Time for some pub changes

[Dierienow]

If you are so concerned about the fun of this game then please where are your suggestions for sharks. Obviously campers like Rab fucking hate X's.. they're fun and interrupt his Nazi-like hold on the flagroom gained through having at least 1337 camp hours and 1 shark on his freq. His entire strategy consists of a) getting to flag room first b) teaming with other try hards who clearly give too much of a fuck about pub that they're trying to remove any counter to their strategy, and then c) tell everyone gg like you have even a crumb of skill on this game beyond camping in spider.

I have never had a bad experience with x frankly. They've annoyed be but never made be quit, and often make me laugh because the play styles they open up. Meanwhile nobody complains about sharks because it is the sole ship that lets these try hards camp the flag.

- QQ more newbies.

[IxaDor]

Forgot to post this earlier but I had an idea where there are 4 small lights in corners of the FR, where if you have them capped (maybe need flag capped also?) they act like truesight allowing you to see stealthed boyos in the FR. I think it's a good idea because by 'nerfing' an ability it adds a dynamic to the game.. now you might have to work with your team to have them grab one of the switches/lights so you can go in to grab the flag. Would stop the X from constantly rushing for the flag and the enemy terr and his team need to move around the base can't just camp the safe spots. Unique solution that would probably look/feel weird but throwing it out there.

Am out of time, I will reply to your post later today/night Qan, thanks for getting back to me though bud!

@Dierenow Honestly it would be better to just give weasal cloak/radar while removing rep/rocket, that alone will make taking a weasal to grab flag more challenging/risky. Stealth while yes, completely hides the weasal, is very taxing so using it creates its own risk. This will also change the role of the weasal, since with it's current setup, it is all over the place in that regards. Plus, I'd like to see people actually using xradar on ships that have it. It's become a "forgotten" ability in terrier/javelins, which by ignoring it completely, changes the way those ships perform. As you know, Terr has to devote pricesless energy to watch for x's which adds another layer of complexity in playing it. More so for the jav as to power it's xradar, it drains it's energy until it's turned off, which can prevent firing a bomb, crucial thrusting or decreased bullet spray. Just changing the weasal back to the way it was, would in turn, change how several ships are to be used which in turn, creates more play styles, risk and of course, rewards.

I think also for regarding the 4 lights, it would be too much for Qan to code in, since simple things like tuitorial graphics took several months, just for graphics because Qan is only coder. I think we should be trying to think of easy solutions that don't require much from our sole developer and will enhance pub gaming. I think we are getting there, especially with the consideration of changing weasal. Cheers!

-IxaDor

[Dierienow]

Forgot to post this earlier but I had an idea where there are 4 small lights in corners of the FR, where if you have them capped (maybe need flag capped also?) they act like truesight allowing you to see stealthed boyos in the FR. I think it's a good idea because by 'nerfing' an ability it adds a dynamic to the game.. now you might have to work with your team to have them grab one of the switches/lights so you can go in to grab the flag. Would stop the X from constantly rushing for the flag and the enemy terr and his team need to move around the base can't just camp the safe spots. Unique solution that would probably look/feel weird but throwing it out there.

[Rab]

Back to your suggestions, I'm not sure I understand them. Is the logic behind not warping players in order to fool them into not knowing when a new round's begun? Or is it necessitated by the 2nd suggestion, because it would be quite strange to warp players immediately after a win?

The flow seems quite awkward, one game starting immediately after another. I think this would be confusing to players. Some kind of break seems necessary, just in terms of "readability." Die broke down the psychology pretty well. Enough time to revel in victory/agonize in defeat, but not so much that you're able to question whether or not to play. The easier choice is to continue, so you continue. Let's experiment with 30 second intermissions and see if it changes anything. Can increase/decrease as needed.

When you've fought for control of a base, it's yours, you earnt it, you should get to keep it untill someone takes it from you.

The rounds mess that up in 2 main ways:

- In between rounds, there's no action. People float around wasting time. There's no incentive for them to continue the battle during that time, and they know they'll get a warp back in anyway. So you've saved up your pennies and got this fancy new base and nobody gives a shit anymore. "lol that guy's still fighting over a flag like it's 1997", they jest. I see how some people might view that as a useful break, but I view it as an annoying interruption, unless everyone needs a piss and a drink every 10 minutes it's bound to be annoying other people too.

- When a round starts, your entire enemy team is warped into your base. It's full on trolling. Get out of my base. It's not "all your base", it's my fucking base, get out. ?cheater entire enemy team!

[qan]

Yeah you're mistaken. It isn't a difficult journey into the flagroom, it's pretty easy.
The travel distance is only from the tiny holes in the flagroom to the flag.
Diagram: https://imgur.com/a/cLmzoio

Wasn't trying to suggest it's difficult to get into the flagroom itself. Just saying there was a fair bit of testing done testing how far a Weasel can rush in with afterburner after entering any FR hole without getting quite close to death. (Current settings were based around that.) However, with a rep and rocket, they can enter with full energy and rocket to the flag, then rep away any mines; or, if there are no mines, rocket, then rep on the flag and wait out the turnover timer.

SpookedOne I think is monitoring this thread, because he put in an unexpected commit yesterday with an idea to counter this. It's currently live. Regardless of the arena size, Weasels now have a 5 second flag turnover timer, so that they'll need to hold it for a full 5 seconds before they can break the enemy hold.

Will look at the rep and rocket. Both together are quite cheap. With only one or the other, taking the flag wouldn't be so easy. Or, as ixa suggested, starting with stealth. That might be a more interesting arrangement and would solve the problem fairly well, especially as stealth is high-drain. It would also be giving something to the weasel in exchange for taking away rocket and rep.

Back in the day there weren't rounds at all. The game just continued. So the timing of when people left was not aligned with the end of a round. So as small numbers of people joined and left, a fairly stable population was maintained. Causing the leavers to stack up causes a failcascade, as everyone thinks "oh everyone's leaving" and then they leave too. So my point is, fundamentally it's having rounds of pub which causes this, so the solution should be to remove rounds?

Here's a blast from the past. Did a little digging to find this commit. Think we were still using CVS at the time:

@415  	13 years	qan	Untested first hack at flag time mode addition.

So around 2005 is when we first saw the flag timer go in. You might be slightly incredulous to hear this one, but do you know what this was put in as a response to? A notable decline of basing in pub. Not joking! The promise of 200 points extra per kill was somehow not enough to get players to fight over the flag, especially as they were slammed with lev bombs from all sides. I'm not going to pretend I'm not proud of the fact that after we began using the timer, we saw a big increase in basing, which continued, and continued, and continued, even to the present day, when you can see huge basing games on the weekends. Of anything I've done in TW it's the single thing I'm most proud of, and the first thing I'd name if anyone asked out of what I've done do I feel has had the most positive impact on the zone.

The only reason I go through this long-winded explanation is to point out for other forum-goers that you surely must be employing that trademark dry British humor when you're suggesting that having rounds is the root cause of the issue of having people quit all at once. Yes, it's the root cause, but it's also probably the root cause of why anyone's basing at all. Without a goal, people were becoming disinterested in 2005. In 2005! When the bar was really quite low, and we were still one of the best shows in town for massively multiplayer action gaming. Since then, game development has surpassed itself time and time again. People aren't going to fight for extra points in 2018. If ever there were a baby to throw out... (End of needless rant.)

Back to your suggestions, I'm not sure I understand them. Is the logic behind not warping players in order to fool them into not knowing when a new round's begun? Or is it necessitated by the 2nd suggestion, because it would be quite strange to warp players immediately after a win?

The flow seems quite awkward, one game starting immediately after another. I think this would be confusing to players. Some kind of break seems necessary, just in terms of "readability." Die broke down the psychology pretty well. Enough time to revel in victory/agonize in defeat, but not so much that you're able to question whether or not to play. The easier choice is to continue, so you continue. Let's experiment with 30 second intermissions and see if it changes anything. Can increase/decrease as needed.

[qan]

Is there a way to code it so things like that appear on the side of the screen near say "Multi"/"Cloak" is located. Like a "Buy Stealth - "command how" ie. type :twpubot:!buy stealth ?

There's a way, but the effort required to do it vs the payoff is basically beyond the scope of possibility. It took us about 9 months to get the new tutorial graphics in. I'm the only truly active coder, and Wirah as the only really active graphics guy is mostly tied up with the social media/newsletter updates + webdev. By the way, he puts out a useful update almost every week... subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't already: www.trenchwars.com/newsletter

Not much to say on the "lolnope" "purepub" fiasco but maybe instead of tying those to currency, you could tie them in as a team reward?

Might be interesting. I can't imagine many winning teams would vote to enable levs, though. If you're winning, it's not good to have them around, as you're stationary and defending the FR. But, as you say, let's keep thinking outside the box. What we have is far from perfect and could use a lot more brainstorming.

Map size. I flat out believe it should be large 24/7. I am wondering though if we can meet in the middle. Are you able to adjust the player size for map spawn? So instead of it being 15-20 (whatever it is now), make it so if its 6 or more it goes to large?

This is what I thought it was (roughly speaking) but apparently somewhere when CFGs were switched around for various special events, it was reset. To be clear, this is just for the medium size, which opens up mid/reduces spawning potential in mid. That should basically always be active now, except in very small games. Hopefully will cut down on some of the spawn issues. Sorry for that one.

Oh yea and what about bringing back lancasters spread shot 1 kill? If memory serves me right, it took out much more energy from the ship as current spread does now. So spamming it wasn't possible and often left you vulnerable for a good chunk of time after it but if it connected with a player, it had a great payoff. Is it possible to do some adjustments to the lanc? I liked how the lanc was either close range or long range (spread). Today's lanc is gaged primarily towards close range, doesn't feel like a multi role fighter that it used to.

They were interesting when they had L3. But maybe a bit too luck-based, or situation-based. (Wait for someone around a corner and cheese them with spread.) They also were slower then, I believe. Lanc is certainly more close-range than before with L2 vs L3. But if you look at the spider game of many players, those slow, low-damage shots are still being carefully aimed. You can (and should) do the same with Lanc, I think. The shots aren't 1-shot kills, but at 1040 damage, it'll kill many players (most of whom are firing when they reach max energy), and spiders/Terr spam/Jav bombs hitting close by should finish them off after that if they're still alive. It's arguably an OP ship that is extremely underutilized and needlessly maligned, though it's hard-countered by the Spider, meaning that vs most serious basing lineups it's crap. I used to play it decently well in pubbase when I played daily. It's definitely my second favorite ship in terms of enjoyment of play, after Shark. Also, few people know this, but it has the lowest afterburner cost of any ship by a decent margin, meaning that while its thrust leaves plenty to be desired, you can make up for it via afterburners and position yourself. Focusing on positioning with afterburner and precision aiming will really make it stand out as how it's meant to be played, as in the hands of people such as TheSerpentMage. I think it's in a good position, and is currently considered one of the "untouchable" ships, along with WB, Jav, Spider, Terr, and Shark. Might be fun to do a throwback one weekend to L3 Lanc, though.

This sounds crazy but what if you made it so players have to purchase leviathan ammo dispensers? So say for 200K you could buy your team 40 levi bombs? LOL.. Could do that for say weasal too, have it so players can purchase a some sort of cloaking transmitter for 200K that gives all weasals on your freq the ability to stealth/cloak for 10 minutes?

These wouldn't be technically possible due to some limitations to how our bots work. Basically bots are simulated players. So they aren't able to selectively limit, say, who can fire on a team. Would need ASSS to be able to do this kind of stuff.

[qan]

Shield
Should be fixed; now works as intended, lasting 60 seconds. But at 30 seconds remaining, will reduce all damage by half, at 15 seconds remaining, will reduce all damage by 25%, etc.

2cool
Made a special edit just for you on that one, Rab, heh.

KoT Leader
Now recommends using !npkill to opt out of the KoT in order to buy.

[Tone]

New:

Retroaction & The Protector & TuNe!

[Dierienow]

Yeah I think the time between rounds sometimes seems useless and causes disinterest as there is no longer an objective and it feels pointless. During this time, and the 3 seconds that I spend dead (adds up), are when I'm most at risk of questioning why I am even playing this game. Would be nice to have something to do during the break, or if it was a little shorter. Maybe 30s between rounds or something.. not 1 second... if it's one second there is no time to feel anger if you lost or pride if you won, just on to the next map.

[IxaDor]

Yeah you're mistaken. It isn't a difficult journey into the flagroom, it's pretty easy.
The travel distance is only from the tiny holes in the flagroom to the flag.
Diagram: https://imgur.com/a/cLmzoio

- Any mines on the flag can be taken care of with the rep, so the shark can't counter the weasel, and weasel can probably cause the shark to TK by repping their mines.
- Players can't easily keep track of the weasel using radar becaue the weasel can rocket to quickly drastically change their position, a player who takes their eyes off the radar for half a second to fight anyone else will lose track of the weasel.
- The distance the weasel has to travel is very safe and extremely short.

I still think bringing back the bigger weasel is to the way to go, but if I had to suggest something else, it would be:
- Remove the repel + the rocket

I agree with you on removing rep and rockets from the weasal. I think it should only have cloak and stealth just like it used to have. Jav and Terr are responsible for weasal detection with use of xradar and as it stands now, it's worthless to expend energy on those abilities. Also, the weasal is a stealth killer, having reps and rockets makes no sense for that ship. Pretty sure back in the day it never had those abilities, not sure why it does now. Cheers.


-IxaDor

[Rab]

Leaving after a big round
This one's really difficult. I've definitely felt this myself. After a long round, 20+ min, you're often just not ready to dive into another one. Especially long, intense basing matches can be intense and require a lot of concentration in order to win (or lose, even after all that effort). Then after this, you have only 1:30 to take a rest, get something to eat/drink, use the bathroom, and so on before it begins again. But a longer break between can also lose players. (Time between rounds might still be something to look at. Longer break between longer rounds?) A key Terr leaving is another big reason behind a mass exodus. And people talk so much crap to Terrs that rarely will anyone who doesn't have several years of Terr experience hop in to replace them.

Streaks are an interesting possibility. Will add that one to a todo list. Not too tough to do. Should you earn it regardless of if you win or lose?

Back in the day there weren't rounds at all. The game just continued. So the timing of when people left was not aligned with the end of a round. So as small numbers of people joined and left, a fairly stable population was maintained. Causing the leavers to stack up causes a failcascade, as everyone thinks "oh everyone's leaving" and then they leave too. So my point is, fundamentally it's having rounds of pub which causes this, so the solution should be to remove rounds?

I think a low-impact way of doing that is:
- don't warp at the start of rounds, ever.
- reduce the time between rounds to a very low number, e.g. 1 second.

[Rab]

Small vs Large Weasel
We've gone back and forth on this one for years. The small weasel can be quite obnoxious; but, it's also quite unique, and some people really enjoy playing it. For the most part it has significant disadvantages vs the old small weasel. It may not seem so, but a lot of thought's been put into where its settings currently lie. It's been carefully timed to make it quite difficult to simply punch through a hole and rush the flag, for example, at least for a defending team that's paying attention. The rocket is much shorter than it once was, and the afterburner cost is quite high, meaning a weasel has trouble covering enough ground to make it to the flag without using up a lot of energy. Meanwhile, it doesn't start with stealth, and must buy stealth if it wishes to be totally hidden, meaning that most players can simply watch radar to spot a weasel. Even if purchased, stealth and cloak together are fairly high-drain and make for a difficult journey into the flagroom if not backed up by others. For the most part, it's able to take the flag only when it's done skillfully and/or against a team that's just not paying attention. If I'm mistaken in this, please let me know. For example, if they're able to rush a bit too cheaply, rather than simply reverting again to another solution with its own problems, we have the capability to tweak settings that may be a more subtle change, and compromise. The heavy-handed approach often taken in the past, especially by those inexperienced with settings work, I think has often thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

Yeah you're mistaken. It isn't a difficult journey into the flagroom, it's pretty easy.
The travel distance is only from the tiny holes in the flagroom to the flag.
Diagram: https://imgur.com/a/cLmzoio

- Any mines on the flag can be taken care of with the rep, so the shark can't counter the weasel, and weasel can probably cause the shark to TK by repping their mines.
- Players can't easily keep track of the weasel using radar becaue the weasel can rocket to quickly drastically change their position, a player who takes their eyes off the radar for half a second to fight anyone else will lose track of the weasel. There are often more than one weasel.
- The distance the weasel has to travel is very safe and extremely short.

I still think bringing back the bigger weasel is to the way to go, but if I had to suggest something else, it would be:
- Remove the repel + the rocket

[IxaDor]

Thought of another possibility to handle Levis. Rather than PurePub/lolnope wars, we could have Levi bombing ability toggled on or off for a certain price. Buyable only every X minutes. You essentially would have permanent purepub until the cost is paid to revert it, and then someone would need to pay again. This would be a simple settings change, where the cost of firing a bomb would be increased beyond the energy pool of a Levi. Would also solve the problem of having a lot of pub-freq Levis. But, it would certainly favor experienced, rich players; new players would not have the option of flipping the switch on in order to play Levi, and this might not feel all that fair, especially as the cost would probably need to be fairly high, and could just be reverted again by someone with more money soon after.

This sounds crazy but what if you made it so players have to purchase leviathan ammo dispensers? So say for 200K you could buy your team 40 levi bombs? LOL.. Could do that for say weasal too, have it so players can purchase a some sort of cloaking transmitter for 200K that gives all weasals on your freq the ability to stealth/cloak for 10 minutes? I know, probably not an option and kind of teetering on the edge of Distension but you never know! Just thought that would be cool to see a graphic of some cool looking station spawn outside base that powers up your team or gives them things like levi bombs lol. See ya!

Ha to add to that, you could allow players to purchase basically big ass nukes to bomb the towers/dispensers for something like 1000K, then have it so the bombed facility becomes a black hole for (x)time that if players go near it respawns them and during the time nothing can be purchased as it would just go into the black hole.. Edit: Hell make that 10,000K, so only the big big spenders can essentially turn it into purepub but for much longer. $

[IxaDor]

The issue with pub is, as always, satisfying everyone (or, rather, compromising in a way that satisfies the largest number of people). Most of what we have now is a series of long and complicated compromises that very narrowly navigate a middle ground.


Small vs Large Weasel
We've gone back and forth on this one for years. The small weasel can be quite obnoxious; but, it's also quite unique, and some people really enjoy playing it. For the most part it has significant disadvantages vs the old small weasel. It may not seem so, but a lot of thought's been put into where its settings currently lie. It's been carefully timed to make it quite difficult to simply punch through a hole and rush the flag, for example, at least for a defending team that's paying attention. The rocket is much shorter than it once was, and the afterburner cost is quite high, meaning a weasel has trouble covering enough ground to make it to the flag without using up a lot of energy. Meanwhile, it doesn't start with stealth, and must buy stealth if it wishes to be totally hidden, meaning that most players can simply watch radar to spot a weasel. Even if purchased, stealth and cloak together are fairly high-drain and make for a difficult journey into the flagroom if not backed up by others. For the most part, it's able to take the flag only when it's done skillfully and/or against a team that's just not paying attention. If I'm mistaken in this, please let me know. For example, if they're able to rush a bit too cheaply, rather than simply reverting again to another solution with its own problems, we have the capability to tweak settings that may be a more subtle change, and compromise. The heavy-handed approach often taken in the past, especially by those inexperienced with settings work, I think has often thrown out the baby with the bathwater.


lolnope
This one's still controversial, and not sure how well it fits into the pub puzzle. It's been a feature request for quite a while, ever since PurePub's existed, and mirrors the concept that underlies the ability to buy PurePub, which is that those who have played pub successfully and for a length of time earn money, which can then be exchanged for the ability to control certain elements of gameplay.

The idea is that for a relatively small price, people can buy PurePub/SortaPurePub for a short time (10 min), which is often enough to get Levis to change ship. If, however, someone is feeling really annoyed by the PurePub buy and wish to continue playing as before, they can override it by spending some ridiculous sum of money. The problem with this logic is that the sum is not so ridiculous. It was raised from $100K to $150K, but nonetheless, many experienced players are able to spend this without batting an eye, so that rather than being something exceptional, lolnope is bought fairly often.

It's worth noting that PurePub can be bought again fairly soon after an !lolnope cancel, and the PP buyer receives a partial refund (or full refund in the case of SortaPurePub). There are also a number of tools available for proactively countering Levis (though not those on your own team), including cheap anti and free roof !deploy. Also, everyone can now see Levi bombs on radar, the radar's zoomed out further to see the bombs coming, they have a drastically reduced energy pool that makes hunting with spiders/lancs far more effective, they no longer have green sharing on their freq, and they have reduced recharge and reduced bomb speed.

I'll see what increasing the cost of lolnope does to how frequently it's used. Would like to see if we can still find a way to include it in pub, though, as it's been requested by many people.


Shield
The shield may not have any meaningful role in pub at present. I think it may also be re-prized regularly, meaning it's always at 90-100%, which is near invincibility. Will need to think of a tweak, or just remove it.


Leaving after a big round
This one's really difficult. I've definitely felt this myself. After a long round, 20+ min, you're often just not ready to dive into another one. Especially long, intense basing matches can be intense and require a lot of concentration in order to win (or lose, even after all that effort). Then after this, you have only 1:30 to take a rest, get something to eat/drink, use the bathroom, and so on before it begins again. But a longer break between can also lose players. (Time between rounds might still be something to look at. Longer break between longer rounds?) A key Terr leaving is another big reason behind a mass exodus. And people talk so much crap to Terrs that rarely will anyone who doesn't have several years of Terr experience hop in to replace them.

Streaks are an interesting possibility. Will add that one to a todo list. Not too tough to do. Should you earn it regardless of if you win or lose?


Low-pop Basewarp
As mentioned, you can toggle this off with !warp. (There are plans to separate round-start warp and low-pop warp but it's not a serious priority.)

The low-pop spawns were put in around 5 years ago. A bit before this time, I was playing pub almost every night for several hours during off-hours, around 1-5AM EST. Even that long ago, we were experiencing massive problems with pub fading out and dying: 0 players for several hours at a time. One player would hop in a ship and float around spawn, and another player might hop in as well. But rarely would they go to base. If they happened to be two fighter ships, they might duel in spawn. If one was a jav, it could go into base and hope the fighter followed, or rocketjav around spawn. Usually people got bored and would quit.

Without low-pop spawn, any time one team had a terr and the other didn't, the base game would basically fall apart, and soon after that, pub would die out. I watched it happen over and over for months at a time. Then K A N E added low-pop spawn.

The change was immediate and drastic. Yes, spawning became much more prevalent (it still exists in normal spawn, by the way). But at the cost of some spawn deaths, suddenly pub stood a much better chance of remaining active with few players, no Terrs, etc. And by keeping those few players actively engaged, when more players did eventually come around, a base game could form.

These days low-pop spawn works a little differently. It has two stages, very low-pop and normal, which also spawns to many locations in lower base, and reduces the chance of being spawn killed pretty significatly. It also takes into consideration whether a team has a terr or not, and doesn't count Levis as active teammates.

If a decent group of people think it's worth experimenting without low-pop spawn as an option, we could give it a shot. But I don't anticipate a good result.

Qan, thanks for your valuable time in posting your detailed explanation on your thought process concerning public. I will reply to a few things you had mentioned, firstly, regarding the weasal, I am a big fan of the small weasal myself. I didn't know you could purchase stealth, interesting. Is there a way to code it so things like that appear on the side of the screen near say "Multi"/"Cloak" is located. Like a "Buy Stealth - "command how" ie. type :twpubot:!buy stealth ? That goes for other ships too, like Spider's "Anti-Warp" if that is even still purchasable and any other ship upgrades relevant to their corresponding ship. I wish there was an easy button press that allowed us to purchase upgrades without having to make macro's to spam bot too, I get lost in 2018 with all the stuff we can buy as this was never available in my days as a pubber from 2001-2006, I think it's awesome but it's also off putting and confusing to pick up.

Not much to say on the "lolnope" "purepub" fiasco but maybe instead of tying those to currency, you could tie them in as a team reward? Maybe freq 1 wants to bring in levs to the mix, they win a round and can vote? I don't know. Since high amounts of pubbux is abundant for most pubbers, I am trying to think outside the box of how they can use those rewards without over doing it. There is that goal and ball, might be able to work something in with that?

Map size. I flat out believe it should be large 24/7. I am wondering though if we can meet in the middle. Are you able to adjust the player size for map spawn? So instead of it being 15-20 (whatever it is now), make it so if its 6 or more it goes to large? I think having it big all the time is better honestly but if it could be tweaked to changing earlier that could work too. Anything over 6 seems to be problematic since that's about how many spawn points there are outside flagroom. Once it goes over that, spawning becomes an issue. Yes, spawns can happen outside base too, I am aware of that, but it's far far less and usually if you are paying attention, you have plenty of room to move, where outside flagroom, you might hit the wall or be corned down an ear. I think testing is worth it regardless.

Oh yea and what about bringing back lancasters spread shot 1 kill? If memory serves me right, it took out much more energy from the ship as current spread does now. So spamming it wasn't possible and often left you vulnerable for a good chunk of time after it but if it connected with a player, it had a great payoff. Is it possible to do some adjustments to the lanc? I liked how the lanc was either close range or long range (spread). Today's lanc is gaged primarily towards close range, doesn't feel like a multi role fighter that it used to. I'd love to see some love put towards that ship though I won't lie, in all my early years of pubbing, it was my ship and will always hold a special place in my heart. I just don't enjoy playing in it much if at all as it is currently so hoping to get some attention on it to maybe revitalize it some.

Anyways, really appreciate all you do Qan. You are a rockstar! Keep up the hard work and have a safe, fun memorial day weekend with you and yours. Cheers!

-IxaDor

[qan]

Thought of another possibility to handle Levis. Rather than PurePub/lolnope wars, we could have Levi bombing ability toggled on or off for a certain price. Buyable only every X minutes. You essentially would have permanent purepub until the cost is paid to revert it, and then someone would need to pay again. This would be a simple settings change, where the cost of firing a bomb would be increased beyond the energy pool of a Levi. Would also solve the problem of having a lot of pub-freq Levis. But, it would certainly favor experienced, rich players; new players would not have the option of flipping the switch on in order to play Levi, and this might not feel all that fair, especially as the cost would probably need to be fairly high, and could just be reverted again by someone with more money soon after.