Aileron

I suggest that the zone switch to turf style flags. The specifics of my suggestion are as follows: A single turf flag is placed in the flag room of a present base. If ASSS can support it, I would suggest the flag is cycled throughout the bases hourly. (If the flag tile can't be moved, you could place the flag itself in an inaccessible room. Then, you can have warp tiles linking the FRs to the room. The server decides which base is active for that hour, and opens up the link between that base and the flag tile and keeps the other ones closed.) The players on the team that holds the flag should get rewarded every minute. The reward calculation should be the current calculation for winning the flag game divided by about 20. (Because flag games are about 20 minutes long) My reasoning behind why this change should be implemented are as follows: The current system has a drastic cycle between high and low populations. If the flag game has been going on, it gives players an incentive to stay, but when it is over, players have an incentive to leave. Thus, the pop tends to crash cyclically after each flag game. If we shift from a single large reward to multiple smaller rewards, we will have one steady population. This is better than a cycle. A healthy population of 30 players will invite more players to the zone. A population of 50 would attract more people than 30, but not *much* more. A population of 5 will attract *no one* and the zone is dead for a few hours. A steady population of 30 is preferable to the 50-5 cycle. Also, having a turf flag will make it impossible to carry out a lot of the things which cause problems...splitting of the flags, warp outs, etc. You would eliminate the need to have flag droppers, which is one of those things that nobody wants to do. It would also eliminate most of the incentive for ragequitting. If you get cleared, so what? You'll have to try to attack again, but it doesn't eliminate everything your team has done for the past 15 minutes. There would be some negative consequences. You would be disrupting the current style of play first and foremost. Also, there would be less reward for executing a successful leak. Freq hopping would become more commonplace, though the rewards for doing so would be lower. Overall, I'm making this suggestion because the positives would outweigh the negatives.

The thing that I would find so hilarious if I wasn't so terrified of you people, is that most of you are either utterly dumbstruck as to why the economy is sucking or are still blaming George W. Bush. The reason the economy is sucking is completely obvious to anyone whose head is detached from their fourth point of contact. While I won't explain it to you on account of the fact that I will be branded a far-right fundamentalist, hate-filled, racist, bigoted, corporate/government tool, xenophobic, nutcase for trying (as if I haven't already been done so on these forums), I'll give a hint regarding whose fault it isn't: Those of you who are 'dumbstruck' are a lot farther ahead of the curve than those who blame Bush, because its not his fault. And no, its not Dick Cheney's fault either. Nor is it the fault of "Wall Street", "CEO"s, Fannie Mae, Feddie Mac, the Banking industry, Oil Companies, American auto makers, or any corporation you can name. Its not President Obama's, nor any elected member of either the Democratic or the Republican parties' fault. The president and all elected officials are indeed doing the most they can to improve the situation as best as best they are capable of, and even though the current President publicly blames Bush for providing the sucky economy when that is incorrect, he has his reasons for doing so; reasons I can respect. If you still don't know why the economy is f(*&$ed, I can't help you. Back to the topic, I do believe that in a perfect world DoD employees should be immune to civilian f*&@tardedness. We aren't really a part of your economy as much as an enabling force that allows people to trade in the dollar rather than the allah akbar. Ultimately capitalism is capitalism and if you can find someone who has the stones to fight terrorists for less, you don't have to pay people as much and the rest of us don't have a right to complain. Also I admit my reality is that I don't need the money and end up giving it to charity anyway. Beer is cheap, Subspace is free, and women who want money aren't worth the trouble. I can afford a pay freeze. Still, I want to point out one point of contention. A large motivating factor for my joining the Army was to escape civilian stupidity. I put up with lousy hours, a lifestyle I hate, not only working for but being owned by the government, and last but not least having the prospect of being blown up by an IED in the near future, all so I can escape civilian stupidity, and now civilian inability to understand basic economics is affecting my salary. Ultimately, its offensive. Do your job. Watch your lane. Your failure to do so is beginning to stray into mine. You wouldn't like it if nutcases shot AK-47s in the air around your town; we don't like it when your messed up economics affects our lifestyle. All you guys have to do is unf*&^k yourselves. I already went to great lengths to avoid your c*&%p and can only go to the extreme of retreating to the mountains and living my life as some kind of hermit in order to isolate myself from your stupidity. I don't want to do that. Its far easier and more beneficial for all of us if you to finally figure out why you are f*&%tarded, fix the fact that you are f*&^tarded, and then fix the economy, which trust me, should be the *least* of your worries right now. Ofcourse its not going to work like that, isn't it? That would require effort and a fair amount of self-actualization on your part, so its not going to happen. No, we're going to have to wait until you are happy with Afghanistan and say we are done. Then, when that finally happens, we get to come back, unf*&^k you, fix the economy for you, fix society for you, and then when all of us are in our 50s you civilians will wonder why us military types will all be cranky misanthropes. How this country has managed to stay together for over two hundred years baffles me...George Washington has to have some kind of influence beyond the grave because the actions he made during his lifetime don't account for all of it.

Look, I want to establish once and for all that these leaks are *not* harmless. The DoD makes the habit of keeping things secret for the same reason a good poker player will muck his cards if he doesn't have to show them. People, and entire organizations, will have 'tells'. The opponent, if given enough information, will eventually pick up on those tells. War never changes. It always has been and always will be a contest between *people* to the death. The thing about people is - people think. They improvise, adapt, and overcome. In real life terrorists do not kindly stand still in the open so that they can be shot like they do in a James Bond movie. Their goal in life isn't to improve the protagonist's body count. They are trying to win and will change their behavior based upon their situation. They hide in the crowd acting innocent for months, watch us looking for any pattern we might make, and will strike only after they find a weakness. Terrorists are also as tech-savvy as anyone. They will, for example, go to a Soldier's facebook page and find a picture of him in Iraq. They will then use the background of that picture to create a map of buildings in a base, so they can sight in their mortars a little better. The sad truth is that our civilian population has become arrogant in thinking Soldier's can't be harmed just because we can kill an insurgent with a missile fired from an unmanned drone at ten thousand feet. What insurgents lack in technology, they make up for in patience, resourcefulness, and a willingness to accept casualties. If you give them a chicken coup, they will build an IED. Given their past behavior, terrorists have without a doubt in my mind used some footnote in some document that Assange didn't think was important to plan and execute at least one attack on Coalition Forces resulting in the deaths of Soldiers. Obviously I can't prove this. There isn't an abundance of forensic investigators in Afghanistan, and the few investigators we have are all busy nailing IEDs to IED makers because our Rules of Engagement demand that it be done because civilians are whining about Gitmo so much; otherwise we can't keep terrorists in jail. If we did divert those critical resources to satisfy your curiosity of whether terrorists have used documents from wiki-leaks to plan attacks, the question of whether the lack of secret information would have prevented an attack from being successful would devolve into a series of "what-if" statements ending in the conclusion that if Al Queda was omniscient, we'd have lost by now. Still, my suspicion is that somehow, somewhere there is at least one good Soldier who is dead and would not be dead had Assange not decided to support Wiki-leak's creation. And, in my opinion, one Soldier is worth more than ten Assange's. A lot of you scoff at Assange being called a terrorist, and it is fair enough to say that the guy who dons the suicide vest deserves the title more, but the results of Assange's actions caused him to be an accessory to terrorism and regardless of his intentions. He has accomplished more to advance Al Queda's goals than most individual suicide bombers. The information provided from Wiki-leaks will help terrorists sharpen their tactics and will help successful suicide bombers to be more lethal. Additionally, since Al Queda's main hope in this war is political victory, the very act of creating a website to post government secrets just might help prove that the free world just might be as f*(&%ed up as Bin Laden says it is. Ah, but we do have the first amendment, though this is *not* an example of it being exercised. People do have a God-given right to express their ideas. However, classified documents are not the ideas of those exposing them, they are ideas belonging to the DoD which the DoD has decided to withhold. What wiki-leaks has done is akin to somebody setting up a bug in your home, and then publishing things you have said in confidence to the public. The only difference here is that in this case the victim is the government. While the government is not a private enterprise and thus has no rights, the entire reason the Executive branch of the government exists is so as to act as a person would in order to counter foreign dictatorships, ie. if wars were run by Congress, we'd have went back to being British colony around 1812. The Constitutional role of the Executive branch does imply the power bestowed upon them by the people to withhold secrets in the interest of national security. All that being said...the sexual assault charges filed against Assange are bull honky. The only thing he did was the same thing every far-left free-loving hippie does on a college campus, and that is rub up against anything as if he were some kind of rodent. While my disrespect for Assange is deep, ultimately I've learned the phrase 'Two wrongs don't make a right' is profoundly true. Assange belongs in front of a firing squad for being an enemy and a traitor to the free world, and thus should be charged with being an enemy and a traitor to the free world. Nothing good will come of trumped up "rape" charges, and indeed the prick is already out on bail and those who filed the charges look like the back end of a donkey. The right way to do this is for authorities to grab their balls, charge Assange with treason, try him for treason, and if found guilty execute him for treason. The only reason they went with rape instead of treason is because they are afraid of the political reaction. That is the wrong answer since Assange's supporters are a bunch of anarchistic internet pricks who use the internet because they are too cowardly to attach their names to their opinions. That actually is a sad example of what European police forces have become when they can be pushed around by faceless bullies. Just try Assange with treason and if the internet pricks don't like the outcome of the court system, they can shove it. Thus concludes my rant. I'm sure none of you will read it except SeVeR, and he'll only do so to cherry pick one or two sentences in order to imply that I advocate some sort of totalitarian police state. Oh well. I guess that's what passes for rational debate these days.

This discovery is actually something very profound though. Keep in mind that prior to the arsenic bacteria, Primordial Soup Theory stated that at some point in pre-history, life was created out of volatile chemical reactions. We've yet to fully explain it. We know where and when all the ingredients were in the same place at the same time, and we know the result, but we really don't understand the process, nor can we replicate it laboratory settings. It was something incredibly improbable, and now we know that it happened in Earth's history not once, but at least twice, which in turn implies that it can't be a one in a billion occurrence. This makes the possibility of extraterrestrial life, even when you confine your definition to preclude other chemical combinations. As for what aliens would look like, atleast by Discovery Channel Biology you'd be surprised how human-like an alien organism would have to be if you stipulate that they would be intelligent and capable of creating tools when you factor in 'survival costs'. The more complex an organism is, the longer it takes for it to reach maturity. If an organism spends too much of its life cycle in infancy, it can't survive. Now, keep in mind that humans need a decade and a half to reach biological maturity, which is an extremely long time frame on Earth's biosphere and is longer than most animal's entire lifespan. For that effort, we have superior intelligence, and frankly not much else. Most of the other mammals on earth are physically stronger, faster, and have better senses. We are essentially the bare minimum in terms of intelligent toolmakers, and even then we have a much higher survival cost relative to our competition. The thing is, even on an alien planet, any intelligent life would have to compete against non-intelligent life, and survival costs will be a factor. Because of survival costs, any intelligent toolmaker would have to also be a 'bare minimum', which would ultimately make them relatively similar to us in a lot of ways.

Wow, this topic is still going on. I've uninstalled that game months ago. I was in Platinum league. Won some, lost some. Didn't make it very high up, but this was on *Platinum League* mind you. Still, I got tired of it because between two good players, the winner is always the one who can micromanage the most, and I'm too old. My reflexes aren't as good at a 15 yr old's. Polix, a little piece of hardware I like to swear by is called a ViDock 2. Its a device that connects to your express card port, and mounts video cards you would normally put on a desktop. I use it on a relatively mediocre laptop. It does what it promises, albeit drivers aren't really designed for that configuration.

Me again. I hate to be the prick who one-ups somebody when they are doing something constructive, but I have one more stat to add based upon one of the earlier topics: Max effective range. In the other topic I had the probability formula, so I am defining it as the point at which REU/10 exceeds DPS times the probability of hitting a target warbird based upon the 40 directional sprite. In plain english, this is the range where even given perfectly aimed shots the energy loss in the shooting ship equals the energy loss in the target, given random positioning of the ships. (i.e. The shooter shoots doesn't adjust his position to line up with the target prior to firing, which is what bombers do. Yes, you could do it with guns, but that's not really how gunning operates.) ranges.xlsx Range is in pixels. The range columns refer to the shooter's ship. There are some quirks in the chart which should be obvious to anyone with common sense. For example, you can't put shredder on a javelin, and bullets fired from a lanc will time out before reaching 2458 pixels, etc. Also, I left out PD because PD is 100% efficient and thus has 'infinite range'. Targets for this chart are warbird/javelins. Multiply by .5 for target Sharks, 1.5 for Terrs/Weasels, and 2 for Spids/Levis/Lancs Also keep in mind that this is *max* range where damage between you and your target is *equal*, but your typical goal is to hurt your target *more* than yourself. You can divide your range by how much you want your target damaged more than yourself. If you have a problem with my formula, the concept of 'effective range' has a certain amount of subjectivity anyway. The idea is to get ball-park figures to quickly use for mental math in the heat of combat, not to precisely land a bullet on the moon. Examples: You are a javelin with gauss. You decide to shoot at a shark for an effective range of 1180/2 = 590 pixels for 1:1 damage. However, you don't want 1:1 damage, you want 3:1 damage because you hate him three times more than yourself. You then take your 590 and divide it by another 3 to get 197 pixels. You are a terrier at low energy after killing someone. A noob warbird flies up and unkindly sprays shredder in your general direction in attempts to vulch you. The range he has to work with is 669 x 1.5 = 1004 pixels. Fortunately, you are packing a plasma cannon with an effective range of 1401 pixels. Thus, if you open up the distance and engage this punk between 1004 and 1401 pixels, all of the bullets he fires will hurt him more than you, and all properly aimed bullets you fire will also hurt him more than you.

Hey, I reserve the right to post my mind when drunk. Audry, you've missed the point entirely. Sex isn't important. The emotional and spiritual bonds which come from a life-long partnership are what is important. However, because of the feminist movement and the 'free love' movement of the 60's, our entire society is convinced that the physical act is central, when in reality it is a sideshow. Love isn't about sex; it is about commitment. The things you speak of are ways to engage in sex without the commitment. I *want* the commitment and don't care about the sex. The difficulty lies in the fact that feminists don't want to commit. They want the boytoy of the month with a condom. That is because love requires that both sides sacrifice for each other, and it goes against all things feminist for a woman to sacrifice things she wants for a man, even if he is making sacrifices for her. The closest a feminist can come to love is to have the man sacrifice for the woman, and she enjoys receiving. The problem is that all win-lose relationships inevitably collapse, which is perhaps why divorce rates are so high. Purge, yes I admit to the general fact that I work too much and don't get out enough, and I will admit that I only have to find one out of a population of millions. However, the 'hook up now for a few months and ask her to wait out a year-long deployment' approach just isn't realistic. I'd have to wait until after I get back, then get started. And that Sharia Law spiel wasn't genuine...just my little way of pointing out that between radical Islamicism and radical Secularism, I don't like *either* option. I took an oath to defend democracy, not to spread the reach of globalist secularist socialism. If feminists want to spread their ideals to Afghanistan, they should have to do it themselves.

Thank you for posting this... As a 26 yr old virgin headed to Afghanistan in a few months, this means a lot to me. I am a far cry from a loser who would deserve the virgin treatment. I am intelligent, physically fit, financially stable, mature, and have a pair of balls. If I lacked any of these qualities, I wouldn't be able to do my job, and I assure you that I do my job *very* well. In short, I am a *man* competing with a bunch of *boys*. I actually did the right thing and waited past high school and college; until I was emotionally and financially ready to support a family, before I started seeking to create one. And what do I get in reward for my patience? Most of the single women in my age group are divorces with children who just *had* to 'experiment' in their youth. In any kind of functional society, those boys wouldn't be able to compete with me at all. But feminists need to control everything, so they prefer the effeminate, childish, undisciplined, irresponsible, and unreliable boys because they can be pushed this way and that. They dislike *men* who are unyielding and stand firm amidst the storm, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. In short, boys make better toys for one-night-stands. Men make better husbands for life. This isn't to say that I could be a husband or a father in my present state. The years of solitude have left me bitter and full of hate. At times I wonder if it were not for the oaths I have taken, that I would not stand against Sharia Law at all, or if that I might even join their mad quest for domination. At this point the selfish part of me would rather have the attractive women wear burkas than have to put up with them mocking me with their 'look but do not touch' crap. If she won't give me the time of day regardless, I'd rather not have to look at her in miniskirts and fishnets. I'd much rather have her wear a sheet and spare me the temptation. And that is why I can never be a family man. Not only regarding this issue, but with many issues, I have been pushed farther than my capacity to forgive. I am not strong enough to overcome that much hate on all 365 days in a year. I would sooner or later slip up and bring pain upon my potential wife or children. I will never be able to raise a family nor have a normal life, and without family, there's no point in the rest of it. The only aspirations I have at this point is to die in combat somewhere in Afghanistan and take as many of those Taliban bastards out with me as I can. That cartoon is clear proof that at least a few people realize that there is a problem; that this situation isn't virtuous but rather a sick perversion of how things should be. With even a few individuals, there is hope that there will eventually be a reaction, and mayhaps a mass movement towards a holier more fulfilling lifestyle. When that day comes in this life or the next, I will celebrate. So thank you for posting that cartoon. It gives me precious hope that I will need in the days ahead.

I wish I could explain this fully without having to give a crash course in tactics. You are correct in that the team that does not rush *will* lose if the enemy rushes. Rushers are an example of a 'force multiplier'. They are a support effort that can have a drastic impact. The problem is that they are nevertheless a support effort. It is mechanically impossible to keep an enemy out of your base through the exclusive use of repels. Though if the enemy does not have rushers, you can keep them out with bullets. The ultimate caveat is the 'waste of space' question. It is very very easy to be a make-believe gunner. Rushers support the gunner who is two pixels behind them and is dropping a can of whoop-ass on the enemy. In the case of leak guard, the rusher will stop the enemy leak for the gunner who then turns and shoots the leak. The rusher is *not* supporting the prick in the spider with beam array hiding behind the lanc he attached to, shooting in a general direction towards the enemy without targeting. *That* guy is a waste of space and is wrong by default according to question 3. Of course, in a practical sense the command to 'rush' means play more aggressively, and is used as a call for the wastes of space to actually perform the job they are pretending to, so you are *not* wrong. I am correct in that if you did have gunners performing their jobs right, the rusher would be wrong, but I suppose there is an impracticality between the definition I used and the way bad players actually play.

Wow, my pithy comments have summoned Ducky from his exile in the deepest darkest depths of Hell! Did Satan give you a furlough, I did I accidentally recite a secret Wiccan summoning spell? I think what has happened is that over the course of prosperity, a ruling class has sort of developed over the western world. It includes both domestic and foreign governments, and Ivy League academics. Generally, these people get sponsored early in life to go to Ivy League schools and get easy campaign funds when they run for office, but the real gift they get is mentorship in the art of looking trim and polished in front of the cameras. Clearly, the reason that President Obama got elected is because of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-(almost) Clinton cycle. The was because people are beginning to see the elitism and are voting against it. Irony is that Obama was groomed from childhood to be a lesser politician, a House Congressman, maybe a Senator later in his career. His relatively low pecking order on the elitist scale is what allowed him to beat Clinton. (McCain actually is not elite and got where he was based on making crazy sacrifices for our country, namely a stay at the Hanoi Hilton, but he was a Republican at the wrong time to be a Republican.) While he is a member of the elite Ivy League-educated class, he was closer to average folks than the Clintons and Bushes. I actually have hope for the Tea Party movement because it is the conservative side of trying to expel the elites from their perches. I suspect come 2012 a similar liberal movement will develop to oust the elites on their side of the aisle. I actually have hope for Sarah Palin's movement because I know some people who knew her son as he was serving as a Private in the US Army. Most Governor/Senator's sons would serve as Lieutenants. To me, the publicized faults of the Tea Party candidates are self evident proof that they weren't groomed from infancy to run for office, and that nobody is covering their gaffs now. Still, put your faith in people and you will always be disappointed. On the other hand, the Tea Party claims to want to uphold the Constitution, which above all else is a system, which you can put faith in. So I guess the real question is if you're willing to have a little optimism, and I guess in my case, yes I do.

Hey, now that it has come out that Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell used to dabble in witchcraft, are any of the far-left satanists who linger on this forum interested in voting Republican? I seriously do not like how the Tea Party is portrayed as right-winged radicals. When you take away all the hype, they are actually a very necessary movement. The Tea Party simply stands for cutting non-essential government services and thus cutting costs. Removing laws already on the books may technically be the definition of fundamentalism, but the idea is actually a necessary part of progressivism and even liberalism. Part of the evolutionary process is that as new features are added, old features which are unnecessary, useless, and inefficient are removed. Now, keep in mind that the US government and most other governments have done nothing but expand since WW II. There never has been a *large* effort to 'trim the fat'. We have reached the point where if any new government features are to be added, some of the older more useless features need to be removed. So, in my opinion, this movement is actually long overdue.

Well, those stats are unexpected. I figured that my stats would be somewhat typical, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'll concede your point. I guess I forgot to take into account my time zone and the fact that by the time I log on, most of the zone has already gone to bed, and the dominant behavior is those 5 guys who win a flag game for an ez 5k when everyone else is centering. (Ofcourse, the scores of the top 100 in xp is hardly an impartial metric, since that really amounts to the most effective killers in the zone rather than your typical player. ) That of course begs the question of why anyone would stack the teams. Cheese, can that racist drunk you talk to offer any insights?

Hey, I knew comparing Brain to Obama was mean, but I knew he's tough enough to take it, and needed to get some attention. I knew accusing Cheese of leading the team-stackers was mean too, and that he is *not* tough enough to take it, but hey, his reactions are always funny. Like how he's 'ignoring' this topic while nevertheless posting in it. The thing about balancing income is, I just typed ?stats. My total flag points are roughly ten times more than my total kill points. I would need more statistical data to confirm (like knowing the ratio of several players, or the stats of the whole zone), but if this 10:1 ratio is typical, that's one order of magnitude. You could quadruple or even quintuple the kill rewards and still the flag rewards would remain to be the dominant source of income. If kill rewards were merely within an order of magnitude of flag rewards, players would be much less discouraged to stack teams while still being primarily motivated to flag.

I agree with the basic premise that players are vicious evil twerps. Also, I agree with your assessment, and tried to go into it with my original post. If the only real way to make money is to get kills, flagging will have similar problems. First off, I would propose that you also increase rewards for teammates getting kills, and the attach toll. This would reward lancs and other role-players. Also, I'm saying that it is a balancing act. Too much flag reward and people stack teams, too much kill reward and everyone is fighting for themselves. Right now we have too much flag reward and not enough kill reward.

I posted this idea in the main forum, but I'm re-posting it so that it gets attention. Just increase the kill rewards. (Including the reward for when a teammate gets a kill) It doesn't matter what features you install to prevent hopping, ragequitting, etc. No matter what is in place, Cheese & friends will actively find ways to exploit the system for the flag reward, and will eventually succeed. Flag rewards consist of about 95% of your typical player's income, so what behavior are you rewarding? The behavior you encourage is anything that causes a player to be on the right freq upon the instant of victory. With high kill rewards, the behavior that is encouraged is persistent conflict. If it were high enough, flag games would be an excuse to break into teams and shoot at each other. A small flag reward will keep teams honest in their attempts to win, so it should be like a 80-20 split in player income, in favor of the kill rewards. Overall, stop running your zone in the same manner which President Obama is running the country. Massive, sweeping systems designed to prevent exploitation will inevitably fail and cause more harm than good. The best way to stop Cheese & friends from exploiting the flag game is to *stop rewarding them* for doing so.

Actually I didn't. There are so many dumb ideas floating around. Sorry, I should have checked to see who made it. Though dang, I think my idea of simply increasing the rewards for kills would solve the hopping problems we've been having.

Okay, so i like to analyze stuff. That doesn't mean I have too much free time. It means I am a geek.

Its me again with I guide I know you all can use. It is for when you get in an argument with somebody on your own team. It might take some of the joy out of HS for you, so feel free to exit out of the thread at this point. ***spoiler alert*** First off, there are three questions that must be asked. If you get a 'yes', then stop right then and there and *don't* proceed to the matrix. Are either of you engaging in illegal behavior such as intentional team killing and flag trading? If so, the guilty party is always wrong. Are either of you spamming bricks or fields? If so, the one who's paying the bill is right. (Thor users don't count here) Are either of you a waste of space on your team? If so, the waste of space is wrong. Def: A waste of space is a player not filling a role on a team, or filling a role incorrectly. Examples of a wastes of space would be someone in safe, somebody floating around in the base afk, a second lanc when everyone is attaching another right next to it, etc. The key here is that the perp must not be making any positive effort towards helping the team. This is not to be confused with the various utilitarian roles such as flag dropper and anti-warper. These roles are atypical and thus are not covered, but in most cases you can treat them as 'lancs' when using the matrix. HSargue.xlsx Three more things to note: 'rushers' include leakers. A leak is technically a critically successful type of rush. 'Gunners' aggressively try to kill the enemy, staying on the heels of the rushers and in front of the lanc. They actively target and kill the enemy on offense and create a cloud of bullets which kill enemy rushers on defense. The key word in this case is 'kill'. A gunner who is not trying to kill the enemy is a waste of space. 'lanc' means 'The lancaster which your team is attaching to', including frontlanc and backlanc. Lancs also make good rushing ships, so for these purposes if you are a rushlanc, you are a rusher. 'bomb support' includes all varieties of bombs, whether they be wallbombs, mines, EMPs, thors, or novas. The key here is that you are using an area affect weapon with potential to team kill.

First off, are you going after hoppers or rage-quitters? Most of the rage-quitting I've seen lately revolves around the lanc. The team will quit because they don't have one, he is suddenly specced, he rages, or her is incompetent. At this point in the reset cycle, xp is more valuable than money, and not many players want to lanc because it doesn't give xp. The smaller demographic of lancs increases the chance that Murphy's Law will cause a team to have no lancs, and thus cause the team to rage-quit. This problem will actually solve itself in a few months when everyone has 15k xp and is working towards getting an alien tech. As for the hoppers, hopping becomes self-defeating when the rewards for *playing* a flag game exceed the rewards for winning it. This is already generally the case when you factor in xp, but after a while xp ceases to matter. You can stop hoppers by increasing the reward for getting a kill.

So, if someone else made a damage module, you could implement center bots...

You got it backwards. Bombers are supposed to support the rushers by suppressing the enemy. Rushers are not there to provide you with a personal meat-shield.

First an foremost, there is an attitude in many that Subspace *will* die. This is justified by the fact that it is by gaming standards extremely old. However, Subspace *can* survive, and it is ironic that WoW has been referenced, because its predecessor Diablo II is a model of success. What made it work was that *because* it didn't have many high-tech features, it was simple to play, and easy on the bandwidth. Things got more complicated when players made them complicated, and that easiness on the bandwidth allowed for more players/bots in the same place. Continuum has lasted so long because it is extremely simply by design and because being designed for the 56k modem, it is super-fast on modern communications equipment. It what other game can there be a 40 vs 40 match up which doesn't cause system instability? So this attitude needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed before forward progress can be made. Secondly, as Brain said, we need to develop our developers. Our senior people need to take on apprentices to both cut down on their workload and to train the next generation. Prittk is the worst in this category. He needs a young padawan in the wings ready to take over more than anybody. I swear he masochistically enjoys the pain of being the single pillar holding up Continuum, but it doesn't *have* to be that way. There are also some things that could help, which we don't necessarily *need*: We could use a 'standardized' setting to replace SVS. Something that says "yes each zone has their own settings, but this is normal". SVS frankly is crap left over from the development phases. There also needs to be an effort to mentor and protect newbies from the predatory trolls. In Continuum's case, this is not so much a matter or protecting their W/L ratio, but rather we should be doing things to try to assimilate them into the community. One thing that is wrong is that in zones where there are no leagues, there aren't any squads. This is a missed opportunity for social networking and new player mentorship. Overall, to save this game, we need to focus more on building a 'community' attitude rather than a 'everyone is playing for his own fun' attitude. Do that, and the rest of it will happen on its own.

I second the field idea.

Isn't that what Cobalt's are for? I typically go with the philosophy of 'adapt to the current settings before trying to have them changed', but in this case I'd say that phuzzy has the right idea. A limit of one field per freq at one time is totally justifiable. The only caveat I have to add to that is that other than the lightning and coffin maker fields, the status quo is fine. Also, I've said it before in game, but field generator should be a signature item.

Well, I said I can do it but didn't want to. The probability of hitting a perfectly aimed shot (That is, assuming the shooter chooses the one of 40 directions which places a bullet as close to the target's center as possible, the odds that this is close enough to be within the target's radius) is: Probability = (diameter of your target in pixels) x 40 x (number of bullets you fire per burst) / { 2 x pi x (range to target in pixels) } You can see why I didn't want to do it. As you can see, the weighted probability isn't a flat stat...it depends on what you are shooting at and how far away they are. I made several deliberate errors, most notably in treating double bullets as firing on an angle rather than straight, but if anyone can do better and more notably still keep the calculations simple, then by all means. Edit: You know what, I do have a flat stat that can be assigned to guns. First off, I'll create a definition for our purposes. Effective range: The range at which a gun has an 80% chance of hitting a standard 2 tile diameter ship. Plugging and chugging into the above equation, we get: No multi, no double: 255 pixels Double, no multi: 510 pixels Multi, no double: 765 pixels Multi and double*: 1020 pixels *not lancs. Lancs fall under the double, no multi range even if they have multi on because their multi shoots out near the back. Duh. Keep in mind this doesn't take into account bullet speed or bullet lifetime, and we are assuming the shooter is accurate and that the target isn't dodging. If your bullets are slow, you might not reach these ranges, or the target may have forever and a day to dodge. The good news is that not once did I involve zone settings, so this is good for other zones as well. Finally, be advised that if you are a non-prox bomber, the effective range of your weapon is in many cases shorter than the blast radius of your weapon. So please, if you use bombs in the center, use a bomb with prox. I'm tired of catching strays from noobies who spray bombs all over the place.