Changes in pub #2

[Ephemeral]

Kry,
Sorry, didn’t mean to sound like you heart isn’t in the right place or that you do not have the ability to make the correct decisions.

But you have taken a job on the Titanic as the leader of the band playing on deck. Making decisions about what songs to play (map/ships changes) won’t change the fact that people are in the cows nest screaming ‘iceberg dead ahead!!’ (new player retention). TW is a ship that cannot turn quickly and the captains do not trust or believe that they can delegate responsibilities to others. There is a small window of opportunity for them to make organizational changes that can prevent this ship from hitting the iceberg but unless they do what songs you choose to play will not really matter.

IMO only a hand few of people have the ability to stop this ship from going down and having us all end up in the water. But this is just my opinion and I certainly could be wrong; I am not an ‘insider’ and acknowledge the possibility that other ships (i.e. other zones) could come together and keep things afloat. But from where I sit the best chance of saving TW is to try to turn the ship immediately.
eph

[Demonic]

Kry,
Sorry, didn’t mean to sound like you heart isn’t in the right place or that you do not have the ability to make the correct decisions.

But you have taken a job on the Titanic as the leader of the band playing on deck. Making decisions about what songs to play (map/ships changes) won’t change the fact that people are in the cows nest screaming ‘iceberg dead ahead!!’ (new player retention). TW is a ship that cannot turn quickly and the captains do not trust or believe that they can delegate responsibilities to others. There is a small window of opportunity for them to make organizational changes that can prevent this ship from hitting the iceberg but unless they do what songs you choose to play will not really matter.

IMO only a hand few of people have the ability to stop this ship from going down and having us all end up in the water. But this is just my opinion and I certainly could be wrong; I am not an ‘insider’ and acknowledge the possibility that other ships (i.e. other zones) could come together and keep things afloat. But from where I sit the best chance of saving TW is to try to turn the ship immediately.
eph

Eph no offence but your completely wide of the mark on a lot of elements, firstly you say head of pub needs to have autonomy, great I had absolutely nothing to do with the change of levs/wzl's back to original settings, nor did I have any input on it simply as you say I left the decision completely down to the head of pub (which was your idea no? since I pushed the change of levs in the first place I wouldn't have changed it back - so assumption 1 done)

Which staff play LT exactly, since I don't think I have gone near one for many yrs, bores the hell out of me no challenge to it so, nor does wing to my knowledge so which upper are you referring too exactly??

I would have to hunt but prior to staff you stated that staff need to listen to players as they know whats best for pub, well whoever did that change clearly listened to the poll results -- now its don't listen to players.

I get all your points, and I agree with a lot of what you do say as you know but those parts bugged me to be honest, staff restructure you keep suggesting is needed - well im all for trying it, but all that will happen then is you have 6 people pulling in diff directions and not a lot bloody happening.

[Ephemeral]

Respectfully disagree (and no offense taken).
I did not say that you micromanaged every decision, I said that staff organization is such that the heads of various things do not have complete control. Frankly to structure staff into more of an autonomous and departmental-centric organization capable of outstanding collaboration would demand daily meetings. It would require top down thinking based upon the current (or modified) mission statement. As I have consistently stated over the last few years, upper staff should never, ever be involved in the operational decisions other than to mediate the inevitable issues when two departments interests conflict. In those cases it would be upper staff job to step in and resolve the conflict base strictly on the mission statement and objectives of the zone. If you are making the case that the current staff does operate this way then we will simply have to disagree.

Regarding staff playing LTs, I was referring to back a while (perhaps 3-6 months ago and longer). In all fairness I have not seen any staff in a LT in a while but the context of my comment was that LT previously were not the issue, the previous issue was that small private freq LTs were treating pub like their personal play ground.

I have never, ever said that staff needed to listen to players, you must be mistaken. I have had many posts where I said;
- new player opinions are never accounted for
- that there is a huge need to move to a method that measures the success of new ideas
- that playing public may or may not understand the bigger picture but staff always should
While I am sure that you had plenty of mis-guided pressure to listen exclusively to the loudest squeaky wheel, it never came from me.

I don’t envy you your job, it is an incredibly difficult task with little chance of success. The fix is neither easy nor very attractive, who the hell wants to sit through daily meetings and mediate very difficult decisions where the outcome usually means no one is completely happy? The available resources keeps dwindling and you are left with fewer and fewer possible solutions. And since the population now no longer supports all the features that TW once had, I see few choices other than downsizing (which is always painful and ugly).

I try hard to never just bitch and whine but rather offer possible solutions to the issues. I may or may not be right but you can take this to the bank, time will be the ultimate unbiased judge on the success or failure of the management of TW.
eph

[Crescent Seal]

I may or may not be right but you can take this to the bank, time will be the ultimate unbiased judge on the success or failure of the management of TW.
eph

Time has already told us that TW management has failed. The reason TW has been so successful at staying alive this long is due to the player base/community, so I hope people don't attribute this to TW management.

[Izor]

And that playerbase is finally giving up with it. I'm not sure Kryn has the wrong mindset about not making ship changes. To be fair to him, the innumerable attacks on the lev since 2004 have all not worked out for a large variety of reasons. They tried outright taking the ship out of the game, but all that did was make the people who enjoyed it quit or find another playstyle. From that point, whining about stuff really loud proved to be effective to bring about changes that one part of the community would like. Those of us who have been around long enough to remember those days will remember that competitive squads would do a mix of LTing, basing, spawning, and LT hunting. I can think back to a couple instances of Siege locking down the base for around an hour shooting down my LTs out of the ear holes. Your stereotypical pub did not have a strong basing game, but it was active with a balanced mix of playstyles. LT's cannot exist without basers, so when there was not a good basing game you would not see an abundance of LTs. Now since the lev has been reintroduced what you're seeing is the community balancing itself. Any LT out there is going to get 10fers every shot until someone does something about it. You can't sit here and say the majority rules mindset is terrible, and then do a 180 when the change is something that you don't care for. There will be no overnight fix for 10 years of wrongdoing and mismanagement. Whatever change is settled on will have to accept some loss of players like any other change that's come down. The best Kryn can hope to do in this position is balance the pub so it is fun again and hope that retainability of new players is fixed. If there is one thing almost everyone posting here can agree on, its that the changes to pub have left us with a less fun overall game than we can think back to. Part of making tough choices is making the unpopular choice in a game loaded with basers of reintroducing LT's that heavily interfere with basing, but I think the thought process behind it is to return the choice of playstyle back into the game that used to make it so much fun.

As an aside, I'm going to harp on my previous that the bot store needs to be removed. The number one way to assure that a new player finds this game dumb/boring is to start them at a disadvantage. At a minimum reset the damn system and fix the prices on things so that you dont have people with unlimited purchase power.

[Zeebu]

down with pub buxxx

[Demonic]

And that playerbase is finally giving up with it. I'm not sure Kryn has the wrong mindset about not making ship changes. To be fair to him, the innumerable attacks on the lev since 2004 have all not worked out for a large variety of reasons. They tried outright taking the ship out of the game, but all that did was make the people who enjoyed it quit or find another playstyle. From that point, whining about stuff really loud proved to be effective to bring about changes that one part of the community would like. Those of us who have been around long enough to remember those days will remember that competitive squads would do a mix of LTing, basing, spawning, and LT hunting. I can think back to a couple instances of Siege locking down the base for around an hour shooting down my LTs out of the ear holes. Your stereotypical pub did not have a strong basing game, but it was active with a balanced mix of playstyles. LT's cannot exist without basers, so when there was not a good basing game you would not see an abundance of LTs. Now since the lev has been reintroduced what you're seeing is the community balancing itself. Any LT out there is going to get 10fers every shot until someone does something about it. You can't sit here and say the majority rules mindset is terrible, and then do a 180 when the change is something that you don't care for. There will be no overnight fix for 10 years of wrongdoing and mismanagement. Whatever change is settled on will have to accept some loss of players like any other change that's come down. The best Kryn can hope to do in this position is balance the pub so it is fun again and hope that retainability of new players is fixed. If there is one thing almost everyone posting here can agree on, its that the changes to pub have left us with a less fun overall game than we can think back to. Part of making tough choices is making the unpopular choice in a game loaded with basers of reintroducing LT's that heavily interfere with basing, but I think the thought process behind it is to return the choice of playstyle back into the game that used to make it so much fun.

As an aside, I'm going to harp on my previous that the bot store needs to be removed. The number one way to assure that a new player finds this game dumb/boring is to start them at a disadvantage. At a minimum reset the damn system and fix the prices on things so that you dont have people with unlimited purchase power.

Aye pub bux have been mentioned a few times:
Personal opinion - waste of time, don't like the idea of being able to add "buffs" for money that would disadvantage the new player that much when entering the game.
However, when pubbux events for example are hosted it seems popular, suggesting pubbux has a place. I am trying not to influence the decision at all with my own personal opinions on the matter so I will leave the decision down to kryn, however its certainly an element that needs to be removed for better or worse.

[Izor]

You're the lead sysop, right? That's when you grow a pair. If you see something thats clearly wrong and I'm fairly sure that I've put together a pretty compelling case and theres not much of a counter argument to it

[Left_Eye]

Reseting the pubbux system has been proposed by me for many months on end to no avail. However, KrynetiX seems to agree that the pubbux system needs to be reset on a monthly to every 3 months basis. The problem with our system is that it gains up over time with no reset, so people just keep hoarding money which disadvantages new players from the start. However, if it is reset at an interval, it gives new players the chance to be put on the same level playing field as the vets. It advantages only those who either play events (to gain pubbux prizes) or those who play public constantly. Either way, those that are active in TW get the benefits. However, if this is so, hosters can stop giving tons of pubbux prizes just to entice players, as they'll be enticed by fewer and fewer pubbux amounts.

I finally see a reset of the system in the near future. It's at least a step in the right direction.

[Izor]

I'm giving this guy every chance possible to be reasoned with like I did with fis until i just gave up and quit. I dont like the system at all, but I realize that even ?buy was reset on a monthly or biweekly basis. Those antiwarps and fcs are awfully expensive when the pool is much lower. The prices/prizes still need to be dicked with severely until balanced (refer to Eph's posts about testing things and following up with metrics after they're deployed.) I can't remember a change to the prizes since initial launch. Now you got people with millions sitting on it or infinitely spending it. It will take 2 days of saving with the current system for the top players to be broken. What I think it was intended to be was an occasional boost at substantial cost to people who played this game regularly. It's currently gamebreaking.

[KrynetiX]

I personally don't care for the !buy system, and I'm considering getting rid of it. There are a few options:

1. Get rid of !buy/money completely. The game was just as fun before money.

2. Get rid of !buying items (antiwarp, brick, repel, portal, etc, all of them) and just leave the specials (flagsaver, strikebase, epidemic, etc). Along with a global reset on money (start everyone off at $0). People will still enjoy dueling for money and buying Specials.

3. Leave the !buy system generally as-is, but with a lot more restrictions on which ships can !buy what. For example, don't allow any ship (except Shark) to !buy xradar. Javelin and Terrier should spawn WITH xradar, and shark should be able to !buy xradar or acquire xradar from eating greens. Also, reset everyone to $0 every couple of months.

Personally, option 1 is looking like a good idea. Followed by option 2. Then option 3.

I'm going to set the public arena to force even teams because I keep seeing teams very unbalanced. This is a simple arena setting.

Pub map is changing. It's not too different from the current pub map, but it restores even more of the original base created by Arilou. It's certainly not a drastic change - it just further resembles the original TW base.

EDIT: Disabling !buy xradar on all ships except shark is already in place. You can thank ThePAP (excellent new addition to our development team) for fixing that up so quickly.

Any other things that I am considering changing are completely out in the open. I'll either speak about it on forums and in-game or you can simply ask me.

Feel free to list your concerns on forums, message me on forums, or PM/?message me in game. I'll be watching forums and pub gameplay closely. Just talk to me if you have anything on your mind - I'm online every day.

[Rasaq]

Nax> we are in the year 2013 and we still have walls that can't be diagonal

[Shaddowknight]

So you have decided on the change of map? Or are we still going to trial our three different variations and see what parts of which are good and work from there?

[Demonic]

If we keep the pubbux I would prefer we used it for something interesting, such as setting up like a poker event where pubbux is the currency used, that way you earn it for winning poker games OR playing pub :P

As for in pub, meh always seemed like a pointless system to me.

[Izor]

I tried to play earlier and realized that the streaks still disappear in safe. This was a fis changed aimed directly at me and should be rectified immediately, as having a huge streak is hard to maintain for hours without RL calling for something.