TWD design change

[Wazzaaa.nl]

most of the new players don't even know twd excists,
they don't even know there is a forum!
newbies get ignored and trashtalked on in pub by the older players
they don't rly have conversation going on with the older players
only ppl like fork sometimes promote twd and talk with them with instructions and stuff
we need more players to act like him
maybe also put twd website for promoting in the green msg's

i heard staff contacts new players and tell them about tw
however ive seen so many new players that don't even know there are more arena's, twd or a forum
we need to focus on this

[Zeebu]

a huge overhaul of the twdt system would be more helpful

[Turban]

forcing captains to add two players who have been on TWD rosters for less than a year (combined time) per game could do the trick for TWDT. that's a simple suggestion to get more new players involved in the league, although staff would have to do some alias checking to make sure shit doesn't get abused. i'd still be fine with that.

but that's kind of irrelevant to this topic.

[Demonic]

forcing captains to add two players who have been on TWD rosters for less than a year (combined time) per game could do the trick for TWDT. that's a simple suggestion to get more new players involved in the league, although staff would have to do some alias checking to make sure shit doesn't get abused. i'd still be fine with that.

but that's kind of irrelevant to this topic.

I wouldn't say its irrelevant, if nothing else happens except twdt gets brought back and revamped, possibly even as suggested above, then something has been achieved that keeps people interested, as I said, I had no particular goal in mind beyond stating twd is a concern, and a possible solution which may work which may not. What I do hate is when people suggests something is wrong, but doesn't propose anything to fix it that's at least possible.

[Turban]

great. just great. this shit decided to not save my edit attempt. here's what was missing from my previous post.

"these kind of talks are slightly irrelevant to this topic. while i do think that TWDT should serve as a gateway to TWD, those kind of discussions deserve a new thread. this thread should excusively be used to discuss possible changes to TWD and talk about the pros & cons of changes that those changes might cause."

if you actually want ideas or solutions to the current problems, i can help you out. you can even check some of our suggestions that we've done in the past. it doesn't take a genius to figure out which ones are good for the zone and which could potentially harm our population. unfortunately i don't have any real power to make changes happen, it has always been that way, so it would be up to you or someone else to actually do something about the current situation. there might also be countless solutions to our many problems and mine certainly aren't the best ones. if someone could lend an ear to me, we could probably come up with something great. but once again, that would be a fruitless effort if staff decides to take their sweet time again.

filter out the shit suggestions, take a look at the good ones and work your way up from there. improve them and see if the pros outweight the cons. once we have done that, those changes should happen promptly. no more of this usual snail's pace activity from staff.

[kthx]

I know this is off topic but a few things.

1. TW moving to ASSS means we are going to have a new server that isn't connected to SSCU and therefore not obligated to answer to the subspace council I am assuming?

2. If thats the case, and the other zone owners refuse to merge, what is to stop us from being gigantic assholes for the good of the game and basically adding their zones more popular arenas and leagues and adding them to TrenchWars anyways, then promoting the fact that they can come over here and play the same shit but with more players and activity.

3. I would be willing to be the spokesperson for that and be the asshole who promotes it if someone is willing to move over the zones.

4. Time to be bold as fuck here.

[PapaRaazi]

Theres nothing fucking wrong with the way the twd is, nothing wrong with the way twl is, there was nothing wrong with pub until pub bux entered the picture along with all the stupid shit u buy with it.

All the changes you guys have made recently has only led to the zone dying faster

Biggest mistakes made so far:
- When the first roster cap was implemented all it did was turn semi active players into completely non active players
- Pub bux has killed all interest in pubbing for most people i know
- Making the most retarded decisions on who to give staff powers and <ZH> positions (if you let wiibimbo in theres something wrong with you)

i don't even remember other changes there were so many, but staffs decision making has been so fuckin terrible it makes me think you're just trying to kill the zone to be free of your responsibility or something.

There is nothing wrong with this game, The game just lacks advertising, you guys claim to be doing your best with the $ but i dont think anybody has ever seen a "click here to pew pew" ad anywhere on the fuckin internet.

This is the generation of indie games, got millions of people playing shit like goat simulator and flappy bird. Keep this game simple stop fucking with it. Instead, take all the fucking money and pay for ad space on a site people actually use. Imagine this game being advertised on facebook or youtube, we'd be set. Or hell notify the world that theres a spaceship deathmatch going down and the last man standing gets $1000, bet that'll get people interested. I realize that ideas completely out there but guess what, the most successful people in life are fuckin insane ex) guy who owns virgin

Anyways what im getting at is this, why make changes like this? is this gonna somehow get us more players? Do you think setting a fucking roster limit, adding pub bux, and having a million <zh>'s is gonna somehow gonna make any difference for people who have never even heard of this game?



TLR

Stop fucking with the game, keep it simple stupid.

Stop spending the money one penny at a time, paying youtube like 5000$ for ad time is a million times better than paying 15$ a week to some british hipster coffee site or w.e the fuck u've been using it on.

This zone is a dying hospital patient who needs a defibrillator not a god damn intervention.

[PapaRaazi]

4. Time to be bold as fuck here.

This.

[roxxkatt]

There is nothing wrong with this game, The game just lacks advertising, you guys claim to be doing your best with the $ but i dont think anybody has ever seen a "click here to pew pew" ad anywhere on the fuckin internet.

in case u missed it

[Crescent Seal]

- Making the most retarded decisions on who to give staff powers and <ZH> positions (if you let wiibimbo in theres something wrong with you)

i saw lasenza <zh> yesterday. is that a joke? LOL...yeah go ahead and make the biggest trashtalking douchebag a staff member and further separate staff from the public.

[kthx]

does it really surprise you that a guy acting like a girl ended up on staff.

[RoDNeY]

allow everyone to double squad
example:

AoS
Primary Squad - Crimson
Secondary Squad - Revenge

You stay squadjoined to your primary squad, and you register with your TWD account/password for your secondary squad and bot retains that, you get challenges for both squads when challenged, we all pew pew and have a fun time, pew pew

endless twd and squadding possibilities, people will play with their friends and then secondary new friends, unless they create 2 mirrored squads in which case theyre gay and are the reason twd sux
and if your primary squad is facing your secondary squad just recode some bot commands to !add rodney:squad or in a bd, !add rodney:ship:squad
only needed if you are battling your secondary
regards,

[but...why...per...]

Double squadding will never work. Not only would it be a bitch to code, there would be too many cases of a conflict of interest. Secondary squads would become feeder squads for the Primary squad. The whole system would be open to abuse hence why the rule was invented.

A roster cap whilst unpopular, is now there out of necessity, a 50 man roster would be no more active than a 30 man roster with the population we have now. If large squads are allowed, it just means less squads to play against and therefore less competition. If your squad can not be active with 25-30 players, then the problem is not the roster cap it is the players.

Twd has seen a dip in activity but the problem stems from a lack of player activity mostly due to lack of motivation, there is very little to play for at the moment, TWL has just gone on for far too long. I can not even remember the last time the TWD ladder was reset? October?

Our problems do not require elaborate solutions, most of what is in place works. Reset the ladder and have squads wanting to chase the #1 spot again, hell even have a tournament for the top 4 squads held 1 weekend, 2 months after the ladder resets. The winning squads could get a trophy on their squad home page or something.

[Turban]

here's a list of changes that i would like twd staff to consider in the future. i've written most of these things before, but perhaps it's time to refresh your memories. as always, if you happen to disagree with something feel free to comment with facts included.

roster limits in twd aren't a necessity, but rather a hindrance to the players and squads. we have already lost way too many players because of the current roster limits and making them even stricter would cause even more activity problems for the zone, combined with a high chance of losing more players. you have to realize that those inactive players actually generate a lot of games that would have otherwise never happened. there is also a reason why TWL and TWD have separate rosters. if you want to compete in a league and won't get any play time on your squad, then you better change squads as you don't earn medals by benching anymore. there are several inactive people don't even care about TWL anymore, they simply want to log in once in a while to have fun and play with their friends. why should we deny this? i believe this is actually one of the many reasons why there has been a drop in activity in the recent years, although another reason would be the lack of good captains and the burned the bridge that used to link public, elim, duel and twd. anyways, i've lost way too many friends because of the roster limits and i don't want that shit to happen ever again. thank you in advance.

we need to reset the TWD ladders for the off season to officially start. this should be done on May 5th after the last match of the TWL season. once the off season begins, we should look into hosting different types of tournaments for the new and old players. it should all be done in good spirits, of course, there isn't a need for public cash rewards. all we need is for them to be properly coordinated, hosted and advertised.

i could be wrong on this one: i haven't seen much new talent in warbird leagues for years. that could be because i haven't been an active warbird player for over 10 years, but i think i would've noticed if we had more new warbirds competing at a higher level. nevertheless, we've actually seen a lot of new players in javelin with some of them participating and doing well in a TWLJ season. now, i quickly skimmed through the top 100 players in public that aren't on a squad and surprisingly around 35-40% of them either used 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1600x900 or 1680x1050 resolutions. that's a pretty high percentile of players if you ask me, although it's not the most accurate sample pool. i don't have the time at the moment to go through more players than that. either way, this is the reason it is worth testing a new resolution limit. once the trial ends staff should compile the statistics of the last two weeks and post them on the forums for us to discuss. it should be rather interesting to see how many players actually used a higher resolution and see how many those players were new to TWD.imo, there's no point to immediately shoot a change down without even testing it. i really doubt there is an increase in activity or players participating with this change, but you can never know for sure.

however, we should keep the main arena (TWDD) with a resolution limit at least during the TWL season/qualifiers or after the trial has ended regardless of the results. you have to remember that while TWD is closely tied with TWL and with simple logic should have the same settings as TWL to be the ideal training grounds for the league, it's also meant to be a casual place for new players to get some squad experience. now, if they do get addicted into TWDD and actually want to compete in TWL then they'll simply have to get used to playing on a lower resolution. no point to force them into playing on a resolution if they only want to play for fun. although, this brings me to the question: why do we not have a bot in TWDD3? it's too much effort to get one there, people rather just default to the first and adjust their resolution to the current limits. we should look into advertising and encouraging new players to use the alternative arena after this test. after all, a lot of people are just too lazy to do anything by themselves.

once staff has the time (aka other things been fixed), we could look into adding new features for squads to unlock by being active in a division. i would love to have the option to release a custom home arena in TWJD for my squad after winning X amount of games or additional captain slots. remember, it would have to be the default map layout. you can use your own custom tiles and add simple image(s) to the open areas of the map, such as listing your top 5 active players in javelin or adding your squad name somewhere in the outer parts of the arena. these maps should be kept as professional as possible and would require approval from twd staff before adding them to the game. we could even host tournaments with prizes for the top performing teams with similar things. changes like this have unlimited potential as long as you don't add things that create an imbalance in the competition like additional deaths for players.

we could even try adding an achievement system to twd. this could get new and old players addicted to to playing the game again. there are people love to unlock things like this and showcase their achievements to the world. these could be various things, like get over 18 kills in a JD/DD match, win 50 games, play in 100 different matches, have a killing spree greater than X> etc. simple addition that could be fun if done right. with this we would have a reason to finally start improving trenchwars.org/TWPD site with the addition of more statistics and information about the player(s).

ultimately, we don't even need that many changes for TWD. it's already nearly perfect. this is why staff shouldn't focus too much on this league, it only requires small tweaks and simple monitoring to make sure things don't go out of control. encourage players to start squads and things will work out. maybe.

i would rather see your effort go into advertising the game, improving and fixing the public map and promoting events, scheduling them during the off hours of the game to get more people online. you can also try hosting mini events in the public arena (rabbit or something) with small prizes to players, like an event of their choice (host could provide a list from them to pick) or something similar.

that's all for now. these were mostly repeats from my previous posts. hopefully it's readable.

tl;dr for soupero

• remove roster limits from twd
• add unlockable perks that squads can obtain by being active and competing in different leagues. we could even reward the squads for winning monthly tournaments that could be to further improve your squad page, home arena or something else
• achievements? maybe
• post results of the twdd resolution limit increase after trial has ended
• add bots to the arenas without a resolution limit in twdd, currently there is only one in the main one which should have a resolution limit. people are dumb, encourage them to use the other arena as well
• reset twd ladder after twld finals
• twd is almost perfect. it doesn't need any major changes, just simple tweaking. start focusing on other things.

[Demonic]

I know this is off topic but a few things.

1. TW moving to ASSS means we are going to have a new server that isn't connected to SSCU and therefore not obligated to answer to the subspace council I am assuming?

2. If thats the case, and the other zone owners refuse to merge, what is to stop us from being gigantic assholes for the good of the game and basically adding their zones more popular arenas and leagues and adding them to TrenchWars anyways, then promoting the fact that they can come over here and play the same shit but with more players and activity.

3. I would be willing to be the spokesperson for that and be the asshole who promotes it if someone is willing to move over the zones.

4. Time to be bold as fuck here.

1. Correct - Myself/Stick and Kryn have basically stepped away mostly from the SSCU TW zone (ill still help staff wise but priority is the AS3 server). The biller is probably a few weeks away. Once a biller is up, we then can get an AS3 zone up properly (thanks to the ddos we are further along with zone then expected) then basically we switch their, which has some + and some -. Not being part of SSC means biller wise we make the decisions, but your chats will be available only to other zones on the biller. Of course if other zones decide they want to come across to the biller as well, then no biggie.

2. I'd rather not be a gigantic asshole lol really not in my nature to try to shit all over the other zones, tho I appreciate their are plenty of others who wouldn't mind.

3. lets get it running before we do anything

4. aye!

-- So why the discussions about twd/twdt etc as we had 50mil of those before? Well maybe because switching to AS3 is a clean sweep, including module programming etc. A lot more features are available (you guys saw perhaps 5% of whats possible during the temp server period). Their are modules out there to change colours (so in theory mvp could have a diff colour name etc during fights), which opens up new possibilities. Anyways, turb happy to chat when u got time, but im not online huge amounts as im trying to sort out a lot of the background elements.