Changes to Public Arena coming June 10th

[roxxkatt]

luckily door state can be set without a bot, and flag rewards are part of the game, and items dont matter then eh

[wicket666]

Why do people care about levi and lts so much, AIM AND FIRE lt gone gg!

[Wazzaaa.nl]

Newbs love levi's
the LTKings squad is what got me into playing twd in the first place
with the LT team effort it's easier for new players to get kills than 1 vs 1 (wb vs wb)
if it wasn't for LTKings I prob wouldn't be playing twd these days
youll prob get a LT freq with maybe 6-7 players
and LT Hunter freq with 6-7 players trying to kill each other
with the good LT's you'll have a hard time which makes you
spend longer time in pub than a 3 minute round (lot's of players leave after winning 1 round)
most of the hunters won't leave pub before the high bounty LT is dead

so with the amount of new players joining
i would highly recommend giving back this ship with a short learning curve (powerful levi)
instead of pushing them into becoming good in the warbird/javelin or other harder ships with a longer learning curve
public should be all kind of various ships with total different shipsettings
if people don't like the powerful levi and cloakers they should go to base
with the more experienced players

[Primary]

Greetings Trench Wars,

As many of us will agree, the Public arena is due for a bit of an overhaul. There have been many changes over the years, and our goal is to restore some of the most popular aspects of the arena to try and make it as fun a place to play for our veterans as well as the newbs that are just starting out in our zone.

These are not the only changes we plan to make, but we have to start somewhere. We'll of course continue to take the community's opinion into consideration as we move forward with changes, and evaluate their impact on Public and continue to tweak them if necessary.

Starting June 10th the following changes will occur in Pub:

• Removal of current asteroid graphics. We will return to 2d & smaller asteroids.
• The weasel will be returned to its larger size. It gains stealth in addition to cloak.
• The levi will be able to green x-radar. X-radar for the levi will drain energy similar to how it drains while used by a jav. The levi will also be able to !buy x-radar for $200 pubbux.
• Removal of following !buys: Shields, Epidemic, Baseterr, Roofturret
• !Buy for all ships will be restricted to the safety zone only.

We acknowledge staff has not always been good at communicating these types of changes to our players, so we are trying to break that cycle and keep everyone well informed of what our plans are to improve the arena. As someone who plays pub exclusively, I want nothing but the best for it and am glad to see at least some changes will be moving forward. We're never going to have complete consensus on what should or shouldn't be changed in Pub, but I'm hopeful we can at least get a productive dialog to follow this announcement of the changes. Thanks!

Why are any of these changes being decided by staff who majority of the time is speccing in pub anyways? Why were the players not given the option to vote on what they would like since they y'know play the game?

[Frightful]

How retarded can you get? You want pure basing stick to ?go base, this is pub it doesn't HAVE to be pure basing, idiots like you are the reason why there are no LT squads.

Bring back !buy superlev and allow more damage.

Simple as that.

Gotta love when 14 year old fake black people try to insult you on the internet. The zone is better without LT squads.

Funny thing is, on any given day, there are 20-30 people basing in pub and 3 people LTing. Without those basers, LTs literally would have nothing to shoot at. LTs are leeches. They don't produce anything of value. Just like you.

[evil Broccoli]

Why afraid to do major changes, The Weasel: nobody likes it, nobody plays the game cause it is there, its annoying since ´97 (much like the leviterr but thats a part of our culture) so why not make it a part of the basing game, i dunno the L2 bomb is unused, and a bricking ship could be fun (more like a tank) and ok give it short term cloak (high energy depletition) so it can deploy its brick....... i dont know, something to mix it up.

NO ONE WILL MISS THE CLOAKERS

[bandcampgirl]

+1 NO ONE would miss cloakers

sharks gotta be able to buy reps out of safe that would be BS

[Wormhole Surfer]

I want to see Lev have no repels, no portals, no guns and no rockets. Also, I feel that lev should have the BombSafety setting configured to 1 so that if any ship is too close to the lev, the lev can not fire a bomb. In exchange for giving Lev those settings, just make sure it always starts with L3 bombs (hell, even throw in a powerball so it can get L4 bombs) and feel free to increase the bomb prox radius a little just for shits and giggles. Either way, I want to go back to the old days when I could sit on top of a lev and that bastard lev couldn't kill me or escape me without warping. $$$

Yes, those settings I just described were the old original lev settings, and believe it or not, people still used that nerfed lev and the zone still thrived. Just my 1 cent.

[Spock!]

Why afraid to do major changes, The Weasel: nobody likes it, nobody plays the game cause it is there, its annoying since ´97
NO ONE WILL MISS THE CLOAKERS

I WILL MISS THE CLOAKERS. There goes your argument, it is invalid.

[bandcampgirl]

I WILL MISS THE CLOAKERS. There goes your argument, it is invalid.

But no one would misss you if you leave!!

[roxxkatt]

simmer down bandcampsteve

[2pac]

Gotta love when 14 year old fake black people try to insult you on the internet. The zone is better without LT squads.

Funny thing is, on any given day, there are 20-30 people basing in pub and 3 people LTing. Without those basers, LTs literally would have nothing to shoot at. LTs are leeches. They don't produce anything of value. Just like you.

Stick to go basing, you don't even play pub nor have the skills to kill an LT. Superlev is the way to go, once its in effect i'll bomb you back to the stoneages.

[Rion.]

Could we get some reasoning behind these weasel changes? I think that these modifications make the ship less fun to play both as and against.

I know I'm going to get trashed for defending a ship a lot of people hate, but I find it the most fun to pub with and I think you're actually proposing to ruin two of the three things that make the ship a great addition to the roster: The small size and the lack of stealth. The third (untouched?) feature is the boost-and-shoot mechanic.

The small weasel brings a completely unique playstyle to the game. The size lends itself perfectly to a ship tailored to hitting and running, since you can weave in and out of the base walls, making exciting escapes or taking shortcuts that are only afforded to the weasel. It adds new depth to the ship as it feels really gratifying to bail out of a chase with a pixel-perfect maneuver through a wall gap.

That said, as much as I love the small ship, possibly even worse than making it big again is giving the ship stealth back. Firstly, giving stealth back would remove the necessity of teamplay. Sneaky weasels rely on their teammates to distract players enough from checking their radar so that they can get close enough to use their slow bullets to get a kill.

Far more important than this however is that the lack of stealth is what grants other players counterplay to the weasel. This is critical to making the ship fun to play against. As it stands, if players have good radar awareness then you can't sneak up on them. With both stealth and cloak, ships like the warbird have absolutely no counterplay to the weasel. This is fundamentally what makes people hate the ship - the feeling of helplessness. If the weasel gets stealth back, ships like the warbird will sometimes just die to the weasel. No counterplay, no "damn, I need to check my radar more!", nothing you can do. Sometimes you just die to a weasel, them's the breaks. That's just super bad design. Contrast that to the smug smirk of satisfaction that crosses people's faces when they radar snipe an approaching cloaked weasel at the moment.

The third feature is that weasels have to use the (again, mostly unique) boost-and-shoot mechanic to get much done. Their standard bullets are slow to the point of uslessness, but since you can shoot while boosting, you get yet another interesting feature to the ship. While it wasn't mentioned that this will be changed, basically the only reason this technique is a viable one to use is because the small ship size makes it slightly less suicidally reckless to charge at people. And you do have to charge at people, because if people are watching the radar, you can't get close enough to use your terribly slow bullets.

All of these features are tied closely and changing one screws up the other.

These are my many words for internet spaceships. I implore you to leave the weasel alone.

[forwards]

simmer down bandcampsteve

bandcampcheese

[roxxkatt]

3clevar5me