Aileron

Take non-flaggers out of the flag reward formula. Players on pub freqs are not allowed to interfere with the flag game, so their presence should have no impact on flag reward. I guess the other half of this issue is too many of the stats listed in ?iteminfo are in serverspeak and not the most relevant numbers the player needs to know. For instance, those nice little gun/bomb/armor stats on the strategy guide part of this forum. Energy and Recharge boosts should be listed by their impact on the energy bar as in '+150 NRG' or '+9 NRG/s'. Sublight drives should be have top speed in tiles/second, acceleration in tile/s^2, rotation speed in rad/s. If you have the time, more relevant stats in ?iteminfo would be a nice thing to have.

you forgot: 5. Having your teammates using you as a meat shield 6. Putting up with your teammates blaming you for dying because they all used you as a meat shield.

Sorry guys. This bill is legit. The Constitutional role of the executive branch is to be able to act unilaterally in the short term situations where only a unilateral solution can work. But, there needs to be a massive and imminent threat to the nation as a whole for this to be justified. The problem is, I don't see how cyberterrorism can be that sort of threat. One threat is of some foreign power getting our sensitive secrets. However, all classified information can not be stored on any computer with an internet connection. It's illegal. In fact, some places will go so far as taking out the CD Rom and filling the USP and network ports with super glue on a classified computer. The prospects of a hacker shutting down utilities are even more laughable. The hacker seeking to shut down the US power grid would quickly find that few of the machines involved with the process even have a computer in them, and most that do are controlled by a computer with an actual operating system. (Your car most likely has a computer that regulates engine functions, but doesn't have an operating system.) Of the scant few machines run by a computer that has an operating system, none are hooked up to the internet because there is no reason for any utility company to install an internet connection onto that computer. It would be like me using the computer I'm on to hack into your house and set your microwave to 12 minutes. You don't have the hardware for that to be possible and you have no motive for installing such hardware. Now, I could still sneak into your house when you aren't around and f___ with your microwave, but that's not a cyber attack, that's a physical one. Stealing, manipulating, erasing, etc. financial data on the national economy crashing scale the President should be concerned with would be possible if the majority of major corporations didn't keep analog backups, but they do. On the smaller scale, that's called identity theft and obviously happens, and identity theft is combated by organizations which fall under the executive branch, so there is legal wiggle room here. What a cyber attack is in reality is usually some sort of method to flood a server with activity until it has to be shut down. It costs money and p___es people off, but doesn't really qualify as a national emergency. Ofcourse, trying to prevent servers from being shut down by shutting down servers is kinda like putting out a brush fire with a flamethrower, which oddly enough is called 'backburning' and works if done intelligently. Now, Xog may have hit the nail on the head in terms of how this bill might actually be used in real life. This bill needs to be very well worded so that the outcome is something that shuts down a utility in a national emergency rather than something that limits free speech when somebody is embarrassed.

A flat or progressive tax is appropriate. One problem you run in to is that taxes on anything other than income or property will *always* be recessive, because one rich person typically cannot consume as much as a large number of middle class income individuals. I agree with the idea of the progressive income tax if it is done for economic and budgetary reasons. I don't like when the cause for it is socioeconomic activism, because such a motive can (and has) take the issue entirely too far. I don't know whether to respond to Brain or Astro. Both of you are pretty close to the mark. Brain is right in that there are many real-world issues which are quite disconcerting. But, I'll give you the credit you deserve Astro. There is more to this than simple politics. I know I am being a poor Christian and that I am going against how I was raised. The thing is, I just stopped caring. Hating millions of people is easier and more satisfying in the short term. Call it short sighted, but the thing about short term solutions is that you get quick confirmation of the result, rather than working hard for something for years and then not getting it. I was too nice to too many people for too long, and now I have no dreams left intact to work for and no people to love, so hatred is the only human emotion I have to work with right now. That being said, I am not a Episcopalian. A true Christian is supposed to hate wickedness and injustice. When it is kept firmly under the control of the higher consciousness, hatred can achieve great things. Without it there is no balance and no justice. Am I motivated for a desire for justice right now? Heck no. Maybe some day I'll figure it out though.

In case you don't know, it has recently made headlines that 47% of US Households don't pay Income Tax. This is mostly due to the fact that politicians keep promising to make wealthier people take a larger share of the taxes, and each new guy one ups the last. Now, we've gone to an extreme. This is fundamentally dangerous. Democracy has a fundamental flaw in that gains/losses for the individuals do not always match up with gains and losses for the whole. Suppose you had a three man country with Adam, Bob, and Charlie voting. Suppose you had a bill that would cause Adam and Bob to gain $100 but Charlie to lose $1,000. If approved, the country would lose $800, so the bill should lose. However, because the majority of people profit from it, it would get voted for. Now, with about half the country not losing anything for every budget expenditure, we are in prime position for this to happen. I'll take this opportunity to quote Alexander Fraser Tytler's "Life Cycle of A Democracy": Ladies and gents, we are at the 'dependency' stage. This is why I hate liberals. Liberals keep coming up with these 'new' ideas. Reality is those 'new' ideas have been tried over and over in history, always with the same results. By the way, the 'great courage to liberty' phase is . The liberal train of thought accelerates the cycle, causing a ton of friggin wars. The conservative train of thought can decelerate and fundamentalist thought can even reverse the process. The cycle doesn't even have to move at all! If liberals and fundamentalists would just stop doing what they do in the 'liberty to abundance' phase, it would just stay there. But, the liberal, while well educated, does not learn from history. Since the immediate predecessor to the war phase is 'spiritual faith to great courage', when the liberal looks at history, they blame 'spiritual faith' as the cause of war. The real cause of war is, always has been, and always will be the accelerating forces which bring society from liberty and abundance to dependency and bondage. From there, the conditions are intolerable and the war becomes inevitable.

Too many teams of jav newbies? Actually, I've been rather busy lately and haven't been able to follow Days of Our Lives that much. That's whats causing the stress.

Look, when you are on a team of all jav newbies that does everything wrong, there are two ways to relieve stress: Complain about it in the forums, or kick your cat. Incidentally I don't have a cat anymore, so I have to complain on the forums. Its not a 'photon weasel', its a 'trap weasel'. The trap laser is more expensive and uses my sig slot, so I consider that to be my primary weapon.

Nice tactic. Great way of mocking me too. Spider and Courage should take notes. They could learn something from this guy.

Veg, I think it was clear from my original post I still think the hikers are fools. But even in your rape park example, if police ever caught one of those rapists, the rapist would be held ultimately responsible for the event. 1. Your claims about the League of the Non-Aligned Nations directly result from their disagreements with the US. By painting the League in a bad light you can only be referring to the US as the good guys. I claimed that the LoNAN claims didn't stack up. I didn't paint them in a 'bad light', only called their opinion flawed. The US dominates the international political scene with a lot of real-world power. We use that real-world power to affect the UN, but the UN is not our tool and does not enhance our power. The US is powerful *in spite of* the UN, not *because of* it. LoNAN is being fools by attacking the UN because the UN is the UN General Assembly vote is almost all of the power they have. They saw a branch they are standing on. 2. You refer to the US as stopping Armageddon by threatening Iran. Clearly this opinion of yours paints the US as the good guys. I said the US doesn't like the idea of Iran starting Armageddon. Frankly we don't like the idea of *anybody* starting Armageddon, and many nations agree with us on that point. I didn't portray the US as good guys. Anyone can be motivated to take out the bad guys for the motive of self-preservation. A really fine point is that it doesn't portray Iran as the bad guy either. What France, Germany, and the US don't like is the *idea* of Iran starting Armageddon. Whether Iran is actually trying to is secondary to the fact they have convinced much of the west that it is their intention. 3. You talk about how Iran thinks the US is spying on them. You say it in a sarcastic tone as if to say that the US is above this, would never do it, and is never wrong. On the contrary we almost certainly are spying on Iran. Spying isn't wrong, though Iran certainly has the right try to stop our attempts. Spying can reveal truth which can stop or mitigate wars. However, enter the common sense test. The US is a rich and technologically advanced country with a top-notch military for the clandestine services to recruit from, and Iranian government officials know this. If the hikers were our spies, they would have been skilled, well equipped, would blend in, and would have been around something that would be of interest to us, of which they are not. Iran isn't holding spies. They are holding hikers. More importantly, Iran *knows* they are holding hikers and are keeping them locked up *anyway*. Now before you go extending that sentence to mean all sorts of things about me accusing the people with the keys of being the anti-christ, let me point out that there can be a lot of good reasons to lock up uninvited interlopers. If some fool walked into your bedroom while you were making whoopie with your girl, you would probably punch his clock out first and ask why he was there later. Under extreme enough circumstances it would not have been wrong for Iran to kill the hikers and make it look like an accident. However, holding three people who clearly aren't spies this long under espionage charges is the wrong answer. They are playing this game clumsily and making themselves look like a bunch of fools, and the longer this goes on, the worse it gets for them. 4. You continually refer to the US as "we" and "our". Yes, the US is my country of citizenship. To use 'they' when referring to a group one belongs to is grammatically incorrect. To use 'they' in referring to powerful members of the government falsely displaces ownership of responsibility. We elected them. We are responsible for the decisions they make. 5. You miss every opportunity to say anything remotely bad about the US. For example, maybe the US is spying on Iran and they are wrong to do so? Maybe Iran is developing civilian nuclear power as there is no evidence to the contrary, and maybe the US are wrong do assert the opposite with no evidence to back it up? Maybe the US is incriminating Iran based on ulterior motives (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5346524.stm)? Maybe the US does dominate the UN, they obviously have economic and political power that many countries would not want to get on the wrong side off? To answer your questions in order: See block 3. Off-topic. Off-topic. See block 1. So, in conclusion. Remember that I called Iran 'idiot' and pointed out 'this is a game they shouldn't be playing'. That doesn't mean 'evil' or 'dangerous'. Point being, in brinkmanship international politics, Iran sucks. They suck so much at making friends that they have most of Europe siding with the US against them when Europe is inclined to snob the US. Right now, the only world powers which are holdouts are Russia and China, and Russia's starting to turn against Iran too. They have the entire world convinced that they want to build nuclear weapons, their only *significant* (barely) allies are Venezuela and North Korea, which are both extremely far from Iran geographically. At home they have people protesting in the streets, and on western broadcasts we gloat about it. They are getting b**ch-slapped in the UN and can't even figure out why. Then, while all this is happening, they decide that the best way to add icing on to the cake is to create a big international incident involving hikers. They suck. They should let the hikers go, take the UN b**ch-slapping, accept the fact that the US is the economic powerhouse of our time, accept that they aren't going to be able to change that, go home, and re-think how they want to portray themselves. Maybe they should read some history books about people who played the game right and learn from them. Right now, all they are doing by pulling this cr*p is causing themselves to lose more faster.

Courage, I'm retired from holding a variety of staff positions in Subspace. See the 'VIP' status under my name? It means 'retired'. No, I have no interest in doing it again. Mostly due to real-life issues. I ranted because anti-authoritative punks like that rub me the wrong way. That is again, mostly due to real-life issues. Suffice to say, in real life I *am* the authority, and I have to pay a heavy price when punks decide they want to play this game.

Alright, I'm doing something that will cause some of you heads to explode again. Another strategy guide. I'll be honest, by this point of time, watching some of your meltdowns is actually an amusing end in and of itself. This thread concerns the tactic of 4 or 5 lancasters, each with AD, who rush and attach each other, forcing the other team to kill 25 lancs in order to stop a rush. There are many ways to defeat this. Many know them, but I've seen too many cases of people not doing the right thing to stop it. The Bullfighter Is tactic only works on offense when the defense are the ones lanc rushing. Simply get out of the way and let them get behind you, then use repels and mines to keep them there. Lancs have little killing potential, so a lanc rush defense is vulnerable to leaks. When a defense has a lot of rush lancs, this vulnerability can be extreme enough that an entire offense, banclanc and all, can leak past them. That's great for offense. However, the rushlanc defense isn't popular and not much a threat. I'll focus on actually stopping rushlanc offenses from this point on. Load for Bear Killing a lanc quickly requires heavy weapons. The best against this kind of rush are L4 and L3 frag bombs, which do a large amount of damage to all the lancs at the same time. Next best are bursts, since the lanc's large profile tends to catch most of the burst. They might have radiating coils, but even then it is still a good idea to save your bursts for the nme lancs. After that, L3 bullets, L2s can work if used densely. What doesn't work are low dps guns like pea shooter and beam array, and L1 bombs, particularly EMPs. Getting more DPS out of bullets There are several ways to increase the DPS on impact with bullets. In this situation, the way to do it is to bounce bullets off the wall in a zig-zag fashion. This decreased the range, but doubles the DPS against opponents trying to fly through the cloud. Against rushers, don't target the rusher. Create a kill zone and fill that kill zone with bullets. That way, even if they repel, they are still in a kill zone filled with bullets. Repel Back No need to elaborate. Mine the Backfield Low Density minefields are a leaker's worst nightmare. If the pilot doesn't want to die and respawn, which isn't an option for leakers, he must either use repels, which a leaker used to execute the leak, or slow down, which allows anyone chasing him to catch up. The lanc rush is similar enough to the leak in form that minefields still have a good effect.

SeVeR, yet again, you are placing an opinion on me. Alright, let's look at that claim. Here is what I wrote concerning France and Germany: The claim that I was attacking is the doctrine of the League of Non-Aligned Nations, which Iran is a leading member, who's leaders have made multiple comments in the past about the UN being dominated by the US. I cited the UN's opposition to the OIF as evidence to the fact that the LoNAN doctrine is wrong. If the UN were under US domination as Iran and her allies claim, the Security Council would have fallen under the Bush umbrella, and OIF would have been a UN operation. I neither called France and Germany apathetic nor jealous. The point I was making was that those countries have their own political agenda which is clearly distinct than the political agenda of United States. As a UN Security Council member and the dominant economy in Europe, the fact that these countries' agenda is that different from the US' agenda shoots holes in the LoNAN claim which was the subject of the paragraph. To bridge the gap between 'France and Germany have a different agenda than the US', and 'France and Germany are apathetic and jealous', you would have to insert the claim that the US' political agenda is somehow golden and incorruptible. If I made such a claim, that argument would hold, because being different from something that is profoundly holy indeed makes something evil. But without the golden claim, different is just different. However, I did not make the claim that the US' political agenda is golden and incorruptible. You inserted that claim into my argument. The claim is clearly untenable and something that is easy for you to defeat. Hence why I say you are using the straw man fallacy. I proved that the LoNAN statement that the US dominates the UN is false, and you in turn argue against a claim which I did *not* put forward concerning the morality of France and Germany's foreign policy. That is the only example I am going to hit for brevity's sake. Suffice to say, much of your post consisted of 'you believe this' and 'you believe that', ending with an accusation of me being xenophobic. Given the number and nature of the claims that you have inserted into my argument your argument is not only straw man but also circular, because you inserted claims which amount to xenophobia into my set of premises from the beginning. Since 'summaries' are popular in this thread, a decent summary of your post would be 'Aileron is a xenophobe because I believe he is.' To that I say: Please stop inserting opinions into my argument. It's illogical and also downright rude. Yes, you are using a Straw Man argument. That is in fact such a clear example of a straw man argument that a philosophy professor could print your post and put it in a textbook. and finally: Everything I say is right because SeVeR thinks the Moon is made out of cheese.

That analogy doesn't hold. A dog isn't sentient and can't be held accountable to have human understanding. Iran's government is composed of sentient human beings who have decided to turn their country into a political hot spot. You are writing Iran off as being a part of the world where despotism just happens as if it were a natural phenomenon like cold climate or chronic rain, and are forgetting that it is the *people* who run Iran that make it the place that it is.

You know, that post right there sums up everything I hate about you people. I brush up on current events and world politics, and post a long and well-thought out article on the subject, and what do you do? You don't read it, you 'summarize' it. Furthermore you don't even bother to summarize it correctly. An accurate summary of my post would be 'Both Iran and the hikers are idiots.' You have *NEVER* supported your argument...ever. Instead, you have created this Straw Man fallacy which you claim is the conservative point of view, but is in reality a point of view held by no sane individual. Then, every time you want to prove a point, you shove this cartoon point of view out in front of us and prove its wrong. Ofcourse it is wrong! That whole point of view is something you constructed for the explicit purpose of being something you can defeat easily! It is a charismatic fallacy, but it doesn't really prove anything. Xenophobia is wrong. The other extreme is pretending the world can just hold hands and sing kumbaya. Those two points of view are held by a scant few individuals. In the middle of those two extremes lie points of view which real people actually believe. You are not the political focus of balance in the universe, far from it, and even if you were, that doesn't mean that any opinion to the right of yours is equivalent to the xenophobic extreme. In fact, you are pretty far to the left, and there is plenty of room between you and the right winged extreme. For sh__s and giggles, I'll do the same trick that you have played for the past three years: To summarize SeVeR's post: The moon is made of cheese. Clearly the moon is not made of cheese, so therefore the opposing point of view is wrong and everything I say is gospel.

Long post follows. However, I made it entertaining. Look, Iran is wrong in this. Here's why: They know that 3 idiot hikers wandering around the mountains does not United States intelligence gathering make. We have multibillion-dollar spy satellites, UAVs, stealth aircraft, Special Forces guys on camels, Airborne Sappers, snipers who can sit still for a month in the field in a gillie suit wearing diapers so they don't have to get up and take a leak, etc. Also, those are just the *UNCLASSIFIED* intelligence assets that we *tell* the world we have. In Iran's mind, they are facing increasing hostility from the US. This is due to all the UN sanctions they are getting hit with lately. The UN, according to the League of Non-Aligned Nations doctrine, is in the US' pocket. That's right...they think that the same UN that said 'F.U. Bush' when we invaded Iraq and owes New York a billion dollars worth of unpaid parking tickets has somehow been under our complete and total domination the whole time. They can't seem to grasp the fact that 'No, France and Germany don't give a damn what the US has to say, but they *still* nevertheless don't like the idea of Iran trying to start Armageddon any more than the US does'. They come to ridiculous conclusions over how the world community works because they have always been on the outside looking in. They have noticed the world has been pushing them out of the global community, and have decided it is easier to blame the big bad US than admit that maybe there is a *reason* most countries in the world don't want to be Iran's friend. Anyway, our intellectually challenged exploration team has become a pawn in their political game. Iran isn't dumb enough to think they are spies, and even if they did, they would have given them back to us by now. By contrast, the last time we caught a Chinese spy (post-Cold War) he was free and back in China by this amount of time, and that spy actually did get too close for comfort to our aerospace tech. He wasn't walking around on some remote mountains in the ass end of nowhere. So, Iran wants something else which I can only guess at. Maybe they intend to use the hikers as defacto hostages in hopes that we will let Iran take two more steps towards starting WW III in exchange for getting the lowest common denominator of our gene pool back. Maybe they want to use them as proof so they can complain to their LoNAN friends about how the evil US is spying on them, reminiscent of 'help! help! I'm being repressed!' in MPatHG. Maybe they like to broadcast on FAR about how their big-bad security force outwitted the fiendish infidel secret agents spying on a pile of rocks, pretending that the Iranian people still actually believe the crap on FAR and aren't on the streets shouting 'Death to the Dictator'. Or, maybe they locked them up initially to get the answers, and now that they have the answers, are too lazy to go back to the jail cell, unlock it, and set the hikers free. Point being the hikers are idiots because they allowed themselves to become pawns in an international political chess game that has the potential to get them killed, just to go on a hike in the mountains which could have been done in many less politically volatile places around the world. I mean, they could have hiked in the Rockies and run the risk of drifting into Canada, but instead... However, this is an international political chess game that Iran shouldn't be playing in the first place, so Iran, not the hikers, are being the true idiots here.

I'm supporting Ceiu in this issue. People who protest against staff for its own sake (which let's face it, is what half of that bandwagon did) are annoying. Its annoying when people disrespect the various kinds of staff in game, on forum, etc., and its *damn* annoying when it is done in real life. They have got a job to do and they are trying to serve the players. When you be an arse, it makes their job that much harder to accomplish. So, Ceiu, keep the faith and don't let these punks bother you. Future advice: Consider not explaining your motives at all. You don't have to. That's a fallacy the real-life version of the anti-authoritative punk has indoctrinated you with in high school which doesn't actually work in real life. Punks typically are not going to be reasonable about this sort of thing even after you explain yourself to them. You are authority. They hate authority. Ergo, they have already closed their minds to whatever you have to say. They will ignore your main point, stick to minutia, and construct a counter-argument containing numerous logical fallacies. In their mind, this sad alternate illogical reality is a valid counter-point to your *facts*. The only people you should explain yourself to are your boss and your peers. Let the boss appoint somebody skilled in PR who can explain the situation to the punks in very small words so they can understand it.

That's good, but my question is more along the lines of: 'How can the responsible players reading this persuade the irresponsible players in the zone to change their ways?' It seems impossible due to the short term gain of the moment. Such as that 20vs1 flag game. We would need to persuade 9 players to not hop and thus not get the flag reward. But, it is possible because over the long term, having balanced teams, no ragequits when you lose, no centering while occupying a slot on the flag team, etc. benefits everyone over the long term. If it hasn't already done so overnight, that 20vs1 gameplay is going to get really lame really fast. Already the players who *deserve* to be on the winning team are getting disgusted. They'll leave, and the flag rewards won't be as high. After that, the exploiters will begin to get bored as well, until nobody flags unless they want to grind money. HS money is only good for buying upgrades for a ship, and eventually players will find the superior ship isn't worth much in fun-inducing value when the only thing you can do with it is hover around base 7 waiting for an nme that is never going to come in order to get an ever-decreasing pot of money. While single game, single player benefits by hopping, ragequitting, whatever-the-exploit-is-it-doesn't-really-matter, over the long term, many games, entire zone, everybody benefits from balanced teams. If the game is legitimate, more players will join, games and flag rewards will get more or more epic. Unless you happen to be playercontinuum, you stand to win about half the flag games you participate in, so: (20,000 ave. flag reward and increasing) * (.5 win rate) * (1000 games) > (4,000 ave. flag reward and decreasing) * (1.0 win rate) * (1000 games) (Average flag rewards come from my personal observation of rewards between legitimate and 'kinky' games respectively, obviously subjective. BTW, if you think the 20k rewards you were seeing yesterday after players hopped are going to continue for long, you are fooling yourself.) It *is* possible to persuade players to stop exploiting because it is in the their *best interest* to do so in the long term/big picture. We just have to show them that in methods less complicated than my quasi-mathematics. I need everyone else's help in this because for all my faults, I happen to have the 'please put the crayon back in my brain' level of intelligence. Its so high that it sucks the fun out of life in a lot of ways and creates other faults. One of said faults is I lack the capacity to communicate to immature morons in means they understand, much less agree with.

For those who don't know, during today's reset, an experimental team evener was used. It didn't function, and players were able to hop frequencies freely. The behavior of the players was disturbing. While under such conditions, one can expect a few exploiters. But, in this case virtually the entire losing freq would freq hop to the winning week after the music started (and after the ragequit curtain fell), creating stacked teams as bad as 20 vs 1. Furthermore, many of the players present pointed the finger firmly at Ceiu while they themselves were exploiting the situation. While I am not denying that the team evener was faulty, that is not the real issue here. There will always be something wrong with the settings. Nobody on staff is perfect, and thus any product they make will have flaws. The real issue is ourselves. Players should not be so ready to exploit glitches. I mean, the intelligence and maturity level reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons - the one where there was a blackout, and the minute the denizens of Springfield noticed it, they proceeded to loot the city. Then, the next day they were all up in arms to the mayor because all of their homes got broken into. I'm sure there will be many wonderful ideas on how to reward players for being on the losing/less numerous team. Those are well and good, but the issue here is in the attitude and culture of the players in the zone. There's this attitude in many that the entire zone exists to serve their stats-building rather than a concept of being in competition with other players in a harmonious system. If this was a game of real life pick-up basketball, no group of 10 would stack themselves 9 vs 1 despite the fact that there is no referee to prevent them from doing that. They would most likely stack 5 vs 5. Furthermore, they would voluntarily split the more talented players in as even a manner as possible. They would do this because having a stacked team cream another defeats the whole point of the exercise. Having even teams is more of a challenge and more fun. Let the staff handle the settings. That's their lane. Who here is willing to do something about the culture of the players around here?

Cre, read the friggin topic. Chronic will be killed by Dr. Brain in an epic knife-fight on top of a massive radio antenna in Alaska. As soon as the combatants work out a time to meet, I can start arranging access to the antenna.

The most civilized way to settle this is to arrange a mano y mano knife fight to the death between Dr. Brain and Chronic. If Chronic wins, reset doesn't happen again, ever. If Brain wins, Chronic's account gets reset. This way, the conflict gets resolved in the bloodiest and most awesome way possible. Also, this way the rest of us can bet on the outcome too. I'll put $1,000 down on Dr. Brain killing Chronic in under 5 minutes. Now to pick a location. It has to be suitably epic. How about that radar tower in Alaska that rootbear says is an experiment in mind control?

The forum's name is 'Strategy & Player's Guides'. Its purpose is to discuss strategies and to guide players. So, if I wanted to discuss strategies in this forum.... Incidentally, I didn't use the word 'strategy', I used the word 'tactics'. Tactics refers to what the individual and small unit does in real-time conflict. So, yes, a disorganized ad hoc team can have tactics. An individual can have tactics as well. Written tactics are designed to form a base template for the inexperienced. Think of written tactics as your 'default settings'. They provide a template and an example of what right looks like, but by no means are they so rigid and inflexible that the right person can't modify them to suit the situation. Take Spidernl's shredder for example. Can a master at the right opportunity rush in on an nme lanc with a shredder to kill it? Certainly! However, should every novice on the team get shredder and mass to have an all-spam-gun defense? NO! Such a defense would get creamed. Can a warbird with 4 repels piloted by someone who has been playing HS for 4 years rush effectively? Certainly! Should every noob in a warbird with 2 repels be attempting the same thing for an all-warbird offense? NO! Such a team would get manhandled by the enemies' big guns. Tactics simply represent what 90% of your team should be doing at any one time. They aren't supposed to cover exceptions. You have to deal with those as the situation dictates. Courage: I listed 'Not rushing at all' as a dumb tactic. The only caveats on offense were to protect the lanc, don't rush ahead of your fire support, and don't suicide. I also said that too much rushing is less dangerous than too little rushing. All of these statements are consistent with your statement. Why are you disagreeing with me when we agree? To All: My guess is that the question you guys really were trying to ask is 'Why have you taken it upon yourself to write a guide when you haven't been playing HS that long?' You haven't asked that but that's the general tone I am getting from your comments. My answer is simple: 'Because you didn't'. Corey has proudly stated he has been playing HS for 4 years. He should have written this thing 3 years ago.

Shredder spammers just die. If the target moves out of the way, he'll return a few quick shots and pwn him. If the target dies, then some third party fires a couple quick shots and kills the shredder spammer. Frankly, they are more of a Kamikazi than a 'shadow ninja'. Best Kamikazi: Raw-tard Since when is a bomber up front? And as convoluted as it sounds, I am the best base gunner for that reason. I usually am the one in front. My goal on offense is to be right on the rusher's ass so that the nmes get killed the second they are repelled. The only exception is when the nme has a good leaker which the rest of my team isn't handling, in which case I hang back and take him out in order to protect the lanc. As important as making forward progress is, the first priority is to protect the lanc. Yeah, I was trying to come up with categories and got carried away with the 'worst abuser'. It funnier to talk about that though. If you think you are better than FDB, you are on crack. Portalling in is not a skill. It is one of the oldest tricks in Subspace. Its success or failure is entirely dependent on whether or not the other team has antiwarp on. The fact you can port in doesn't make *you* good, it just means the *nme* is dumb enough not to have anti. If you can do it 'every time', the implication is you only fly a lanc against poor quality enemy teams, because a good nme team will have constant anti coverage. FDB on the other hand tends to make the best enemy teams look like a bunch of noobs even if they are doing everything right.

Forgot to respond to this... I have no friends in the types of circles you tend to run with, true. Ofcourse, if you and your friends were in a tough situation, I'd wager it would be a clusterfuck over which one of you could screw everyone else over the quickest.

....... So, everyone here is just going to wait for staff to come by and solve their problems for them?

I am proposing a sort of grassroots movement for players in HS - a massive anti-ragequit pledge. Right now, the zone is suffering in the flag games due to a clear lack of interest in them at this time. This is no wonder. Most flag games yield rewards in about the 5k range. Also, during prime hours you will typically have about 5 people on one team and about 2 on the other. Whenever there are atleast 8 players on both teams, players start hanging around the zone in droves. Clearly, the problem isn't that people aren't interested in flagging. Players are interested in flagging, but only when the flag game is strong. If nobody RQed, everyone would benefit. It isn't apparent to the player on the losing team, but over the long term he is helping himself by sticking around. By contributing to the legitimacy of the flag game, the next game would be stronger and sooner. Nobody wants to be screwed. If you don't screw your fellow player, and he doesn't screw you, everyone wins. However, if you *do* screw him, he will most likely do the same to you, and right now nobody in this zone trusts each other another enough to flag. So, we come to the pledge. Very simple: Don't ragequit when you are losing. That doesn't mean you can't leave your computer if your house catches on fire, but the idea is that you stick around until the end of the flag game, even if you are losing. To show that you take this pledge, change the background of your banner to either a gold or silver background. If this interferes with your banner, you make make a gold or silver square in the top left corner. If you do this, other players will be more willing to join your team, because they will know you won't bail out on them. There is a reason why I called this a challenge. It isn't supposed to be easy. However, I will point out that there is another thread running on who the best player in HS is. I will say this. Champions don't punk out. Anyone who wants to make the claim they are the best player in HS needs to sign on to this pledge. To be great means to overcome difficulty. If you can't do that, you are a punk no matter how tuned your skills and equipment are. Also, if you are a lanc, you damn well better sign on as well. Yes, being a lanc sucks. You are the first person on your team to get screwed, and the first person idiots tend to blame when things don't work out. Still, you need to be reliable, not prone to temper tantrums. Yes, that's the stealther vulchass getting preachy on you. There are two things I don't do however. First off, I don't screw over the people on my team. Secondly, if somebody beats me, I don't deny them the reward for doing so.