone - especially when it's something as widespread as pub. What did you expect?
• As a Dev, you should expect harsh criticism from time to time.
• As a Dev, I think you should maintain a professional attitude. This includes not swearing and countering insults with other insults, otherwise you're just stooping down to 'their' level.

Is that too much to expect?

It's probably way too much to expect. when the insults come from members of the community who supposedly represent a majority opinion, or at least a respected opinion, it's easy to feel as if you've been thrown under the bus when people don't stand up for you or admonish the person hurling the initial insults.

How can you begin to act professional when you're treated like this? It isn't a job, he doesn't get paid, there is nothing professional about it aside from the respect we ought to be giving him for donating his time.

If anything, you should be asking the regulars to show some common decency and quit acting like any and all changes have to go through them first before being tested or implemented. Their opinions should be treated with the same respect they were given with.

If this was really professional, somebody would filter the crap responses before they're posted.

[DankNuggets]

I think it's been turned off... I tried to play yesterday and an <ER> said it was turned off.

I would like to point out that this is very dissimilar to distension. There are far fewer commands and all ship settings remain the same. You are given currency instead of pressing through ranks. The only reason anyone would compare the two would be to confuse people and try to influence their decision to give it a shot.

Doesn't surprise me that a few people seem to act exactly like they did last time I played.

FWIW, I wouldn't take much of anything said by cheese or kthx seriously. Neither have any experience with pub development and both have preconceived agendas as to what they'd like everyone else to play, how they'd play it, when, in what arenas, an with whom they could play. Both ought to sit the entire thing out since they have such extensive bias towards each other.

[Zeebu]

i couldnt get an answer int he other thread, so i will try this one too. i randomly walked in under a diffrent name on sunday and shot a couple times. i didnt know what was going on yet. noticed the little dollar sign and didnt think anything of it. now i would like to go back in on a different name and actually give it a try. unfortunately i cannot seem to earn money on this name. how would i go about earning money on this name? it doesnt say 0 or much of anything. it just shows a dollar sign with a blank beside it.

[Nockm]

This'll probably get ignored, but hey.

I've noticed some well-meaning Devs are conducting themselves inappropriately in this thread.

• As a Dev, you can't please everyone - especially when it's something as widespread as pub. What did you expect?
• As a Dev, you should expect harsh criticism from time to time.
• As a Dev, I think you should maintain a professional attitude. This includes not swearing and countering insults with other insults, otherwise you're just stooping down to 'their' level.

Is that too much to expect?

I missed Distension probably due to being b&. No idea what it is/was.
Sounds like everyone hated it though.

How do you expect me to respect what you are saying after you tell me that you moderated "Habbo Hotel"

Don't worry I was fired 3 times from staff there also for stealing the password to the Moderator account and deleting rooms with WAR, under the alias 'fireballz' and 'tdos'. Also uncovered the George Moderation client (java tool) which let us enter rooms invisible and could silence users even without staff permissions.
Plus the glorious Great Habbo Raids of 2006/7 with Anon.

[kthx]

What you just said has already been said but thanks for rewriting it in a way that was extremely long. I guess that is the kind of unnecessary hard work that we should all be appreciative of.

I used to be a moderator on Habbo Hotel and they implemented a similar scheme where users accumulate points (known as pixels in the game) just by being active in the game and contributing. They can then trade the Pixels for actual virtual currency and spend it as they wish.

These kind of ideas are vital. Also, look at how some amazingly viral games work (example: Farmville by Zynga, 85 million players per month). They keep a user returning with social hooks like real-time interaction, if you plant a flower or whatever you HAVE TO return to the game within 2 hours otherwise your flower will wilt and die.

How do you expect me to respect what you are saying after you tell me that you moderated "Habbo Hotel"

----

Anyways the point here Method isn't so much about the changes its about why the changes were implemented, there is this little faggot named "Cheese/Roxxcatt" who after distension was destroyed tried making his own distension zone that has no playerbase and so he decided to try to bring distension back into TW without calling it distension. Without actually playing TW he joined TWDev where a lot of the new players didn't know who this "cheese" was and listened to his ideas, and took many of them especially when it came to "fixing" the tw pub. Sure enough it was implemented and sure enough here comes Cheese playing TW for the first time since I killed Distension a few years back. Basically the moral of the story is - ITT: Some random faggot tries turning TW into Distension again and once again players refuse to put up with the shit. And that is the main reason so many people complained about the new change.

Ok, gona try and make sense of this crazy shit.

Dexter has only ever tried to improve this zone. I've had many chats with him discussing how the zone is declining and brainstorming what can be done to inject some life back into it.

A while back he explained the new $ pub dollars system and we were doing some testing in twdev. I'm impressed by it and believe it can be awesome.

Players need rewards. PLAY and EARN model.
This goes without saying, if you play a game and receive no reward you will get bored. In this case the $dollars are a reward for 1) winning basing matches, 2) killing players.
I used to be a moderator on Habbo Hotel and they implemented a similar scheme where users accumulate points (known as pixels in the game) just by being active in the game and contributing. They can then trade the Pixels for actual virtual currency and spend it as they wish.

These kind of ideas are vital. Also, look at how some amazingly viral games work (example: Farmville by Zynga, 85 million players per month). They keep a user returning with social hooks like real-time interaction, if you plant a flower or whatever you HAVE TO return to the game within 2 hours otherwise your flower will wilt and die.

I found it a lot of fun to watch your $ balance rise with each kill and gives players an incentive to actually play and earn. Do not try and pretend that people actually care about points in pub - they are useless. Noone checks the public stats on tw.org.


Ok, problems with the system and the way it was tested.

After reading the comments, the tests should either have gone ahead in pub 2 during an active time of day (more than 15 players in the arena) OR in pub 0 with *zone alerts sent beforehand "We will be beta testing some new pub settings in pub 0 for the next hour. Please help us test and give your feedback [...] here"
I wasn't there for the actual test (I don't know when this happened - a few days ago I assume) but from the responses here it sounds like players weren't aware of what was going on. Never force or restrict players, if there is testing to be done be sure to allow them to opt-in if they choose to.

Ship restrictions. I'm sure the thinking behind the ship restrictions was to limit some of the ships that aren't integral to public basing. Clearly from the feedback - players are not willing to have to 'pay' for the ships they have been playing for years. This change is too dramatic - I guess we know that now.. as you can see Dexter already removed that after the responses. End of story.
Leviathan should be the only ship that requires a purchase. Either !buy lev for 5/10 minutes, or for 1 life. This means people who crave LT still have that option but it won't disrupt the game as often as it did when there was no pure basing.

I say go ahead with the pub $ scheme but in such a way that it can be ignored if a user isn't interested. Sure, let players rack up their $ balance but some might prefer to ignore it and just fly around aimlessly.
I work from home on my startup so I'm always ingame on my other computer. Sometimes I feel like taking a break and just flying around pub shooting the shit without any care for points or dollars. I should be able to do this and take no notice of the new system sometimes.

A large problem with this zone is players just don't find the game and if they do they get bored while trying to learn wtf is going on. (That and when they refresh the server list, the hostnames dont even work anymore).

Pub dollars obviously doesn't attract new players to the game but it surely gives players something to play for and should keep them around as they play and earn.

I like the idea of it being integrated into other events too. $ rewards for winning public basing rounds, events, tournaments, duels etc.

I am against dollars ever being reset. If that was going to happen every month - what is the point playing and earning them.

I'd like players to be able to save up and buy things (not necessarily items in pub) but something else... something to make me want to play and reach a certain amount of $ so I can unlock a new feature. Or a new expensive ship that I can use for the following 2 weeks.


Anyway, well done Dexter and others implementing this. You work voluntarily on improving the game and just get a load of abuse. Use the feedback in this thread to improve the system.

And to everyone moaning.. read this: http://i.imgur.com/EfYKq.jpg

[kthx]

Also being able to be prized super and shields while in TW probably helps narrow down specific numbers used in specific programs that might help people cheat in other areas of TW. Probably shouldn't be giving out prizes like that.

[Zizzo]

What do you guys think of adding a betting dueling system within public?

I'm pretty sure you lost a duel like this for $20 vs Sakke in spider and never paid. afk

[Dezmond]

btw, how do you check how much money you have? didn't see a command for it listed in the f1 help.

Do the command !$ in pub.

[Jason]

played for a few mins last night.

don't like it.

back to the basics, pretty please!

btw, how do you check how much money you have? didn't see a command for it listed in the f1 help.

[Pressure Drop]

Dexter might have worked hard on it but that doesn't mean it was misguided or ill conceived and staff need to give better direction and ideas than this. I dont mind testing new ideas but how some of these ideas passed any sort of vetting procedure i dont know. We need new ppl , we need not to force out old population but no amount of change is going to bring in that many new ppl but it will force out those finding less reasons to log in.

quite frankly the core ethos of TW should be to keep it is as simple as possible...
We do not need a complex !buy system from the bots that needs to unlock/lock ships ... i was in pub and got d/c when i tried to wb or jav to test out what ships i could fly as it automatically ship changed me. This is an awful change and will only frustrate ppl who wont bother playing any more to earn money to unlock ships or whatever but just quit the game.

LT's are totally overpowered and that is more of an issue now there is very few arenas active. I could argue about that but that belongs in a diff thread. So rather than make a convoluted buying system to reintegrated them in a limited capacity i still think changing them to a totaly new ship set or if you want keeping them similar but unattachable is an eaiser and better option. Similarly put a small attach bty on javs to stop them attaching rocketing tking so much in base...etc


we need to keep some things the same , like the ability to jump into normal TWD ships at any time. Money if it's kept should be the icing on the cake and not actually needed for anything important or game changing. a short burst off Super is fine but should be very expensive , shields would need to be alerted to the public by the bot considering how much some ppl eat or lag induce in pub might make whining worse if not clearly shown by a bot :P and these items should only be available a couple of times a reset to hardcore players as a bit of fun.

Yeah well maybe if you would stfu and listen sometimes you would learn something instead of agreeing with terrible ideas and morons.

I am always open-minded. I make my own decisions... Just because I like ones you don't agree with doesn't mean I didn't make up my own mind. You were just mad earlier because I was saying how people are going to be negative about any new change, no matter what it is. -Regards

[kthx]

Did you retire a cheater and decide to start playing again as a kiss ass who won't just tell someone they have a bad idea? Are you going for the Delectable?