Killing my fun in pub.

[Spock!]

dont listen to spock. he wants big weasel with stealth cause he never plays the basing game anyway, just wants to lame spawn. let weasels buy rep. the weasel flag saving makes the game exciting

Reason I never Base is becuase the fucking LT's bomb the shit out of the place and the weasel doesn't stand a chance. Gosh!

[Spock!]

In pub today there was seriously 4 LT's running around all at the same time. If that isn't considered out of hand then I don't know what it.

I personally think we need to have a serious overhaul of the Lev. Make it a bit faster + better energy recharge but with a yellow bomb instead, and I don't know what else it would need......something.


And btw, who makes the decisions if staff do not?

[Shaddowknight]

Unfortunately most of staff dont have any say in it.
We can state our opinions on it, but its no better than anyone else and doesnt help and more thab this thread has

[cookies]

The current vision should be ‘downsize this bitch back to its core competencies’ and ‘yes, we do fewer things but damn they are good things’.
eph

This. I have been watching this game circle the bowl for a few years now, coming back every few months to see if staff fixed the glaring problems yet. But it just keeps getting worse-- farther and farther from the game I started playing. Playerbase is way down, we don't need this huge x-and-jav-favoring map.

LTs, small x, garbage map, and the broken-ass shop shit all over the game and staff's refusal to balance obvious bullshit is the reason most new people quit the game after playing for 15 minutes.

It's like with every update they are making an active, concerted effort to make pub suck even harder.

[Crown of Thorns]

I agree wholeheartedly.
Maybe have one dedicated FFA-ish/Base public map settings and for those who enjoy that playstyle and the other(s) with more of a streamlined base feel to it.

[bandcampgirl]

Voting in pub against levis - YES!!!! too many levis all the time are ruing the game

dont listen to spock. he wants big weasel with stealth cause he never plays the basing game anyway, just wants to lame spawn. let weasels buy rep. the weasel flag saving makes the game exciting

Bring back strike base

Dont score lancasters in killothon. too many newbies straying spread shots

[Ephemeral]

most pub changes arenc't done without some conferring with other staff and some other players...

Conferring with players, even knowledgeable players, is not the same thing as having vision and wisdom that leadership requires. Of course getting input from players is important but I simply don’t agree that this is a panacea or is the answer to running TW. Being a good leader of a zone means doing what is right for the zone long-term, not what some vocal players might be suggesting on a specific issue. (In fact, I would put this fairly high on the list of things to improve in TW.)

… staff quota... i dont exactly know why bkgmjo/eph are brining it up. it has a reason and it just cant be removed. yes, staff is helping the game, and ideally they're doing it entirely voluntarily out of their very own motivation. but there has to be a quota to ensure that everyone is helping at the minimum at least. .

I raised it as just one example of what I feel needs to be revisited and changed. I think it can, and should ‘just be removed’. If the quota is the metric being used to see if people are doing what they volunteered for, then something else is broken. At best it should be just one single thing used to understand the job someone is doing. At worse it is exactly what it has become, running TW on auto-pilot.

And don’t even get me started on ‘pub bucks’, it epitomizes exactly what I think is wrong with TW. Simply look at Qan’s post to see this in action (no offense to Qan or his contributions to TW). But this (and pub bucks) is exactly what I mean, TW generates ‘solutions looking for a problem’. Every player has good ideas. Every developer has capabilities and offer solutions based upon what they know they can pull off. But without a strong leadership, with a good vision and a plan to make it happen, this boat is just drifting aimlessly. TW has become a mess of diverse ‘good ideas’ with nothing holding it all together.
Is it hard to walk away from a lot of the work that has been put in? Sure. Is it hard to listen to some of the players whine and bitch about losing some of the ‘features’. Sure. Does understanding how well staff is doing their job take more than counting up hosted sessions? Sure.
But IMO squeezing out a few more years for TW means making these kinds of hard decisions, it is NOT about trying to be everything to everyone anymore. The current vision should be ‘downsize this bitch back to its core competencies’ and ‘yes, we do fewer things but damn they are good things’.
eph

[fiS]

most pub changes arenc't done without some conferring with other staff and some other players
staff quota is mainly to ensure that we are doing our jobs. The deans cant be on at all times to ensure we are, so this helps give them an idea of who is doing great (in addition to info provided by other staffers). The quota also encourages some light friendly competition (although, this can be a bad if it lowers the quality of events)

i do agree there are a fre glaring problems that seem to not be dealt with, but getting real changes done isnt always an easy process around here, you just need to deal with the right people in the right manner

i dont even know who's in charge of pub at the time being (exactly). and the ones i think who are in charge of pub settings and map, i do never see them playing and enjoying pub.
which "other players" are decideing or having a say in there? my suggestions or ideas are just being entirely overheard too? i dont even see those people who are representative or in charge of pub looking or posting in this topic here.

staff quota... i dont exactly know why bkgmjo/eph are brining it up. it has a reason and it just cant be removed. yes, staff is helping the game, and ideally they're doing it entirely voluntarily out of their very own motivation. but there has to be a quota to ensure that everyone is helping at the minimum at least.

competition among quota is entire bullshit (imo). if you use it for your own motivation, that's fine, but competition itself... no.

EDIT:
the actual problem, oh yeah i forgot.

weasels: ive said that before and ever since they are this way.
they are entirely overpowered and just ruin fun. a compromise needs to be found here, because removing the weasel entirely isn't a solution and keeping it at the current strength is also not one.
a possible solution that i suggest: keep it small, let it have cloak/stealth (reducing energy slowly) but remove its rocket AND repel.
the possibilty to shift-bullet already makes it really overpowered, it doesnt need a rocket. same with the repel: it's small already and invisible, so why would it have an extra shield? no, no, no.

levis / lts: they're a part of tw pub and tw, some hate them, some love them.
basically i totally agree with bkgmjos statement above, it just makes sense.

!buy: the buy feature actually makes this game somewhat modern and gives motivation to play, does it really?
we need to limit where people can !buy stuff, how often they can (increase the delay?), adjust the power and effect of the features that just wipe out the entire flagroom. but then again, we need to find cool features that people actually want to spend their bucks on - other than !buy super during killothons.

[Shaddowknight]

most pub changes arenc't done without some conferring with other staff and some other players
staff quota is mainly to ensure that we are doing our jobs. The deans cant be on at all times to ensure we are, so this helps give them an idea of who is doing great (in addition to info provided by other staffers). The quota also encourages some light friendly competition (although, this can be a bad if it lowers the quality of events)

i do agree there are a fre glaring problems that seem to not be dealt with, but getting real changes done isnt always an easy process around here, you just need to deal with the right people in the right manner

[Spock!]

I generally agree with the two above statements. The tiny weasel does infact ruin many basing games (Me being an avid weasel flyer, I know from first hand) and I am all for making it big again, as long as we have stealth too. Cloak + Stealth + Big will not interfere with basing much at all, as the terr will be able to easily pick the weasel up on radar and shoot it. (as long as it has xradar on)
The only problem I see are "Veteran" warbirds bitching about being lamed. But the weasel really is too slow to be a serious threat to a wb anyway.

Lev terrs can go to hell for all I care. I think there should be a time limit as for how long a lev can be attached. That way it can still jump into base when it gets its bounty up while not totally ruining the basing match by blindly firing bombs from outside.
I have to say though, one reason I never base is because these so called "friendly" levs constantly tk to attempt to save their own asses, and that just ruin basing for me, and that is why I am now always on a priv freq.

Just putting my penny in the pot.

[Ephemeral]

I have been saying this for several years, TW is trying to be ‘all things to all people’. As the game grew older TW kept dividing/sub-dividing the population by offering different events, configurations, and leagues. Cutting up the same sized pie into ever smaller pieces served no useful purpose when what was really desired was a bigger pie. Making matters worse is the fact that for years and years changes were made in a vacuum and without any way to measure if the changes had a positive or negative impact on population. In fact multiple simultaneous changes were often made ensuring no chance of really understanding what was going on.

Now that the game is on the down-slope of the growth bell curve. IMO it is far past the time TW should have been ‘downsized’ to concentrate on its core competencies.

1. Enough of the current system of ‘rewarding’ staffers for running hundreds of events. Event popularity is easily measured, pick the top 5-6 and control how often they are offered.
2. Enough of the endless tweaking of the maps and for God’s sake stop forcing ‘holiday’ pub maps down the players throats. Use a single standard pub map as the default entry map and stop playing with the settings. If other maps/configs are thought to be desirable, them make them as secondary arenas and their popularity can be measured. (I am willing to bet that those stupid holiday maps would hardly be played at all, yet somehow we let Pink’s opinion dictate what everyone HAS to play.)
3. There is no real need for multiple problematic leagues, reduce it to a single well run league.

eph

[bkgmjo]

dear qan,

the idea of voting in pub is nice in theory but will just cause heavy abuse (multiclienting, calling in ppl from other arenas just for the vote, messing as spectator without actually playing and so on...).

also with alternating pub every hour people would just get confused and annoyed, spam ?help and leave the game. it would also lead to levi-haters or levi-lovers staying away depending on settings. this total fail pure pub episode of tw perfectly showed that permanent changes have a heavy impact on player population as you currently can see as the results of random unplanned map messups too. also, just think about the ragequits when ppl get thrown out of their ships or freqs randomly...


if we want to reactivate pub(s) we have to look back at what actually killed them. and thats not lts or priv freqs as those have been there when i could still choose between 8 open pubs. the problems with those are symptoms, not causes. but then again, what is the problem? pretty obvious to me when comparing to tws golden times:

• first of all, the game is getting old. back in the day there were no facebook games, barely any other mmos and the graphics were cool. what can we do about that? pretty much nothing, unless we find very motivated ppl to create a new client.
  
  
• the community is none. we have many small communities from twd players over lt players to staff, to upper staff and even there we have groups hating each other. decisions are NOT based on any community voting or whatever for years now. very few people see themselves in almighty positions and make choices for players not caring about the results (not all i know, but this is what mainly happens in staff). the best display of this is right here on the forums. hidden staff sections and a dead player forum area. a result of forming elitist groups and allowing public forums to become flamewars places where nobody actually picked up ideas and even the majority of posts from staff here is offensive nonsens. what to do? include the community into the game and regulate bs talk (thats actually the job of a forum mod, just in case you guys forgot)
  
  
• all groups of players are given their own playgrounds. we have twd for squads, ?go base for basers, ?go duel for duelers, ?go elim for deathmatchers and and and. most of them hosted 24/7 by automated bots. sounds great huh? the absolute contrary it is. ive talked about this to an experienced game community manager who didnt know about tw (their company handles more than 500 online games) and she was amazed this game is still being played. there are a few golden rules in community management of which some are:
  1. do not split players into too small groups
  2. do not make groups too big
  3. keep the flow (which relates to carefully watching that players can level up or step down a little without groups being too distant from others)
  
  in late 90s and early 2ks those rules were followed, not anymore. we give the 3 duelers a place, the 10 ppl who want to play as squads, the 4 lters. the 5 elim guys and so on and then watch how all of them whine that nobody is online while player count actually states 100+ ppl online. also we allowed those isolated groups to become such professionals in their area that new players need a long time to even try and challenge. there is no medium level anymore. changes? i know im gonna get hating for this but... the hell shut down those 24/7 events(twd included) when player count is so damn low. most of them cant even be played then anyways because simply nobody is there to play them. rotate them, host them manually like years ago or make them events like all others. place twd on weekends(maybe even just one day of weekend) so players know when to meet up for it and dont put every single player into its own arena.
  
  
• a good staffer is who hosts events. i wonder if the majority of players knows there are quotas for new staffers to match. you get score for hosting, answering help calls and so on. nice idea but faulty. or did you see many actively playing staffers in pub lately? they assemble in twd and events to collect their score, answer questions without knowing the answer to collect score, host the same 10 events over and over and over to collect score while there are hundreds of maps on the server, hold pointless meetings and discuss over each other. point is: staff today is put in place to take care of staff things, not player issues. its not all staffers like that, some are working hard, trying to get things done and rip their asses off to help the game but as in every place a few weak spots ruin every endevour. if you are staff and not motivated to do anything anymore thats fine, its all voluntary and we thank you for what you have donated, but if this motivation is gone then follow dock>s and priitks and others good example and retire, axe yourself and dont stand in other peoples way just to feel important. and while you are at it you might as well remove mod rights from all those millions of VIP mods who just abuse data about other players and dont help anywhere. seriously, if you do not play this game anymore and just chat or afk, your oppinions on how players should play are bullshit.
  
  
• we time events on late sunday evening, american time. do i have to mention it is night time in europe by then? or even early morning sometimes? even staff meetings often happen at american evening times during the week, after midnight european time. is this what you call global community? europeans are actively excluded from the game and staff that way. no surprise euros leave. and just in case you do not realize... every leaving european is one less player, one less of "new player x's" countryman that could make him stay. ive seen groups of germans, dutch, english, fins, swedish, italians and others suddenly leave completely because ppl of their country werent seen anymore. getting new players whos native language is not english and who struggle to learn is pretty hard that way.
  
  
• finally, pub is ruined by people who do not know pub. if you really read all of this you might understand the following problems:
  • pub changes are made by staffers who never play pub
  • pub changes are put in place and nobody cares about effects. just to mention some:
    • the small weasel still ruins every basing game, steals flag and lames like mad, ruined the fun for terrs and levs and everyone who went for high bounty in base, forcing them all to private freqs and other arenas
    • the alernating map often results in 5 active basers defending 5 entrances
    • the buy anytime anywhere idea is only good for laming and powers up levterrs too much
    • the streak idea and kill-o-thon encourage heavy laming
    • the auto-freq-balancing makes everyone who likes high bounty, including levs and terrs go to private freqs to avoid it, it also does not check who is baser and who is spawner. this does not work to make teams even
    • the new maps that came in place made more players leave than come in. nothing got reverted
  • a pub that is starting to become fun is systematically ruined by events hosted to collect quota score
  • cheating and rude talk in pub is almost completely ignored by staff. saying "jew" can result in a netban though
  • good warbirds are drawn away by ?go elim
  • good terrs, spiders and sharks are drawn away by ?go base
  • good javs are drawn away by ?go javduel
  • all squads are drawn away by twd
  • probably lots more

now why do i put all this in a whine about being unable to handle a lt thread? because those levterrs are merely a symptom of all the idiocy that went into the development of this game. levterr players are players who want to team, players who want to play in pub, and players who enjoy the challenge. they have no place to run to like all other ships. but then again there are barely any skilled hunters anymore. levs in general are so pushed to be on private freqs that i dont see why they would bother helping the pub freqs. they get punished with losing their bounty on freq shuffle, they get lamed by some weasel when they finally made it into base to defend, they get teamkilled by those dozens of javs that cant aim or tk on purpose. they dont have teams to defend them anymore because all those teams are drawn to subarenas. how are people even gonna learn to baselev that way? for all of you who whine about "some lev newb blowing up base", maybe you should have played in the 90s when people were happy to have a defending lev in base or a levterr on their freq to assist basing. and most importantly my favourite part in the game: you could always hunt skilled enemy lts. today we have like 3 or 4 of those left. cant be such a task to handle. at least i manage to get each of them in a few minutes and im not very good at aiming.

if you want to blame broken pubs on anything, make it be the small weasel and bad staff decisions that led to heavy imbalances in gameplay, not some well thought ship settings that made this game grow supreme over all other zones.

[qan]

Does anyone have an opinion on allowing voting in pub? We had a system like this active at one point in time... I remember that some people were abusing it, though, so I think we disabled it. No reason we couldn't fix those bugs, though, and get it running again.


So: if we had a working voting system, and it enabled new settings for, say, 1 hour, after which they would revert, would anyone object?


If it sounds like a good idea, what things would you like to be able to vote on?

A few things I can think of off the top of my head that we could toggle on/off:

• Levis
• Levis allowed to attach
• Priv freqs
• Weasels
• Warping into base at round start
• Forced warp (everyone is warped into base at round start ... except for levis)
• Start a special game mode, such as kill-o-thon or pub hunt (actually, which reminds me... why not have "nemesis" features for certain ships? Someone kills you X number of times and they become your nemesis, and if you get revenge on them, you gain a little bonus $?)
• Distension (hrr hrr hrr ... I kid)
• ???
• Prophets!

And note that we could require different percentages of people to enable each particular option (70% of players required to disable levis, while we'd need 80% to disable private freqs... as an example), as well as include votes for reverting back to the original settings before the time is up (which would probably require a smaller majority, since the original settings would be considered the most "correct"). So this way, we could maintain plain old pub, while allowing the odd change or two if it's popular enough at a given time. Probably still have the code, somewhere...

[DKFett]

could cut the bottom half off the map

- less room for noobs
- easier to learn what to do
- harder for levs to green

I agree with this!

Another simple yet (maybe) affective idea.

It will also have more action, as there is lots of space to run around without seeing anybody. This will bring noobs into the action faster, thus, they get addicted faster.

Because, clearly, there isn't nearly enough addiction going around.

[Spock!]

could cut the bottom half off the map
- less room for noobs
- easier to learn what to do
- harder for levs to green

Another simple yet (maybe) affective idea.

It will also have more action, as there is lots of space to run around without seeing anybody. This will bring noobs into the action faster, thus, they get addicted faster.