Open Letter to Demonic and M_M God

[bkgmjo]

Would this also involve re-instating the res-cap in pub and limiting arena size to 35 again? Or are we suggesting a pick and mix version?

Make a collection of things that were generally liked. Timed basing and pubbux are part of the game in pub now while pubbux could easily be spread over the whole zone allowing to buy being the starting zombie in events, auction being the cap in ?go base, betting on all kind of matches and event outcomes and maybe even buying specific events happening. But still, the pubbux system in pub needs to be reworked. It is heavily unbalanced and the buy anywhere system is pretty good at destroying games. Best would probably be to remove it or multiply costs for buying outside of safe by 10 and adding a 5 second timer before the item arrives as this is simply against the all players are equal thing that made TW be the most successful zone. Res-cap for actively playing people wouldn't hurt, but higher limit for specs to allow videos and watching the game.

For all the people asking for pub to go back to previous settings, there is an equal number complaining about lev and weasel being over powered and ruining pub.

This is not true for the lev as you can see on the forums, in general chat in pub and if you care also in !comments. A little summary if you do not feel like reading through all of them: http://pastebin.com/CSQPzbQi
If you look at who complains about levs, it is always the same very few people and if you look even closer: changes to the lev keep making people who haven't commented on forums for a long time come back just to make clear this is wrong.

As for the weasel: A big majority of people beg for it to finally be big and not a basing killer anymore. It is a fun ship in small for dueling each other or the typical cloak hunter ships but it does not belong into pub as it replaces the cloaked surprise terrs and javs would lookout for with their radar with some barely visible, guided lagrocket missile that can come in from the tiniest holes of flagroom and kill ships or steal the flag faster than anyone can be warned.

TWD itself needs a complete rework in how it works, and needs to be independent with an actual goal to stand a chance of retaining players, as with nothing to aim for, people will go.

It is not only that, what happened the past few years is always trying to turn everything into some kind of TWBD. ?go base is theoretically hosted all day, pub puts people into rounds with only two teams like TWD matches and even warps them into base and even worse: resets peoples bounties, which they often worked on for quite some time. High Bounty has always been an important element in pub. Current pub also heavily punishes every ship and play style that does not belong into the TWD scheme. This makes pub and the whole zone be some kind of homogenous mass with little variety. Work out the differences of what should happen in each area and make a cut between pub, base and TWD and build on this as a strength, not a weakness. Or in case you think it should all be the same then put it all into one arena as different ones do not have any justification of existence anymore then.

One thing that might work to revive TWD a little is to make it mandatory to actually be on a squad to have base or ship duels and for that shut down 24/7 ?go base, elim and similar events. This wouldn't work the way it is now as elim is pretty active even in dead hours but if you made quick squadchanges legal with a rule that forbids abuse to feed a squad there might be a chance and it could offer making elim be something with a meaning again, you know like the big event as it used to be with the possibility of bragging to be the best for a week or month or whatever, not the monotonous collection of score to be on top of the list. Don't nail me on this though as I do not play those games and people who do would probably be better on rating this thought.

Also since hockey is becoming increasingly popular there could be a KO-system championship every weekend. Well, weekly or monthly championship with KO-system for squad games could also give new players more chance to play and give people something to look forward to and to log on for.

3) Marketing/Advertising - Very important, but kinda need 1 and 2 fixed first or pointless

Just make sure you know what to advertise for. If things keep changing constantly most advertised promises might be void when players arrive.

[Bigyin]

HI,

First of all haven't read full thread or played in awhie so sorry if I am repeating anything or things you have tried or are doing just now.

To get more people to play would it not be possible to put the game on steam or something like that? as im sure people would just download it and give it a go as its free, and sure a % of them would stay.

with TWD to get more games taken place, make it so any member of team can challenge a friendly TWD game which would be non ranking, so even if no caps or Assistant are online they can still play a game.

Also with TWD possible of adding a non squad member into a game, could limit it to say one? and just in non ranking games? reason for this would help more games played as would help make up the numbers if you don't have enough online, and also helps to try out players for joining the squad as you can see how they play with the team before they join.

I don't think Limit times when you can play TWDs would be a good idea, but you can do things to help them play when you want them to, like power hours? get more points for a win when you play in power hours etc

Idea for twd again, same idea of money you can earn in pub, put that into twd? so you can buy things like extra subs, swap life's with players as in someone starts with 11 lifes and other starts with 9, timeouts dureing the game as in no one can die from any team so gives time to regroup, Team energy recharge etc

[LF]

I think the TWD solution rests on the shoulders of everyone, as compared to those of staff alone. Just take a second to reflect on the current TWL season for reference. Each league had 8 teams. Each league was also only a 2 or 3 team show with everyone else just being filler squads just to have someone to play each week. You could have looked at rosters during preseason and KNOW that it was going to be dice/enemy/pandora in finals in LB, dice/pandora in LJ, and really just Fierce by itself in LD. Take a good hard look at the !myfreq listings for each squad playing today and I'll bet that every team involved (All 3 of them) has at LEAST 10+ players that could have been starters on other less "elite" squads this season. While granted my squad had a disappointing finish in TWLB due in large part to my own failure, how competitive do you think Fierce would have been at all in basing if players like me, diakka, myth and usoi had never joined in the first place, because any one of us could have joined and played for one of the top 3 squads in out respective division. The point is to stop joining squads that already have 25+ other capable starters on the roster and spread out the talent a bit. There's no reason you can't be on a chat with all of your friends, but are pixel medals so important that you have to stack as heavily as possible just to watch ease/megaman carry your ass to a medal each year? Spread out a bit and you will actually have people to play against, but god forbid you have to pewpew vs your "friends"

[LF]

lack of quality/active european staffers

Probably more the former than the latter on this one. Every single "active" sysop we have is european, with MM being the only one that actually plays the game anymore. The is absolutely no "western world" (I wanted to avoid saying American since Canada is a huge part of our playerbase too) leadership in our zone. Hell even disregarding sysops and only looking at the rest of upperstaff:

Lefty: Head of bans...actually American and in a job that suits her real world skills (as a lawyer)
fis: Head of I have no idea...probably here just because. Extremely young and european.
Up in ya: American head of TWD - Doesn't even play TWD (Love the guy though)
Willby: Cashier at a grocery store, great kid and good worker but hardly what I'd consider "leadership"
Shaddow: public relations? I have no idea why this is a smod position, I consider it a product of HMS Syndrome
Reckful: Head of leagues, doesn't actually play any leagues.
ThePAP: Relatively unknown, but an absolutely fantastic coder and a real asset.
qan: Same as PAP, and probably the single best candidate imo for zone leadership
Dezmond: Was head of bans, now co-head? of a marketing team that hasn't done anything...ever. Probably HMS Syndrome
24: Also co-head? of marketing? What's even more amazing than this guy ever making SMod in the first place is how he has managed to keep the position this long while doing absolutely nothing...ever. So we have 2 SMod positions for a department that doesn't even really exist while MM does all the legwork in formulating an actual plan.
Kryn: Head of pub - while I disagree with his choices I think he's a good fit for the role

Without revealing anything I'm not supposed to reveal we have an overwhelming majority of european staffers compared to American/Canadian, especially given the playerbase that we have (Majority American/Canadian), and an entirely european "leadership" for a majority western population. Even worse we have all the wrong people in all the wrong positions (Not all but most). I will bite my tongue on highlighting the rest of the inner issues staff suffers from that could potentially make a huge difference but I'm probably going to get my ass reamed for this post as it is already anyways, if not axed for expressing my opinion.

tl;dr version: The issue isn't a lack of european staffers, its a lack of quality staffers and diverse leadership that actually plays the game.

[Turban]

i should have specified that i meant the lower staff, e.g. mods and hosts. for some reason once active mods get promoted to smod they quit doing what they are supposed to do: help the zone and its players. seen it happen way too often; wrong types of people in leadership roles. fk typing with the phone stinks, will edit this later and add my thoughts about other things as well.

[roxxkatt]

with TWD to get more games taken place, make it so any member of team can challenge a friendly TWD game which would be non ranking, so even if no caps or Assistant are online they can still play a game.

this doesnt exist already?

[Bigyin]

not sure as i said in my post not played in a long time so still to work out what's changed

[Bukkake Surprise]

"Willby: Cashier at a grocery store"

AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Man, Health Care would get a kick out of that.

"suits her real world skills (as a lawyer)"

Lying, thieving slimebucket with no morals? The only thing that should be filled by lawyers is mass graves.

"HMS Syndrome"

Is this Hypermobility Syndrome or something else?

Thanks for the details, bkgmjo. I noticed a lot of those things, like the rocks not being where they're shown. Nobody has told us why the rocks were changed.

"Interestingly, such a packet rewriter on the server could also be used to enable reading of PMs, chats and so on but who would ever suspect anything like this to happen on TW?"

You mean the mods (and maybe someone else) are reading our chats and PMs? That should be removed at once.

How do you know about the rewriter?

I saw the weasel is back to "super fucking annoying" settings, the ones it had a year or two ago, when it could rocket into base, kill the terr, sit on the flag and repel everyone who tried to get the flag back, resetting the timer. I don't mind so much that it's small, but it shouldn't have both a rocket and a repel.

I've played a bit more since my last post, including just now, and the map has been changed to the one that was around...I don't even remember when. There have been so many changes over the past 10 years I don't really remember what the "original' settings were. Without a private frequency LT around and with six or more people on each team, the game feels like Continuum again. That's good. The bot was down right now, so I didn't get the annoying time-displaying pop-ups that stupidly replaced the green messages.

The whole ?buy system should be moved to the safe zones only, so people can't spam Burst and Full Charge.

"Superweapons like epidemic, roofturret, flagsaver, baseterr, super, shield and whatnot keep coming and going"

These should be removed.

I don't know why the Pub Bux were ever introduced. There doesn't seem to have been a clear vision of what to do with the Bux, but "hey, let's add features to the game because more is better". Wiping out the Bux made Alanon and SkyMan's (and maybe others) quit, because they primarily wanted to hoard Bux.

"a pubbux reward for laming the most levs in spawn"

Why not? Keep the assholes from getting on a terr. I'd kill them even without the reward. I never consider it when killing them. It's just the smart (and satisfying) thing to do. I like to hear them cry.

I don't see why a lack of European staff members would stop Europeans from playing the game. I don't give a shit where the mods are from, as long as they do their jobs. Lizard Fuel should be in charge.

What does "Lizard Fuel" mean?

[Ephemeral]

So here we are after a cluster fucked TWL playoffs. A great reminder that the zone population drop means more than just fewer players in the game. It also means that all resources, like staff and dev, are stressed.

Surely no one would argue that leagues like TWL or TWD are healthy and doing well. Running this stuff takes a fair amount of experienced players to step forward and donate a lot of time; this shit doesn't simply 'run itself'. We throw a new set of people under the bus each year after they have dropped the ball trying to manage a league for the first time like THEY are the problem. First, is it not obvious that the pool of available good candidates to run a league is shrinking? Second, is it not obvious those who have previously managed leagues leave for certain reasons and don't come back (and that we need a way to retain these people)?

We already have an incredibly large 'ball' of code to maintain. Dev guys are busting ass and doing a great job but they can only do so much with the resources they have at hand. People come up with a new 'good' ideas and the expectation seems to be that we simply have to code it up, roll it out, and let the zone test it for bugs and exploits. (Coders will always prefer to work on a new piece of their own code than go back and try to fix someone else’s ball of spaghetti; they aren’t going to say ‘hold up, we already have too much stuff that doesn’t work right.’) Yet we continue to ask them to add to it without a lot thought about the risk/cost of introducing new issues and bugs.

So what will TW look like in a few more years? 98% of TWD will be JDs and DDs; BDs will have all but disappeared. TWL will continue on its downward decline (the Head of TWL will probably be someone like PeePee). Events like Distension and hockey will remain handicapped and never reach their full potential. Staff will have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel for anyone who is willing to invest a fraction of the time it takes to really do the job (people like 2pac will be Mods). We will have a new TW Credit Card feature in pub so players can charge for things that want to use to ?buy win (but this will crash the server periodically when someone defaults on their payment).

Yet even with what is outlined above we still have many people insisting that in the face of the zone shrinking we do not have any need to become more efficient, we do not have any need to start to think about consolidation, and/or we do not have any need for intelligent scheduling or rotation of features, we do not have the need to do things well. In other words, just stay the current course with the expectation that everything will work out on its own. Who knows, maybe someone will be able to figure out that secret Lev setting that will bring a lot more players into the zone.
eph

[bkgmjo]

@Bukkake:
I have no proof of a packet rewriter but go try and find fullcharges with a jav, then ask a mod to do *watchgreen and it will claim you got fullcharges when you actually got a shrap. So, if the server does not know of anything then there must be something else changing the data packets and since I doubt the client does this in only tw pub and nowhere else and I seriously doubt the NSA fools around with games it must be something on server side modifying them. Of course it could be this thing does only that and nothing else but the possibility for a lot of abuse, spying and bugs is given. Also since current sysops claim to not have server access (and I am tempted to believe this) it must have been set up by someone who had access, not many people are left for that and one specifically was often accused of reading PMs. But then there is no proof of this so no point in pointing fingers.

[Bukkake Surprise]

We're not pointing fingers, just talking. Who was it, what happened to him, and who else can do it?

Never underestimate the NWO slime.

[2pac]

Why would I wanna be staff at trenchwars that makes no sense at all. What you smoking on Eph?

[BooBiesYaY]

Why would I wanna be staff at trenchwars that makes no sense at all. What you smoking on Eph?

i said over my dead body lol. i like my hair i dont want 1/2 grey.

[Ephemeral]

Ok, so we now have two very good examples of what happens when there are problems with one of the core processes in the zone; a broken change request process has now adversely impacted the zone twice in the period of one week.

First we had the TWL playoff decision to make changes bite us in the ass and then we had someone decide to change the pub arena to a April Fools map. I do not want to drop the discussion into one that assigns blame or discusses how good or bad these decisions were; that isn’t the point at all. I want to focus on how the change request decision making process is not working.

Some may feel that since the zone is basically a volunteer organization there is little value, or it is impossible, in do things correctly. Change management is just one of the processes that is being affected by this attitude. I don’t think it is unreasonable to think that doing things correctly is more difficult in this kind of volunteer organization, it probably is indeed the case. But let’s examine this process a bit closer.

TW has several existing tools they could use to control changes; change management isn’t a new thing nor is it rocket science. Anyone can develop simply tools and document the process of how changes should be controlled. Anyone who is around development has been exposed to various systems, tools, and procedures. But a lack of tools and understanding of change management isn’t the problem with TW; tools exist and some people clearly know how the process should work.

So why is the current status of the change request process in TW a total cluster fuck? We have multiple people making multiple changes in a vacuum and without anyone serving as a ‘check and balance’ and with incredibly bad communications. This has lead to someone making a decision about changing TWL playoff format without understanding the potential risks. Another person made a decision about changing the pub arena without communicating ANYTHING to Kyn, the guy who supposedly is responsible for and controls pub.

I assume that whomever made the April Fools map decision was thinking that they were helping; same for the TWL playoff idea. But the intent is not the problem. The problem is that people think that their intent trumps everything else, after all they are volunteers and have the best interest of the zone in mind. There justification normally also follows something like ‘it’s too hard to get a consensus, takes too much time, and/or that Kyn guy has been AFK for the last day’.

TW culture has to change from this kind of thinking to towards one where change decisions are handled better. If the ‘idea’ is to change to some holiday map then this should be discussed 2 weeks before the holiday arrives. If the ‘idea’ is to change the TWL playoff config why in the world could this not be thought through weeks/months before hand? Why make these kinds of decisions in the 11^th hour all the time? Of course there isn’t enough time to test or get buy-in from people of you are making on-the-fly decisions in real time. These aren’t some fucking impulse decisions you make about buying a candy bar at the checkout line counter; this shit can adversely hurt the zone and the community. The road to failure is paved with good intentions; having a good intentions is not enough.

So the solution is to first stop allowing multiple people from making running, real-time changes. The ONLY thing that should ever be changed on-the-fly is something that is so bad it is immediately threatening the zone. Everything else, every single good ‘idea’, needs to be vetted and justified. It should be communicated and others have a chance think it through, consider its possible impact, cost and benefits. The guys who will end up having to actual do the work are the only ones who should be estimating the scope of work; and that SOW should include what it will take to make sure it works properly. It should also include estimates on what it will take to maintain the new feature including a rough estimate on handling the inevitable exploits players will seek. If someone comes up with a million dollar idea that HAS to be implemented right away, it’s just too bad. It doesn’t matter how good an idea is if it comes with a one hour decision requirement; it gets rejected.

Ideally Dev will be able to work the change requests into logically grouped revision or releases. Or perhaps the zone decides that on the 15^th of every month will be the day that new stuff is rolled out. Doesn’t matter how it is done, just that we move away from the shit of constant running changes done in stealth mode. Everyone needs to have some discipline here, players cannot expect the zone to implement changes in real time and those making the change decisions need to communicate the ideas, get them vetted, and then get them into the queue to be prioritized and done.

And a note about prioritization. This is a key part of improving the change management process. The zone leadership, whether it be the upper staff or the Council, needs to be the one who oversees and makes the prioritization calls. It is their responsibility to ensure the changes and their priority matches the zones objectives. So if the zone ends up spending all kinds of time and resources on developing a feature like pub bucks over doing a new player training feature, we know who is responsible. They are the ones who have to meet or exceed the zone objectives and we measure their success/failure based on this. They are the ones who are responsible for balancing both new players and existing player features (IF that is what the zone’s objectives truly are).

But this is the kind of thing that really has to accompany the new staff structure (Council). Just adding an elected Council will not make much difference unless the zone also improves the way it does things (like change requests).
eph

[Shaddowknight]

Agree with at least 95% of that Eph. I am hoping the Council and the rest of staff can get ourselves straightened out.