Trench Wars Pub & Zone REVITALIZATION - Need your feedback

[SpookedOne]

I agree with Qan that this is infeasible, and really at this point, the game needs a rebirth not a revitalization.

That being said, there are a few issues that are compounding the pains of being understaffed and stagnating.

• Ticketing System. This is the major reason I didn't return to dev a few months ago Qan. It is an absolute imperative that you keep a ticketing system of work needed and completed (especially since you're on other side of the planet to most of us). I will help you port tickets from twcore.org and configure gitlab if needed.
• Test/Mock Framework. The other main issue is the distrust and politics from upper management involved with dev. Devs with less than SMod privileges are ineffective. I'm not advocating for escalating all new devs to SMod, but it is the job of upperstaff to give them the tools to succeed. The only other option, outside of letting devs test on the live system, is to create test harnesses with a mocking framework for them to develop against.
• Call to Action. I never see any periodic zoners with a call-to-action for staff/dev volunteers. How do you guys expect to get new volunteers involved with the zone if you never ask?

In regards to the original proposal, it seems that small, incremental changes are easiest to swallow, but the scale of things suggested in this thread seem impractical with current staff numbers and will likely to burn out the only botdev you have left.

[San Tokie]

How can people donate today?

[Wormhole Surfer]

There may come a point in all zones when population becomes so low that the only way to maintain regular activity is to schedule a weekly event. This may be a friday night, every week, when someone hosts 3 hours of events, or it may be every sunday afternoon when a weekly duel tournament is hosted. To increase activity even further, a prize could be awarded like a custom Subspace T-Shirt, Poster, or Beer Mug,etc. I know there are some of us who would be willing to pay for the prizes. Personally, my first priority would be to Extreme Games, but I don't know if they could get their shit together for this.

[an_angry_koala]

forums.trenchwars.org/showthread.php?46457-DSB-Star-Destroyer-vs-Millenium-Falcon

[qan]

How can people donate today?

You can donate here: http://trenchwars.org/donations/

Also, I recently bumped up the amount of in-game money you can receive as a thank-you gift by quite a bit.

Currently we have something like $1.2K as of March. That's 1 year of server costs. Will probably need to do a fund-raising drive soon. We could look at more serious advertising, such as YT ads on gaming channels. The impression cost is a little high but it guarantees ad interaction (only pays if they watch awhile or click).

[qan]

• Ticketing System. This is the major reason I didn't return to dev a few months ago Qan. It is an absolute imperative that you keep a ticketing system of work needed and completed (especially since you're on other side of the planet to most of us). I will help you port tickets from twcore.org and configure gitlab if needed.

Would be great to have something going again, yeah. We'd planned this when we migrated to gitlab awhile ago. But due to the repo being private (it's quite a pain to have a mixed public/private repo on gitlab, as we have with twcore.org, and some parts we need to keep sensitive). I guess basically we could create a dummy repo and run the ticketing system on that. Ideally we could access the API from in-game and have a simple system to report bugs. That's sort of a stretch goal though. If you want to set something up to do this, let me know. Unfortunately we don't have access to TWCore.org unless we can get ahold of Maverick, so it might be difficult to port out the old tickets. Most are dated anyhow. But that's OK.

• Test/Mock Framework. The other main issue is the distrust and politics from upper management involved with dev. Devs with less than SMod privileges are ineffective. I'm not advocating for escalating all new devs to SMod, but it is the job of upperstaff to give them the tools to succeed. The only other option, outside of letting devs test on the live system, is to create test harnesses with a mocking framework for them to develop against.

If someone wants to create a test framework, that'd be interesting and useful. Testing live also works just fine for the scale that we operate on. As far as access goes, it's not a very big problem now. More, lack of skilled developers. The trick with bot coding on TW is that there are not a whole lot of small tasks like there once were. It's more complicated than ever before. People used to start small with event module coding. But events are not really very popular anymore, so there's not much motivation to learn to make them. Meanwhile, most people who already know TWCore are mostly now working full-time as devs. Oftentimes, the last thing they want to do is dev in their spare time. The number of people left to do the work is pretty small, such as people like me who don't dev as a job and so find it enjoyable/relaxing/satisfying as a hobby, but are still skilled enough to be able to do it. If you're interested as well, let's do it! Access is no problem. Things are just more secure than in the past, requires a little more setup.

• Call to Action. I never see any periodic zoners with a call-to-action for staff/dev volunteers. How do you guys expect to get new volunteers involved with the zone if you never ask?

Fair point. I'll set up a periodic zoner. I deal with a lot of stuff trying to keep the zone going generally, not just dev, as well as work full-time, and it's easy to forget to do a lot of things.

[forwards]

forums.trenchwars.org/showthread.php?46457-DSB-Star-Destroyer-vs-Millenium-Falcon

whatisthis

[roxxkatt]

You may be beginning to see why I'm a little frustrated that pretty much nobody seems willing to lift a finger to help out on, say, the Steam relaunch, but still expect this kind of stuff done tomorrow. It's demoralizing.

its actually far worse than you expect.
prior to the steam launch i got trello boards up, wrote custom biller/directory/server server open source projects up that were fully functional and able to handle both subgame and asss, got all the ssc netops on board to switch away from priits biller, put the message up on the forums of every single zone, and got the message out to the people like you that actually produce results.

not one single person did a goddamn thing, and then kryn botched the steam launch

not even one

[roxxkatt]

and at this point its basically a matter of public fact that you are basically the only person keeping trench wars running, and have been for a large amount of months, and anyone that says otherwise is a fucking clown

[San Tokie]

I think raising the bonus for switching teams to even out the frequencies from $750 to $1500 would improve Pub

[Tone]

This is neat that someone wrote this article with subtitles such as "why?" and everything so that therefore by comparison i dont have to feel as bad for any longer posts that i might be suffering from Neurosis

Medium & High Priced Items in the store instead of just the medium priced Baseterr. example: Lancaster buying a life with 1550 energy so he can have fun letting warbirds hit him with full energy .

Weird Wacky Wild Wednesdays (WWWW) is when the sys op puts on some bizarre novelty setting every wednesday, that is different every time its done. Example: Red Terrier Bullets last 3 minutes long instead of 10 secondish

Promotional Videos ( See my latest thread in this Forum ))

[Vehicle]

Honestly, I think you guys should remove the !fruit thing from the pub system. It may sound puritanical but I really don't think we need to introduce a slot machine to pub to encourage proactively playing the game.

[Tone]

Honestly, I think you guys should remove the !fruit thing from the pub system. It may sound puritanical but I really don't think we need to introduce a slot machine to pub to encourage proactively playing the game.

Thats a very bizarre weird reply, the ! Fruit wont cause less playing or people addicted to typing out bets instead of playing, and besides people have a macro of the the max or their facorite bit so they hit a function key and it does it, they can play 5 times in seconds. You are completely wrong about this and things need to be ADDED to SSCU TrenchWars, no substraction. Fucking, what in the mother fucking such are you smoking? shit on a shingle laced with PCP and RAID? ! Fruit being a significant or heavy distraction from game play so remove it to get players to play?? PLEASE EVERYONE, SOMEONE, Tell me what this guy mainlined and smoked !!!! O My Loooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrdd

[forwards]

ahgreed

[Tone]

I went in pub and Kinky Girl asked me for Fruit Money which i gave, 24 thousand, which she said was all gone a few seconds later ;; then other people were all talking about fruit, making me look like a jackass being wrong with my previous reply. I cant believe people are carried away with fruit.