Points, money, pubbux, to die, to sleep, no more

[Viruk]

If you remove them from scoring or completely disable some play styles (even if just for a few hours a day) because you want to have a ?go base pub you are actively telling a big part of the population to "go fuck off". Ever thought of this?

Not exactly. You could say it is telling them to play the game as it is meant to be played. Some will quit. Some will change their ways. Some will do their own thing as long as the game allows it, regardless of scoring.

However, if certain play styles kill basing by deterring basers when there is a low population then I would rather keep the basers and lose the others. Some play styles depend on having basers to prey upon and may die along with the death of basing anyway. Why risk losing two groups instead of one?

When scoring I would prioritize basing, because it is supposed to be the primary purpose of the arena, because it is the most interesting and complex part of the game (IMO) and because other styles depend on it. The end of a basing round "Best/Most" rewards should never go to anyone who is not competing for that flag.

Success in other play styles could still be scored separately: Let those with alternative play styles compete against their own group. Spawner vs Spawner. Camper vs Camper. LT vs LT. Dueller vs Dueller. They should get some reward too, but nothing to compete with basers.

Having a reward system that is capable of telling the difference and rewarding flexibly (without crashing the bots/server/database) is important for this.

[roxxkatt]

when playing pub, i never cared about points
then i helped bring pubbux around
then when i played pub, i didnt care about points OR pubbux

conclusion: who cares?



additionally, it was the original intent of the pubbux system to replace ?buy and give players something to come back to
that wont happen if it resets, and retention of players will potentially go down
the problem of the inflation of the system is entirely due to having nothing to spend on and staff mismanaging the system, and has nothing to do with it

[bkgmjo]

@Viruk
I agree with promoting basing but pub was never intended to support only one way.

Rewarding basers much more than others sounds good to me but locking out the others removes a part of the game. In the end basers who really can't deal with some ships as enemy or simply don't want to do so have some places to go. Can always TWD or ?go base. The way pub has always worked best simply is letting everyone do their stuff, be retarded and just do bs. Its mainly this loose play style and chatting that kept the community alive during years now.

For those who really want some pseudo-professional action the events and leagues have been made and used for a long time now. But this is specialization and heavy limitation, not the likes of everyone. I for example like when a private LT bombs base while my freq tries to capture it. You can use them like special weapons and when there is no more need for them just blow them up. Most LTs quit after being shot down a few times anyways when they see there is opposition.

It is a little off to say nobody is online in ?go base and decided to go to a place with all options available so now we want our favourite game established in pub because what people really want is no levs and heavy fighting for flag.

[Viruk]

In the end basers who really can't deal with some ships as enemy or simply don't want to do so have some places to go. Can always TWD or ?go base.

I suspect for most veterans it is not a question of not being able to deal with some ships/playstyles (although 'dealing' often means chasing more than killing). The problem is dealing with them and basing at the same time.

My (limited) understanding of TWD/TWL is that basing is only infrequently active at certain times. Not suitable for a casual gamer (and probably lacks the variety of pub).

?go base can be fun but does not always run, involves waiting/hoping for team selection (and lacks much of the variety of pub).

Most LTs quit after being shot down a few times anyways when they see there is opposition.

True. Pathetic isn't it?
Shooting them down can be a problem though, and doesn't the team greening system mean those LTs could be reassembled within seconds?
Unfortunately what is true for LTs is also true for many basers after being repeatedly shot down by LTs.

[bkgmjo]

Frustration works for all ;-) No matter what ship or which way you want to play. Can always be prevented by others.

You are right about the TWD thing. It needs two squads online to allow a game, which doesn't happen that often in less populated times. TWL needs hosting and schedules. Same with base though. But this is a population problem more than anything else.

Levs can only green up to 15 bounty by team greening though and without buys or others helping them its sometimes pretty hard to get greened with all those spawners. What most people in base see is not this part though but only the evolved form including a terr (pokemon comparison ftp :-P) bombing them. Not how they keep getting raped in spawn without real defense. Just the way they do it when shooting walls after they made the jump up.

After all I think this whole combination of spawners, basers, LTs and LT hunters usually keeps things between all balanced but levi evolved to a hate target and people get fired up about it now more than newbies, bad terrs, tking javs, flagstealing weasels and spawners who score by basers work on flag. The most hated play style keeps changing based on who whines loudest. But that's going on since TW started now.

So far people just whined and complained about this kind of things only. Most of those who claimed to leave forever in chats or forum posts still do it after years. Locking out some ways of playing really did make people leave though. So I guess its best to schedule testing of different settings with minor tweaks that slightly push people into the one or the other direction. Better than drastic changes without checking what effects would be.

[Dexter]

My fault! BOO

Anyways, playing without the pub buck would be great again..no inflactions, no money, no donations..uh :P

[qan]

Note that *points cmd (which is used to add/sub pts) makes all points flag points, AND resets Avg column to 0. This is the only way to modify user points in pub.


ALSO: I was going to say that there's no way every !buy does a DB query -- the only queries are when saving/loading data @ start/end of session -- BUT this is a horrible lie!! The system makes a record of EVERY purchase. Removing this immediately; should result in a massive reduction of DB usage.

[roxxkatt]

rejoice, for qan, slayer of terrible dev practices, is here to save the day

[Shaddowknight]

Note that *points cmd (which is used to add/sub pts) makes all points flag points, AND resets Avg column to 0. This is the only way to modify user points in pub.


ALSO: I was going to say that there's no way every !buy does a DB query -- the only queries are when saving/loading data @ start/end of session -- BUT this is a horrible lie!! The system makes a record of EVERY purchase. Removing this immediately; should result in a massive reduction of DB usage.

Theres a URL that we can use to see how much players have used/spent bought/donated/dueled/etc, so will that now be useless?

[Ephemeral]

Note that *points cmd (which is used to add/sub pts) makes all points flag points, AND resets Avg column to 0. This is the only way to modify user points in pub.


ALSO: I was going to say that there's no way every !buy does a DB query -- the only queries are when saving/loading data @ start/end of session -- BUT this is a horrible lie!! The system makes a record of EVERY purchase. Removing this immediately; should result in a massive reduction of DB usage.

There is a difference between a query and recording every purchase; a simple query is not that expensive in terms of db performance. Obviously you have to query the db when someone ?buy to see if they have the money. But I can see no reason why anyone would have been recording every purchase, perhaps they figured that in the future another new feature would be added that allowed layers to accumulate frequent flyer points or some other kind of cash back ‘feature’ :0
eph

[bkgmjo]

ALSO: I was going to say that there's no way every !buy does a DB query -- the only queries are when saving/loading data @ start/end of session -- BUT this is a horrible lie!! The system makes a record of EVERY purchase. Removing this immediately; should result in a massive reduction of DB usage.

Yah from what I saw at a quick look there is a lot of unnecessary trouble for both bots and database. Should maybe focus on this and clean up a little (especially with what is being logged and for how long and having a cronjob sort out old data to an archive or simply delete it) before making changes due to high load on the systems (Although I like the changes for other reasons). Also applying the same charset/db engine/conventions to all databases sounds like an actually good idea to me :-P

Lots of the bots could keep session data with a timed load/save of player data to reduce it. Also when writing use only one open connection and write the whole bunch of data for all including all logging of whatever. Will reduce table/row locks on the db, connection count and chances for bot malfunctioning (transaction, temporary backup store for queries in case of db being down). Maybe also having only a single bot that is allowed to connect to db and have the others use it for common info and reading/writing data async might be wise to avoid lock errors and allow for a forced save for zone recycles.

The same applies for the website too kinda. Caching frequently loaded data for reduced db load at the cost of stats and player-stalking-data not being correct on the millisecond would also save traffic.

Sorry of this gets a little too technical for the normal user but I have a feeling I need to push some guys on it since when I was offering my experience with analyzing structure and handling of database and suggesting changes and wanted to write a tutorial for inexperienced devs my access was taken away for it being too dangerous for idk what reason. So this is someone elses job now ;-)

I know this is a tough task since we have a pretty grown system here but it really needs to be done soon and strict conventions and guidelines will have to be made up to drastically increase the quality of bots/db, to train the motivated newer devs who just cannot have the same experience as people who have used similar systems for years and to avoid a total crash after all.

[Shaddowknight]

Recording all !buy transactions has it's uses though...
If you can track the number of antiwarps/portals bought in a given week, you can kinda use that as a means of measuing how effective leviterrs are (more antiwarps means they are more commonly found, intuitively)

Also being able to tell if something is NEVER bought (and therefore useless) can be nice.

[bkgmjo]

You really are set on your hatred of LTs right? :P Might just record each new LT and at which bounty/streak count they died for that purpose though.

Anyways, we currently log lots lots LOTS of stuff and most of it will stay for the rest of TWs life if things stay as they are. Figure giving details here would not be appreciated for security reasons but even if it were buy statistics or whatever only you could just sum them up each month and save to a separate table for the statistics. One entry(maybe one for each item) per month is far less than thousands that are also linked to players and whatnot and have to be (partially) loaded into memory on every single query, may it be reading or writing. Same goes for all stuff and is most needed for alias related tables and the buy things (might include messagebot and all kinds of statistics shown on website) as some stuff from the start of this millennium still is in the same tables that are actively in use and causes more trouble (false bans, db load, newplayers not being recognized, ect.) than anything.

[Shaddowknight]

You really are set on your hatred of LTs right? :P Might just record each new LT and at which bounty/streak count they died for that purpose though.

Anyways, we currently log lots lots LOTS of stuff and most of it will stay for the rest of TWs life if things stay as they are. Figure giving details here would not be appreciated for security reasons but even if it were buy statistics or whatever only you could just sum them up each month and save to a separate table for the statistics. One entry(maybe one for each item) per month is far less than thousands that are also linked to players and whatnot and have to be (partially) loaded into memory on every single query, may it be reading or writing. Same goes for all stuff and is most needed for alias related tables and the buy things (might include messagebot and all kinds of statistics shown on website) as some stuff from the start of this millennium still is in the same tables that are actively in use and causes more trouble (false bans, db load, newplayers not being recognized, ect.) than anything.

I really only used that as a very practical example
I was merely pointing that it could also be used to track new !buy options (see which ship is buying the item more, and how often, etc.)
It's important to be able to track how popular changes actually are with data like that in addition to the verbal (typed) responses of players.

[bkgmjo]

ya those would actually be useful infos. Still need to be summed up and placed in some other tables since they are ment for another purpose tho