Suggestions for making TWD alive again

[Turban]

i have talked several times to "respectable, and knowledgeable" players of TWL and TWD, and have heard them out. most of it can actually be found on these subforums and TWL subforums. some of the players are willing to help out, and some are not going to do jack shit and are all talk. you can take claushouse (TWDT) and mythril (TWEL) as examples of good players who can and want to get shit done, and have done so while being players.

staff has always been underrepresented when it comes to the competitive parts of this zone, but we are not in that bad of a shape. we have almost the same amount of event players in within our ranks, and several public players as well. some are great, some may lack the experience but make up for it by being useful and active, and some are beyond useless.

[Fork]

Plus if any discussions/ meetings had to take place... it would prob be better on forums rather than in the game. If all staff put there opinions/ideas on the topics (mentioned by the syst-op) people would have time to think carefully about it (better ideas/ opinions would be said). Syst-ops would have time to read all the replies before coming to a decision based on what all of staff (perhaps public intervention too) have said.

[Exalt]

as for the current TWL operators, i am fully confident in their abilities as some of them have prior TWL operator experience and have shown to be willing to help with this year in various different projects. i have personally trained the remaining ones who were lacking in experience, and they have been doing a good job. it's not like they are running the league; TWL operators (aside from the head position) are more so supportive roles. nevertheless, there isn't that many players that have this get shit done attitude and actually want to help with the running of leagues.

What I'm saying is less about them wanting to help, and more about them having the capability to help. Do they actively speak and communicate with the competitive veterans of the zone? Do they play in those leagues? Do they have any relevant ideas outside of what you tell them to do? Are they even capable of having those ideas?

When you have your 3 hour meetings with staff, the large majority don't play leagues. How would they have any good input or say in what should be fixed/changed/whatever in the competitive aspect of the game, when all they know how to do is host .?go Pictionary?

The same can be said when you talk about public. I don't play it and don't enjoy it. I don't know shit about what is good for pub and what isn't. The majority of my experience with pub is from 10+ years ago. I wouldn't be a productive member of the "fix public" meeting if I were staff, because I don't have a clue about what pure pubbers are thinking or want. That being said, how the hell can most of staff know the opposite? You, Ricko and Shadowmere are probably the only real staffers who play leagues. Maybe I missed some people, but the majority either don't play or haven't played in years.

So yeah, the helpers can be nice, but staff meetings full of helpers and people who are unqualified to give ideas doesn't exactly inspire much confidence. I'll agree that public has to be fixed first I guess, but I honestly don't think staff has ever had a big enough representation of the competitive players. It has never had that, and it probably never will with the people in charge.

If you are about "GETTING SHIT DONE" then staff would stop hiring the kiss-ass "nice" players and start hiring people who will tell it like it is. Leaders don't kiss ass, which is mostly the reason people get hired. They also don't hire players like J-B-Inc. I thought I'd like to put that one out there. Whoever hired him was either an amazing troll or really doesn't understand the mindset of the regular players.

[Turban]

@ fork: fixing what is broken is far more important than adding more layers to the cake. it takes priority, and once those have been done we can consider adding things that are good for the public arena and do not break the gameplay of it. i would want to add something to make the new players feel "less abused" in a sense, but have no idea how to implement it properly. a good tutorial is one step to that direction, but there needs to be more i'm afraid.

[Ephemeral]

Pat,
How the fuck does ?buy help pub when it so heavily favors experienced players? The very logic of it slants the playing field in favor of players who have spent more time in the arena and have built up a large amounts of money. New players already start at a distinct disadvantage in that they don’t know how to fly, shot, etc.

So explain to us how having more experienced players buying stronger ships and attributes does not make pub even more one-sided? If anything new players ought to be able to fly stronger ships and then the experienced players.

What fucking fun is it to run around and own new players? How does owning new players help the zone in any way at all? I guess if you are a selfish fuck and don’t care then you don’t care about new players. But even that kind of selfish perspective is a fail since without at least some new players constantly joining the zone attrition will eventually turn TW into another EG or HZ zone.

And yes, I play pub.
Eph

[Exalt]

People who dont play pub and have no intentions of playing pub shoud be in charge of 'fixing' pub. uh-huh.

Maybe the problem is that the pool of people who meet your requirements is so shallow? I mean thats the entire reason you need to 'fix' pub, right? To refill that pool?

I never said people who don't play pub should be the ones fixing it. That would be counter-productive. The same goes for people who don't play leagues. How can they have any idea what the mindset of competitive players are if they've never been competitive in this game whatsoever? The same goes for Pub, although the large majority of players in staff are pure pubbers or pure basers. So I guess everyone can fuck things up equally, although I'd rather have SOMEONE with experience in leagues outside of like 3 people total in staff.

[Fork]

- bringing back the old public settings and ship settings; however, bullet damage will stay unaffected
- pure public weekends will make a return
- simple leviathan protection for flag rooms making leviathan a high risk-reward ship. it would be more fun to play, and more of a challenge.
- removing !buy feature for the time being. we can still figure out additional ways to "spend" the cash in non-harmful ways.
- return of ?buy feature; in safety zones only
- coming up with a solution to fix the new round warping exploit
- setting !warp off by default; players who want to base would have to toggle it on
- compiling a new installer which would include all the public maps and public lvz files to make downloads "instant" for new players
- finish the tutorial and set up a new player area in public
- starting our marketing plan (team assembled, discussion/meeting will happen soon)
- retraining of staff members to focus more on team killers and how to handle calls etc

Personally i would like the to the following changes to pub to make people play pub (getting people to play pub is the number 1 problem that needs fixing :P)- NOTE: they are not all my ideas (it shouldn't be about about who thought about what idea).

-Tutorial arena

-Unpredictable rewards at the end of the round (the same rewards happening every 3 minutes in a contributory factor to people getting bored. Unpredictable rewards are exciting because people don't know what to expect)

-Jackpot idea (not saying anymore) is the perfect example of an entertaining method that will do the above + get people out of spec

-New players being stronger/ harder to kill for the first hour or so of play

-An adaptation of wormhole surfers map- make this look more like the original pub map.

-Remove the buy options for things that heavily affect basing (epidemic etc)

-Old Levs back but make it much harder for them to penetrate flagroom (better flagroom wall protection)- people liked the LT games.

-You play 15 minutes of pub- u get a random set amount of spacebux (once per day)/ rewards increase if you log on the next day (miss a day and rewards reset to basic)

-INCENTIVE TO PLAY DURING INACTIVE TIMES- if turban was correct- im shocked and annoyed this wasn't mentioned. Why is it acceptable to allow 0 players playing for hours and not do a thing about it. ?Possible ways rewards for spacebux or w/e is increased.

-More things to spend our spacebux on to make spacebux worth collecting.


Ok done for now (run out of time).

[Pat Minotaur]

, maybe staff should stop hiring Pure Pubbers all the damn time (or total newbies who are just as clueless about leagues), and hire some more TWL players or something. Hire some active TWD players.

People who dont play pub and have no intentions of playing pub shoud be in charge of 'fixing' pub. uh-huh.

Maybe the problem is that the pool of people who meet your requirements is so shallow? I mean thats the entire reason you need to 'fix' pub, right? To refill that pool?

[Turban]

i will not be doing things by myself, fuck that. it is going to be a team effort.

TWDT, TWD and TWL will take priority after other issues of greater importance have been been fixed and implemented. we have open positions for staff in every department, and players themselves also have to step up and show that they are willing to help. we can't magically make people appear out of thin air, players themselves need to be proactive.

as for the current TWL operators, i am fully confident in their abilities as some of them have prior TWL operator experience and have shown to be willing to help with this year in various different projects. i have personally trained the remaining ones who were lacking in experience, and they have been doing a good job. it's not like they are running the league; TWL operators (aside from the head position) are more so supportive roles. nevertheless, there isn't that many players that have this get shit done attitude and actually want to help with the running of leagues.

as stated, TWD and TWL still need a real purpose. TWDT was a success this year, but also requires more work to increase its exposure to the newer players.

@ public: public has to be an even playfield. there are too many variables that break the game and make that arena a joke; such as the !buy feature to win base games with the abuse of epidemic, super and shield. i would want to have more healthy features to that arena, such as real-time leaderboards and monthly winners/top players.

[Pat Minotaur]

Removing ?buy from pub in 2014 = more new players for TWL?

Ha!

Good luck with that.

Thanks for punishing the pubbers for your inability to keep the parts of the game you like up and alive.

Changing pub in order to get these mythical hoardes of new players to NOT like pub and have to join TWL to get anything out of the game is so stupid it just might work. But I doubt it.

[Exalt]

i will be more heavily involved when we have the resources and time available to focus on the competitive parts of this zone. there is no reason to have too many irons in the fire. we have to tackle the current issues one at a time for us to be the most effective.

Okay, so here's an idea: Instead of you having to do all the work when staff finally fixes pub, maybe staff should stop hiring Pure Pubbers all the damn time (or total newbies who are just as clueless about leagues), and hire some more TWL players or something. Hire some active TWD players. Get some veterans in there that might be able to help you with it.

Cuz I'll be honest, if it's only you doing any work for leagues Turban, I don't see it working out no matter how much effort and time you put into it. I also don't see how 90% of this list http://trenchwars.org/index.php?v=staff have a damn clue about TWD or TWL. Be real here. How many of those players are even remotely considered knowledgeable of leagues by the veterans?

I mean, even the TWL Ops have players that don't play TWL. I mean, seriously????

[Turban]

i will be more heavily involved when we have the resources and time available to focus on the competitive parts of this zone. there is no reason to have too many irons in the fire. we have to tackle the current issues one at a time for us to be the most effective.

i have some plans for TWD and TWL, although i'm only "responsible" for the latter one, but they will have to wait for a better time. we can't start marketing the game when we have an incomplete, and broken, public arena.

[Turban]

as i have said in the past, and will continue to say in the future, TWD and TWL are still in a need of restructuring and we have to revaluate both leagues. however, our public map is by far the most important part of this zone. it is the key for our success, as that is where all the new players will go to when they start playing the game, and while some may stay, others will eventually start exploring the other parts of the zone. these players will likely end up checking out events and elimination arena, depending on their interests. naturally having public squads and competitive awareness in the public would help, but that will require the players efforts as well.

it is of utmost importance to fix the public arena.

[Pat Minotaur]

Nobody that plays this game for any long period of time stays in public as their main "arena" of choice. Nobody.

Speak for yourself.

TWL populations are shit so go fuck with pub?

Pub isn't dead. There are good games in pub every day. There are loads of people who only play pub and don't give a fuck about squads or teamchats or any of that other shit.

[Exalt]

While I don't really care about public enough to even give much of a say there, I'd say that if that's what the large majority of pubbers want, then let them have it. It can't be that hard of a fix to revert things back.

I still don't really see how that addresses the competitive side of the game, although bringing back elim may help tremendously in having players stay active for longer periods of time while waiting for TWD games. Please split the maps into elim and jav elim though. I don't care how active or inactive regular elim becomes. I'll never sit around waiting for a random wb elim to happen when 20 javs have the majority vote 99% of the time. Javduel was split from elim originally because WBs owned the majority of vote always. Javs complained. Then they complained when Javduel was inactive while elim was always active, so it was merged again. Now it's always javelim all the time, and that is really, really boring. If you're going to do it, make sure to split it again. At least test it.

I guess we will see what happens with the league-side of things whenever those things are mentioned, but it doesn't sound like you guys had much to say in 3 hours outside of the Pub ideas. Pub has gotten all the changes, and it frankly is NOT the reason this game is around still. I don't know why Pub has always gotten so much attention for so long, when legitimate proof is there to show why this game skyrocketed in activity and player levels at various times. TWL always adds population every season, which is a standard thing. TWD being implemented in 2003 showed such a drastic uptake in population that it should be a huge indicator for you guys, but apparently Public is still the major concern that it always has been. I've never figured out why. Nobody that plays this game for any long period of time stays in public as their main "arena" of choice. Nobody.

Edit: I take that back. Apparently, there is a very small minority of players like Pat Minotaur that will play public forever. Either way, pandering to them, while ignoring the large majority of players who enjoy the competitive aspect of the game far more (along with things like squads) seems like a bad idea. It's been done over and over and over again with no results. I'm not sure why this is always the case.

Edit #2: Oh right, yes I am sure why this is always the case. Public is always the main focus of Pubbers, and who are the large majority of players on staff? Turban, you're one of the few that isn't a pure-pubber or just a baser. Seriously, think about the large majority of staff members in this game's history, and what do they almost always have in common? They liked public and/or base more than anything else, if they even played the game at all.