Plarep

I've been using hollow explosions, 2x-sized bullets/shraps, and prox squares for 10 years now. Some other people have also asked about, used, or modified them over the years: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9bm_gs5YcFxYUs0MWpMYlRNVHM/view

i must be misunderstanding you, or you are misunderstanding how shraps work in this zone. i added the second part because it's not always clear that "closer to the bomb = more damage, further from the bomb = less damage"

If I have to guess, the original SVS settings were designed to mask/reduce the effect of high latency and low bandwidth from when everyone used 9600, hence SVS settings have low thrust (sensitive to latency) and low rate of fire (sensitive to bandwidth). Even now, with everyone on much better connections, it frequently happens that bullets barely hit on someone's screen but barely miss on someone else's, or for someone to ghost when they hit/miss the corner of a wall. If direct bombs did full active shrap damage, there'd be a huge difference between a direct bomb doing 750 + 190*8 = 2270 damage (instant death) and a barely not direct bomb doing 740 damage. At that point you might as well just give bombs random damage. It's true that no player fires a bomb in open space with the intent of dealing damage with shraps; they only fire bombs for shraps inside boxes, and then only if they cannot/will not fire directly at the enemy (i.e. they have no angle or they don't want to go inside the box with them). On the other hand, players consciously dodge shraps all the time. Bombs have big enough prox that you often can't avoid getting hit by them, but they're often slow enough that you have a range of spots to skim them. Since shraps come out at the 8 corners, you just skim them anywhere else to avoid taking an extra 190 damage (which is pretty noticeable once you're yellow and numbers start appearing beside your ship). Also, players can deliberately run through a bomb's prox to lower the damage taken by forcing the bomb to do some pb damage (esp against thors with its huge blast radius), but it's pretty situational (the bomb needs to be close to the shooter relative to its blast radius), and often times maybe it's more so the shooter making a bad choice of when to bomb than any reaction on the defender's part

tbh i'm actually kind of impressed. you have a lot of interests and this is probably the first time i've seen internet bragging done right. (forcecap is still going to be here to stay, though, sorry. it's pretty much how it's always been that some people don't want to play with other people for whatever reason and you can't really force them to)

I've already started my boycott. But, seriously, this is a pretty clear conflict of interest, and you ought to clear that up.

It's hard for me to believe that people actually get pissed off by words in Subspace, given ?ignore and (I think) the lack of people making more aliases just for the sole purpose of talking to you. I think more relevant factors for population are ease of getting into a prac, whether pracs are "fun" (and different people have different idea of what's fun, from tryharding to 123gospear to using random ships to mostly typing and occasionally shooting), and whether there are matches coming up.

I like 4v4tiny except for the lancs. Lancs are pretty much absolutely ridiculous on that map and would need a bounce removed or something.

I think any new map should have two goals in mind: It should be smaller in size than the current map (less flying from point a to b just to get to the action or chase forever). The density of the map structures should be the same as the current map (if the map becomes too dense it becomes proball/warzone where you aren't flying and aiming as much as bouncing and more bouncing).For 4v4arc1, I like that the map is slightly smaller by cutting the corners off, but the space in the center of the map is too empty and could use a couple random rocks to bounce off of. Better yet, I wonder if the map could be made slightly smaller by moving the "first ring" of structure slightly closer to the center (and moving everything else inward correspondingly). 4v4arcwide is too big.

You don't actually need to remove mines completely to get rid of runners mining for forever and ever. Just raise cost from 550 to 750 to make them unviable for defensive uses. That way, you can still retain all the nondefensive mine shenanigans.