By making optional features, it allows small groups of people to play the way they want to. I think it's a great idea. To each thier own, and you'll always be able to find servers that host games that you wil be interested in.

But that's what the game was back when it had far more players. I'm not talking about making something new, I'm talking about restoring the game to what it was. Back when the game was most popular, it wasn't interactive, so a truce mode wasn't necessary in order to appeal to other types like explorers and builders. Only when the game became interactive did it allow attackers to ascend and claim the game as the sole domain of the killer, chasing away any other type of player. And short of returning to a non-interactive version (which I'm also supporting now), the only way to restore the game is through a truce mode and PvP limitations, as just about every other game provides, so those who don't want to be savaged by bloodthirsty killers won't have to be.

Your point about not making a game that appeals to everyone would probably bring a chuckle from the guys at Zynga. The goal of their designs is to use only gameplay that appeals to a large percentage of test subjects. You can turn your nose up at their designs, as a true gamer, but they don't much care as they bank millions of $ per month. If I could restore the broader appeal of TW and somehow attract even a fraction of the millions playing Zynga games today, I'd risk losing the 100 or so who enjoy the bot-kill-fest of today's game.

TradeWars was once a game that appealed to casual players. You could play 15 minutes per day, up to an hour per day. Nobody wants to put the kind of time you guys put into this game. Seriously. This game can support a lot of different game styles, and it has over the years. I want to get back to that. Your game will remain, but I want to restore some of what the game once was and see if it still has an appeal.

You are missing the point. In my proposal, the new player protection wouldn't be indefinite. At some point, E.G. after X number of days or after the player had done X, Y, and Z, the protection would switch off. Any player can, of course, void their remaining protection if they wish by attacking someone else or doing certain other things. So it wouldn't be a "Oh well, I'm protected from everybody, I'll just build up a wonderful empire and a few weeks from now when everybody else is just ants compared to me I'll void my protection and squish squish squish! Yay, I win! Woohoo! W00t!"

One problem, of course, is the multiplayer game. Back in the old single-player days, a good player with under 1000 exp. could park in fedspace, log out, and know they were perfectly safe so long as the feds didn't tow them out for one reason or another. Nobody was going to be attacking them. The huge horrible hungry planet-nibbling monster might decide their nice planet with a L2 citadel would make a tasty snack, but nobody was going to attack this trader. Now, some other guy who's online can catch you in that one second when you just had to leave fedspace and turn your ship into so much nav haz.

Another thought... When these rules get implemented, I just know there's gonna be some fun beta test games! The rules for these games will be something like:

WARNING: A truce is strictly enforced in this game! Nobody may attack anybody else for 69105 years! But we want you to try everything you can think of to attack others anyway! There shall be no blockading of Stardock. But we want you to try your best to do so! We want photons! We want planet busters! We want nav haz! We want hundreds of dupes per IP address! We want automated trucebreaker bots! All successful truce violations must be reported to Federation HQ with all relevant details so it will never happen again!

That was not the intent of the thread, well maybe alittle

But back to the strengths or level's to keep safety in a otherwise unsafe tradeworld. Would focusing efforts on a truce mode then adding a option to keep people un-pvpable make sense? To elaborate what if you had a truce mode to meet the demand and then in the future made some kind of weighted formula for total player assets. As long as a player has less than that formula cap they are untargetable or attackable.

Winner so far, btw



MB I agree but when I think back to when I first started playing 19 years ago we didn't play at the speeds we play today. If when I was in my teens a trader had destroyed me when I was warping to stardock from terra to buy my first ship and go exploring I likely would have never looked back and continued to play MajorMud and L.O.R.D. instead.

While I don't like truces anymore than anyone else a option never hurt anyone as we can choose not to play in a truce game. Also like I said the game has changed and added new levels of enjoyment for some(scripting) and stripped away what was the standard for others(Cruncher). So while I don't necessarily like the idea of truce games I am open to options as long as they stay options.

I wish I was hearing more of this. I don't expect people on this forum to love what I'm doing, but I spend far too much time defending it. The problem is, I hear one side in this forum, but I hear a very different side in private emails and conversations, and the variety and quantity of that other opinion is far greater than what I get here in the forum. Those voices won't come here because this place is known to be hostile to such opinions. Who needs it.

I also wanted to make the point, which is really a better one, I think, in response to Master Blaster's rant against making a game that's everything to everyone. Ever hear of 4x games? It's a very common game genre that includes games like Civ. The Xs are "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate". And that's all we're talking about here. TW was once a 4x game. One of the earliest, in fact. Now it's just a 1x game. Exterminate. That's unfortunate. There are players who prefer to focus on exploration, building an empire (expand), and managing their empire (exploit). I actually consider the Killing part to be more optional than the other three. Not all games must necessarily lead to massive outbreaks of war. There really are those who are happy just to explore, build and manage an empire. These three are the constructive aspects of the game, while the fourth, extermination, is the destructive. Some people like to build stuff, others like to break it. TW should appeal to both. But there need to be ways to guarantee that they play well together, for obvious reasons. The role of the builders should not necessarily be to provide the killers with something to do.

Yes, I firmly believe that there is not enough room in this universe for me and another alien race! Not to mention most of the scripts that are on my hot keys are attack scripts:P

Ha Ha
Any vetrans blood flowing yet??

TO KAUS:
E-mail me bum, to the thread point....no comment...
I just got codes..have not yet completely setup my server, and have not played a serious game in a few months so my opinion is null.

LOL. Bring the buck down on me. Holy cow.....

What is a safe game, it's not really a game at all. The idea is to start as a lowly weakling and overcome the odds to become the big cheese. I understand building but that was all changed when the game went multiplayer. There is only one way to build a 'safe' Trade Wars 2002 game and that's to add the feature back in that allows only one player at a time to be in the game.

I would support that, in fact, that might be the perfect answer to this situation. Create a couple 'beginner games' where people can come play without fear of interaction (one player at a time) to learn building and game techniques, then when they feel they are ready, move them to a LIVE multiplayer environment.

Don't water down the multiplayer game. It just won't work.


PS, I hope you don't mind, but your last sentence is worth quoting



If you don't kill the builders, what's the point?

That feature will be in version 2.08, which should be released soon.


I don't get it either. It reminds me of the How I Met Your Mother episode where Marshal was coaching basketball and Lilly wouldn't let him yell at the kids, they didn't keep score, and everyone gets a trophy.

if that is what they want to play though, I'm not going to condem them for doing it.

This is like debating the fate of the hens with the wolves. Wolves just want dinner, but the hens might have a different viewpoint if you asked them. ;)

But yeah, I really do hope that people take advantage of the new access-limiting options. I can see a lot of really cool possibilities with that. Not just closing the game to interaction all day, but maybe having an hour of open PvP in the evening, for example, when the hens can go get a beer and leave the game to the wolves.

I'd also like to see some different end-game conditions. Maybe one of those conditions could be 'build the largest empire in X days", and it's all about building. Such a game would probably benefit from an initial truce period, after which players can focus on breaking down the opponent's empire rather than just growing their own empire. Maybe a month-long game, building for a month and a half and fighting it out for two weeks to see who emerges. Or just build start to finish and see who can grow the biggest. Why not explore some different ways to enjoy this game?

It's interesting, the single-player mode. Anyone who wants can actually do that even now. Just download a fresh copy of TWGS and don't register it. You get one game slot and, important for this discussion, one node. If one player is on, nobody else can get on. Unfortunately this also applies to remote admin facilities. I'd volunteer to set up just such a server for anyone who wants a single-player TWGS game, but my ISP doesn't like open ports. A few months ago I had port 5060 (SIP) open. Got an automated notice that they'd scanned our IP and found evidence that one of our computers was infected with a botnet virus. Talked to local tech support, he advised closing the port. Closed it, what do you know, no more botnet!

coming from myself who plays alot of different online games. this is what i would suggest. this game was great and still is great. perhaps it may have ran its course... I hope it hasn't. Although talking to other developers isn't a bad idea at all. I would suggest maybe perhaps talking to a 3rd party that could mainstream this game. Free lancer is kind of like this game. Ask for a little fee each month for players to play on it. perhaps 5 bucks.. since most games are 10+ But, you have to appeal to the gamers out there. there are alot of games out there that are exactly like tradewars. Bascially what I'm saying is you have a great products with alot of backing form back in the day. spend a few bucks market it make it great and those followers will come back. I've played this game since before starcraft (1) based back in 1997 I still enjoy the twar but, i know who to look for in a game and when I see them I know i'm dead. hahaha... back to topic.. if you want to cash in on a great product you have to spend some cash to make it happen. I know personally I would be the first in line to grab the game tradewars 2002 pc game or wii or xbox or ps3... JP it's time to expand or your wishing on getting back to appealing with gamers to how it was is so early 1990's (not a gay comment I am correct) I'm talking to you as one of the younger people here. If I was 29 like I am now I AM YOUNG and I was trying to teach someone what I know. They'd go crazy and I'd go even more crazy trying to teach them. All of them ask what are the numbers for I tell them to forget it... when you see a higher number than 100 then talk to me LOL!!!! I hope this game goes on for a much longer time than it is now. Even with the new version you are having more people leaving than returning. Remember when you said you had almost what a 500k following? Slap a name on a game and make it just like it is here with graphics... you'd be a huge success... just my opinion...

CoMeT!

Comet we've been down that path, years ago.. They completely warped the game concept and split the already small community. Now they have a pay version that loosely resembles the original.

The game has been around over 20 year's I literally cannot think of many online multiplayer games that can claim that.

It's true we started down that path. But the developer got greedy and decided they wanted the game to be "their game", not my game, and we never got to see what a graphical update of classic TW might look like. I'm still interested in many of the things we were supposed to do with that game. Tournament modes, a graphical game view, support for both community-hosted games (sandbox) and company-hosted games (tournaments), and all of the new fiction. What we got has nothing to do with what was planned for that game, or will be done with my next opportunity.

I've spent some time today chatting with the authors of a new textbook on social gaming, a pair of very experienced and successful game designers in the industry, and that represents my primary goal for the current game. I just want people who learn about this game either in text books or other media, or once a new game is out, to have a place to go to experience the game "as it was". It may not be possible to fully achieve that, but that's the goal, and it has nothing to do with trying to make money on the current version.

Another part of what I'm doing here is prototyping some things that might be part of a new game, like a graphical map, automation, etc, the kinds of things needed to take away the tediousness of the game and encourage people to open their minds to it. I have a great little laboratory here where I can explore ways to evolve the game, even if I don't want to evolve this particular game. I do want the current game to remain largely what it is. But I'm not interested in leaving TradeWars at v3.

Just happened across this thread searching for something else. Reading this makes me sad - what might have been.

A lot of good ideas in this thread for truce modes, PvE vs PvP modes, adding in conditions for victory (instead of just victory being whoever has fastest trigger finger, requirements like # of colonists, planets, territory, etc).

These are the kinds of things that would have saved the game - and not a one of them were implemented.

Instead we got a bunch of timing crap intended to break scripts (which didn't serve its intended purpose in the long run), and new bugs that screwed up combat.

Anyone know if JP plans on ever doing anything constructive with TW again? At what point can we consider TWGS abandonware, and start screwing with the code ourselves?

It's never going to rebound with the mess he left, and slowly but surely the lights are going out... you can count the number of active servers and players on your hands now.