Just another 2 cents from the peanut gallery...when I have tried explaining the basic concept of TW to friends I have to tell them it seems to be a nice mix of RPG, chess, Risk, Monopoly and the stock market! What else can one ask for in an ansi game? Ok.... Everyone roll 1D50.... [}:)]

Heh, this was an oldie but goodie, good choice hellcat. I think this is one of those threads that had the absolute most interaction with JP in the past like 4-6 years.
As to why i think it was silence who said wb if you are the the real HC, about 4 years ago a guy went by the same handle, and he was quite notorious in his day as a very good killer.
So expect to be confused by some people

Bump

This is the thread I mentioned in my other recent post about the age of modern scripting. It's an interesting read. This was a real fork in the road for TW development, and I can't help but feel I took the wrong road by leaving the game alone and letting the community decide what's fun and what's not fun. Who knows if things might be different now, but I think it's clear that nobody enjoys the way this game is played today except for the few who are masters of modern scripting.

John
What could you do to the game to control scripting.

I have had a discussions with others that a script is nothing but an intelligent macro. (alright knowing when to send that macro) All you are doing is sending keystrokes to the server. hmmm It is next to impossible to know whether a human or a script typed those keystrokes.

Look at all the more popular games... (I am not too familiar with them) We have aimbots,cashbots, etc in all other games.

The whole purpose of a computer is to make our lives easier and we have people complaining that scripting is bad because they don't have the intelligence to make their own scripts.

Welcome to the 21st Century where the luddites/flat worlders/we never landed on the moonies have a voice and unfortunately (IMHO) we listen to them.

If we listened to these kind of people we would still be hitching our horses to the hitching posts. And we wouldn't have lost all the pooper scooper jobs and buggy whip manufactures would be still be in business.

I'll read thru it. There's a lot of good scripters and "big names" here.

I don't think it's fair to say that nobody enjoys the way the game is played except master scripters.
There's a lot of people that play the game, and a lot of people that enjoy it. And most of them are
not master scripters. I would say the master scripts generally script for the sake of it, and don't
tend to enjoy the game as much. Scripters tend to become "master scripters" because they've gotten
tired of the game, but still want to stay apart of it, so they script.

For the most part, I agree with K3. Most problem cases arise when a newbie goes into a competitive
game. In a game with two good, competitive teams, the winner will be the one with the best keytime.
In a game with one good competitive team and one non-competitive team (whether because they're
new or just lazy) then the competitive team will win.

No matter what you do to the game, a competitive team will always beat a non-competitive team.
No matter what you do to the game, experienced players will be inexperienced players. It happens in
all games in all cases, that's one playing field nobody can level.

So what can be done? Create settings that focus on the problem areas so that sysops that want to
create a non-competitive game have the tools to do so. That way aggressive players either play a
different game, or have to work harder. I posted a list of those in another thread somewhere, I'll see
if I can find it.

Except in this case, 99.999% of the people are flatworlders and ludites while the remaining 0.001% sit alone thinking how great they have it. The jury's in. This game isn't fun like this. It has nothing to do with tech. It has to do with looking at what's good about scripting and what's bad about scripting and making changes to the game to limit what's bad and emphasis what's good. It can be done. The point of bringing this post back up is because I proposed several ways to address the issues known at the time, and I think they're still relevant. What I want to know is, would I have the support of this community in doing that (I really need beta testers to do it), or would I be doing it in a vacuum. In 2004, I concluded that it would be difficult to introduce these changes to a mostly hostile community, so I decided not to do it. I'm wondering if attitudes have changed.

Well how would you change it? I mean how could you make scripting less important than it is?

If you don't make scripting less important, then you don't take away the motivation. You may
make it technically more difficult, but those that crack the system will just have an impossible
to beat advantage. The trick then is making scripts less useful. How do you do that?

I have no problem with the idea that some games, not every single game, but some games
could be intended for script-free or script-reduced play. As long as the changes are optional, and
it doesn't create massive server instability, I'd be happy to beta the changes.

Back "in the day", when you started a new game, you at least had more than 30 seconds to build up your base before being defeated by these great players. You could play a game against great teams where you could do your thing for awhile, have a chance to get hooked by what the game has to offer, before going down to defeat. Losing isn't the problem. It's being faced with the reality that nothing you do will ever give you the chance to win. You say the key is making games less competative. That's the opposite of the problem. The game isn't competative. There are very few winners in any game. What makes it fun is feeling like you can compete.

This post to the hackaday.com post on TW in 2009 really sums up how the "outsiders" perceive our game. This is why nobody new comes in to play.

http://hackaday.com/2009/08/28/tradewar ... more-14070

"Tradewars 2002 is one of my best younger-days memories in gaming. Running an evil corporation, taking part in a couple tournament games with hundreds of players, bringing an intradictor cruiser loaded out with 100,000 fighters down on a well developed planet bubble, it was good times.

Nowadays it’s virtually unplayable. Get into any TW2002 game that has banged more then 3 days ago and try to get started, you’ll run almost immediately into some script kiddy who’s already got stardock (the only place you can buy ships) blocked and blows you to hell before you can get out of your original merchant cruiser. This kills the playerbase and the end-result is lack of competition and fun.

Even if they don’t have stardock blocked (some games disallow this), there is nothing stopping them from dropping defensive or offensive fighters everywhere in large numbers, and the end-result is exactly the same. The second you run into a stack of these he’s already been informed and his script has him sitting in your sector blowing you to hell inside of half a second.

Game Over, it’s not really fun anymore."

This isn't a problem of ALL GAMES. This is a problem of TradeWars.

I had the same problem in 1994. More than a few times I would run into games that were
built up and get killed by a lot of offensive enemy figs.

I had the same problem in WOW when I tried to play, I got plastered. I had the same problem
in frozen bubble online, the guy next to me was really good. I had the same problem when
nexuiz, which I love, until I got to where I could beat the competition. I had to learn how to do
fancy laser jumps, and how to get really good at aiming. I had the problem with counterstrike...
man, I'd get in, get blown away by some guy w/ a sniper rifle, maybe last 20 seconds before
"*click* terrorists win!"

It happens in a lot of games. The whole of the online gaming community has this problem,
each has dealt with it in their own ways. Some have been successful, some have not been.

So I ask, how could you deal with this successfully here? I think it's going to be harder than
it sounds, but I definitely think it's a worthwhile idea.

The bottom line is, you can't take away scripting. But you guys know this game inside and out and you know what the really overpowering tactics are and where progress could be made in returning some sanity to the game. And the way to do that is by making changes to gameplay that address the problems caused by the scripts, not the scripts themselves. The easiest example is putting a movement delay on a planet. How many powerful scripts would be crippled by a planetary move rate of, say, 10 seconds? Do we really need planets zipping around the galaxy? Of course, this also assumes that games would have ANY delays, which they often do not, and that in itself breaks the game. Players today are impatient. You want to do in 2 days what it once took 2 months to achieve. That's great for established players who want to play a blitz game, but it's horrible for anyone else. The game needs pacing. And it needs to be playable in small chunks of time, like it used to be. You need to be able to play an hour today, then come back in tomorrow without realizing that some other corp now owns 99% of the galaxy, controls the MSLs, and is using you and your corpmates as hood ornaments on their fleet of ISSs.

Planet delays would allow for nearly unlimited gridding in the games I play - might as well give up on grid defense for the most part. I also don't really play much except on the weekends and that is one of the main reasons I play solo unlims. The type of game you are looking at is a low turns (< 1k) game which is already available. There are building games out (ICE9) that emphasize the long term game.

And, no I don't want to do in 2 days what it once took 2 months - I want to do it in 1 day and get on with the attacks. If it wasn't for writing scripts, I would have been done with TW a very long time ago. .

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

A planet delay of 10 seconds would make planets pointless. Nobody would pgrid because invasions would be too easy. But it wouldn't
cripple powerful scripts, it would just cripple the current non-scripter players. I would just use a tpad ship dropper, or an xport-torper.
If I bought 100 torper ships, put them in high traffic areas surrounded by figs, I'd have plenty of time to xport in, torp, xport out.

Suddenly that's where a planet delay becomes a real liability. Nobody can callsave in and pick up the gridder. They're going to die. So
now ppl don't grid, ppl don't move, and you get a stalemate. That's not very fun. At the same time, a planet move delay makes lv5+
invasions impossible. If I have an enemy with a bunch of lv6 planets in sector, I'm going to pgrid in. Once I've got a planet in there, I
can start invading. But citkilla... well, would be wayyy too powerful against something like that. That actually makes some scripts
even more powerful.

But if you're logging out and leaving your stuff to sit, there's nothing in the current game that can help you. Scripts or no, you can't
defend squat if you're offline. To that end, 20000 sectors just isn't enough. You'd need millions of sectors.

Prome is right tho, in an unlim a planet delay would basically be suicide. You'd never stop an unlim gridder... ever.

Planets would be worthless with a delay? We're talking about two completely different games. I'm talking about a game that was at one time played by almost 100,000 active players, where planets were about building a base and generating revenue, and you're talking about a game where a planet is the biggest and best ship in the game. I want to make the planet "useless" in the way you're describing, because the game you're playing isn't fun. A game where the planet has the "useless" role that it once had, whether or not you like it, was clearly more fun to a LOT more people. That's the dilemma here. I have studied this game over its 25 year lifetime and what it is today is not the best that it has been. But convincing a group of modern players to open their minds to the possibilities is probably never going to happen. That's a shame, because you guys are major experts on this game. I just don't think your motivated to make a game fun, you're motivated to make a game that you personally like, and those are very different goals.

There was a "golden age" of this game when a wide range of people enjoyed playing it. It offered a wide range of tactics and roles, and was one of the first true sandbox games where you could choose how you wanted to play. You could be an explorer, a builder, an attacker, a leader, or whatever. The game today does not appeal to a wide range of player types. It appeals to hyper-aggressive players. You can talk about all of these different tactics and how changing one makes another more powerful, but all I'm doing is pointing to a snapshot in time of the game where the game was played a certain way, and saying if that is used as a guide, and changes are made so that the game plays like that again, it would be a far more interesting game. Maybe not to you and others here today (all 100 of you), but to a much larger audience. That's what I'd like to do. I think I'll probably have to go it alone, though, because I'm still getting far more "that's impossible" from this community.

There is an option that may work concerning planet delays. Only initiate the planet delay after a planet jump has been made. Also, a cit entry delay could be added to hinder cit killers. Say a 2 second wait before you can land again once you lift.