Aileron

I've implemented a lot of suggestions. There are also a lot of suggestions which were partially implemented. attraction made the suggestion that the Nightwasp should be available sooner. The current mercenary system was generated based upon a suggestion that mercs either be made more expensive or more plentiful. There was also a suggestion to limit the damage from sabotage. I did that. One of the ones you made yourself if I recall was to remove transfer services. That was done. There was a suggestion to remove the bank. Granted I didn't do it fully, but I did remove the interest. At the start of this round turn rate was set to 1. After a couple of suggestions, it was re-set to 2. I can take constructive criticism, but you haven't been making constructive criticism, you engage in name-calling. You've called me a stupid corrupt moron, made claims that I don't understand this game, accused me of favoratism, suggested that I commit suicide, and then sit and wonder why I might be ignoring your "constructive" suggestions. Please, before you claim to have done constructive criticism again, take out your copy of Webster's or whatever dictionary you use and look up the definition of the term. You'll find that it among other things it involves being respectfull and avoiding personal insults. And I can't think of a more shining example of being counter-productive than your efforts to decruit players at the beginning of June.

Yeah, I think it was Ducky...sorry SeVeR. Wikipedia cites the official cause of the war, but one thing that is obvious about European history, especially while monarchy was still around, was that the official cause and the practical cause were usually two entirely different things. Armies don't come out of nowhere. They have to be recruited. Most people when given that proclaimation would say they would stick with confession. There had to be other factors. The serfs were recruited simply because if they did not go they were thrown off their lord's land and would be homeless, or worse. The knights went because it was their job. The lords went because most of them had two or more sons, by tradition the eldest would get the estate, and the lords wanted to give their younger sons a piece of real estate. The article didn't mention the crusades of children holding flowers. And the persecution of Jews in Europe was more or less constant rather than something that happened during the crusades. I would have expected more detail and less opinionative speculation from wikipedia... To be honest the people who likely looted the books were some sort of scribes or monks who were the only one educated enough to understand their value. Those type of people would take books rather than wealth. Not all science is Astronomy, but more importantly compairing the Greek Empire at its peak to Dark Age Christianity. During the height of Greek civilization, they knew these things. During the time before their civilization, writing didn't exist, but I'd venture to say that they probably didn't know much about astrology until after their civilization grew. I'm trying to say that Dark Age officials weren't crooks - they were! When the Christian civilization developed, their understanding of science was enough to start the modern age. It wasn't Christianity that caused the Dark Ages, it was the corruption and eventual collapse of Rome that did. And none of this is a valid reason to not follow Christ, who himself despised the Pharasise who were the dominant fundimentalist ideology at the time.

Actually this is the US protecting Europe, which is a service we are providing for our own selfish reasons. All parties involved are doing what's best for them, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't !@#$%^&*ociate with each other. Its like buying bread at the store. You get bread. The store gets money. Both parties benefit though both parties are acting selfishly and independent of each other.

This is the reason I am deleting your posts Ani. Read rule 5, or better yet read the post script. I for one like open debate but you are not debating. Debate implies some amount of intellectual reasoning is done. You are whining. You have a conclusion you wish to push, and you are making stuff up in order to push that conclusion. Secondly you've become a cancer to everyone who's actually trying to build something here. The only way to get a negative income is through self sabotage. The only way to be attacking someone with negative cash out is self-sabotage or very odd accident. All this negative income thing demonstrates is that there are a couple of people who are really trying to lose, most likely because *you* told them to seek out the inherent flaws you think are present. The people who are trying to win are actually doing quite well. This is the part where I'd normally say stop whining and start being constructive, but frankly I'm tired of this and will settle for a STFU! SR, you are partially correct. However: 1) It is not my intention to exclude this game to this forum's player base. 2 & 3) That's what clan vs. clan is for. I probably should have put this in bold last time, because this is important: I'm trying to find a way to promote clan vs. clan conflict. If the clans are recruiting, they go to the zones and recruit and train players. We need to change the way winners are determined. The current system promotes single play and last minute play. The new system will rank clans on a basis of performance the whole round. Secondly, a clan reset needs to be done to remove all the garbage clans from two or three months ago. Third the clicker will be put in, because that's what its there for. However, if anyone who I haven't already told to stfu has any suggestions as how to promote clan vs. clan activity, please make them.

The poll explains it all.

Well, it means I'll put it to a vote. Ani...shutup. Frankly, the only reason there even are people with negative money is because you told them to do it. And no I don't count it as a major hitch...the people who are "in debt" by game standards aren't advancing. BTW....BALEETED!!!

It also depends upon the game. Most games flat out have no addictive capacity whatsoever. There are some that can be pretty bad however. If the AMA comes to decide that it is a mental disease, I'd agree.

I wouldn't say the final episode "sucked", though I would say it wasn't very "final". They must be planning on finishing things up with a feature film. I swear one of you people was claiming to be satanist sometimes and making some D&D references including having a mage with 22 intelligence...SeVeR, I must be confusing you with another radical liberal on these forums. Christianity doesn't cause wars. The Crusades were caused by the constant need of European nobles to expand their territory, though I admit some of the nobles were idealogical. There's another point to be made about that event. When the Crusaders were sacking whatever place they got those writings from, they looted the writings. They could have !@#$%^&*umed the writings were "black magic" and burned them on the spot. They could have also simply ignored the writings thinking them worthless. The very fact that atleast some Crusaders chose to loot books rather than silver and gold implies that they were atleast enlightened enough to value knowledge. Generally peace always advances science. War advances engineering and technology. As for Christianity advancing science, Christianity did do a lot to advance medicine, atleast when compaired to the pagans that came before it. Most primative religions considered disease some sort of omen, and would cast out people with diseases. Christians however would care for diseased individuals. This caused immunities to build up in the general populace. While for the first few hundred years the medicine sucked, eventually advancements were made because diseased people were treated rather than cast out. Don't pretend to be an expert on the Dark Ages, because there is no such thing as an expert on the Dark Ages. There are virtually no records from this period today. We can today only guess what role Christianity played during this time. The rules Christianity adds run counter to biology though. For instance sex before marriage is a rule design to prevent people from giving in to biological urges before they in our society are ready for a life-long commitment. And for reference, there is no Christian rule against watching porn, though there is an interpretation forbiding the making of it.

You dropped the f-bomb a couple times rootbear. In hindsight I should have censored. As for who's who...Knightflame is obviously the evangelist, though I mean than in a general rather than technical sense. If I had to guess I'd say he is a Baptist missionary, but I obviously can't be sure. SeVeR happens to be a satanist or atleast has the mindset of one according to an internet testing site as I doubt he spends his free time drawing pentagrams on the floor in goat's blood, though we have establised that he spends a lot of time playing Dungeons & Dragons and in my experience the stereotype of all satanists playing D&D is true. (Keep in mind that this is a non-reversable if-then statement.) I don't recall whether or not Drake considers himself satanistic or atheistic. And there is no debate as to which science fiction show is best. Stargate is. Anyone who thinks otherwise is denying the path of origion and we all know what that means.

Well, I promised that if this round completed without a major hitch that the proposal to increase round length would be considered, and the round went through without a major hitch. If I also recall correctly it means Animate Dreams owes me $20.

That's the third theory we have on the subject of people leaving. It also was the precise reasoning that caused turn rate to go from 4 to 2 last round. However, I wouldn't consider 2 turns per hour to be a speed-round, and I can cite a few MMORPGs who use that rate. The problem here though is that the ships are unbalanced. This is a predicted problem - I figured that when making 8 ships I was inevitably going to screw up one or two. This usually isn't a critical problem as people will simply choose the overpowered ship. However, the ship in question, the Terrier, has a 30% strike bonus and a 15% defense penalty. That means a lot more players than usual have an offensive spin, which causes constant attacks. Next round the Terrier will be nerfed a lot, the Warbird nerfed slightly, and the Leviathon and Weasel improved. I will emphasis "slightly" at this point for the Warbird, as it is the only truly defensive ship and I infact want half of the players (everyone who preferrs defense over offense) using it, though I will also make the Weasel something viable for the defensively minded. There are also a host of tactics that seem to be present with the goal of not playing for 3 weeks but making a quick run at the last day. There have been multiple proposals with regards to settings changes to solve this. However, I've come to the conclusion that regardless of what settings changes are implemented, players will find a strategy along those lines because the system in place rewards being in the top 3 at the last second rather than sustained performance. Thus to problem is not in the settings themselves but rather how winners are determined. Simply put, next round the top 3 will be taken daily, and whoever is in the top 3 will earn tallies for that day. Whoever has the most tallies at the end of the month will be winner. Basically, a system will be in place that will reward people for being on top the whole time rather than at the last second, because this round the player who performed the best was clearly zappa. Other miscellaneous settings changes: There will be a wider spread in weapons so that people don't max out their troops so easily, and spy weapons will be better because though it was intended to nerf sabotage, it wasn't quite intended to nerf sabotage this much, and recon should be possible. As for those other two theories mentioned at the beginning of this post: Polix has a theory that people aren't playing because it is complicated. I agree...there have been things added that complicate the process particularly at the start and end of the rounds, most of which can and will be removed if the tally system (admittingly something also complicated, but only my end, not to the player's) is put in place. My theory on the subject is that most players are going to leave a couple months after trying it anyway, and the way to offset that is to recruit faster than the rate at which players leave. Generally the best way to do this is to have players recruit allies. The clicker/recruiter feature, as annoying and unfair as it is, will likely be added next round, as it was exclusively designed for the purpose. However, studying the course of how this game developed, first there were the Forum Killers, then the SSCentralGods. After that came the MG Infidels who recruited under the basis of taking down the elitist SSCentralGods. Then there were the MG Terrorists who recruited under the basis of shutting up the annoying recruiters of the MG Infidels. Then Penis was created to take down the cheating MG Terrorists. Then Vagina was formed to take out the arrogant overpopulated Penis clan. The pattern is that the wide scale movements of this game were based upon one clan recruiting allies in attempts to take down another clan which has somehow made them angry. This round, the kind considerate humble fair-playing Vagina clan has not angered anyone...jerks!!! As such there isn't any massive recruiting going on. I need a method to sow some sort of clan rivalry. I have one idea, but it seems to be far to ambitious to implement within 5 days. My other idea is to do a clan reset. The live clans will simply re-register (hopefully under a different name because I am frankly tired of clans named after reproductive organs.) However, dead clans will collapse and maybe their members will be absorbed into the large clans. Generally though 2 or 3 large clans will be ideal while a dozen or so tiny clans defeats the purpose. I frankly don't have any great ideas on this particular subject, and any intelligent and constructive ideas on how to encourage more clan vs. clan activity would be welcome.

First off he's as welcome here as your are. There's nothing wrong with trying to convert people, and as annoying as it might be to you, asking him to stop would be undemocratic. Secondly what do you expect from a topic en!@#$%^&*led "Christ"? A conversation about Tiger Woods not winning first at Oakmont? You could easily avoid such "pressure" by not reading the topic. Personally, I think watching an evangelist and a couple satanists argue is funny. They barely speak the same language.

Rootbear's post was deleted due to profanity. Keep in mind that this forum is open to children. I for one sometimes have to access these forums in a library which happens to be nextdoor to my old elementary school, flanked by 7 and 8 year olds as well as library volunteers who know my family. The prospects of one of those kids reading my screen and repeating that stuff is unsettling. Besides, use of profanity is only going to increase the chances of this forum being blocked by filters used by schools and offices. SeVeR, your statement !@#$%^&*umes Christianity to be anti-scientific and anti-free will when outside of the dark ages Christianity has done no such thing, and even during the dark ages Christianity was only partially subverted to the dominant powers at a time when all other socio-economic forces were completely subverted. The Crusades for instance were one of the biggest contributors to scientific thought in history. The primary benefit was that the returning Crusaders brought back scientific works from the Arab world after the Arabians were no longer interested in science. Most of what we know of Greek and Roman science actually came by this route. The Crusades also brought a time of peace in Europe because the Europeans didn't have to worry about each other. England and France for instance were at peace for the only time in history prior to the 1800s because the armies of both countries were in the Holy Land. This peace also lead to scientific advancement. The anti-free will thing is what irks me though. The notion of some religious figure commanding a legion of unquestioning followers is something that doesn't exist outside of Hollywood. Sure there were cases in history of religious leaders, but those leaders needed to have a real-world buerocratic system under them just like any purely secular leader. Yes, the Pharohs of Egypt claimed to be deities, but what kept the Egyptian populace from revolting was the efficient buerocracy that was in place. I for one have never had a priest try to tell me how to live my life. I've gone three years straight of not putting any money in the collection bin, and haven't been scorned for it. Usually the church recieves more finances than they need and they have to find some way to give it back to the community. I have never been told to hate anyone of a different belief, and certainly not race because "Catholic" means "universal" as in "one church for everyone", and besides we are doing much better among African and Hispanic populations anyway. The only time I've experienced that style of manipulation was when I attended a Baptist service, in which I observed that their followers are taught to scorn Catholics. However, that is a very small denomination. There is something however that is more detrimental to free will. As odd as my next source is, this was covered in the second Matrix movie. In the opinion of the machines, humans were controlled by environment and biochemical impulses. For instance, Dopamine causes anger. If a human being only used the standard of what he or she "feels" is right, that person would judge situations based upon their mood, which is based upon hormones, and would essentially be a slave to those hormones. That's how it works with animals. Animals don't have free will; they are merely slaves of their own biology. Religion in general attempts to challenge followers to overcome those chemicals by setting a constant model of behavior.

I actually don't like the idea of having more soldiers than weapons, but the idea is correct. I'll probably increase overall weapon strengths by next month, and also put a wider spread between the different weapons so that everyone doesn't jump to L3 Guns/L2 Bombs in the first week. It wouldn't solve this problem though. This problem is not caused by settings, but rather simply by persons who wish to be annoying. There isn't a benefit to a negative income. The people with negative incomes are on the bottom of the active player lists. As for interest...its summer. Most of the smaller zones shut down this time of year and I guess this event is similar.

I have recieved a complaint about vulgarity. I don't see any now. If vulger posts were made and subsequently deleted, don't make more. Drake, don't disprove claims that were not made. That's part of what's known as a straw-man arguementative fallicy, where one creates a strereotypical likeness of your opponant in your mind and argue against it. It is extremely rude. No one claimed the pyramids were divinely planned. And a lot of studies that went towards proving the bible were partially successfull. But usually its a group of people who go out to disprove the Bible and turn up with nothing. Truth be told however, the latest of these event occured 2000 years ago. I mean, 200 years ago the United States was a second world nation only recently independent from Great Britain. If you could talk to an English-speaking person from 500 years ago, you would barely understand each other due to how much the language has change. If he were from 750 years ago, you flat out couldn't. 1000 years ago would pre-date any European nation that currently exists today. Now, keep in mind a mere 20 years ago people used floppy B-drive disks. Imagine how much information on those disks has already been lost. The very fact that the Bible survived all this time implies that the center of it must have been important just to survive all this time. By the same token, I'd be carefull quoting the frills of it. Actually, the places where flooding occured didn't really use boats. Sure the Sumerians probably had rafts, but nothing that you could really ride out a flood on. Essentially it would take divine invervention for one of them to survive that flooding via boat in ancient Sumeria, because no mortal knew how to build a ship at that time and place. Besides, Christians don't have to take the old testiment literally. I'd say the pyramids are overrated. They required as many man-hours as proportional for any other structure in their time, and constructed it in fewer hours by having more men than usual. That is unless you believe the theory with which they might have used kites, for which I'd argue against with the lack of development upon that technology. If they did it for the pyramids, they would have continued to use the technique with other projects and would probably still be doing it today. We do indeed have nothing like it in modern times, because modern nations (except some communistic ones) don't blow half of their national budget towards construction of a monument to the current leader. If I had to pick an ancient wonder that I would like to see (if I had a time machine), it would be the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. That was a engineering marvel.

I was making a basic statement for the viewers who aren't physicists, and given how this topic is about religion and not physics I didn't want to digress. Yes, matter can become energy and vice versa. Even more interesting is that one of the corollaries of the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle a particle and an anti-particle could spontaneously spawn out of nothingness provided they annihilate each other again quickly enough. The point is that in a closed system the total change in matter and energy is a zero sum equation. As for the "Morons on both sides" quote. Its rude, but it explains my point. While most Christians are normal people who are perfectly reasonable in terms of self-motivation. However, there are some, especially among the relatively newer demonations who think that Jesus is going to swoop down and solve all of their problems. They are very small-minded and very loud. They think that "Thou shalt not use the name of the lord thy God in vain." means "don't use profanity". Infact, it means that one shouldn't cite the name of God unless one is qualified. Unless you are an educated preacher, you shouldn't be preaching. Even then, you should restrict your audience to either a church setting or during missionary work. Missionary work means "Solve their problems first." That in turn means "Seek an audience that actually has some real problems." For example, Mother Teresa. She went to starving villiages, solved their problems with poverty, and only then would ask them to convert. Her words were backed by her deeds. Without deeds, faith can be false and words can be empty. It deeply frustrates me that religions so similar to my own practice the policy of annoying strangers with their simple-mindedness. It also frustrates me that people like SeVeR will understandably get annoyed by these psuedo-Christians and assume that all Christians think as they do. All the psuedo-Christians do is push people away. Unfortuneatly, its hard to get the message out that these fools don't represent us.

Zero income was tried last round and people still bought all the mercs. It would have been ideal to have a per capita merc limit, but the closest thing to it is to have negative income. Its also more "realistic". In real life Mercenaries don't give their employers money, nor do they stick around for free. And don't bring clans into this discussion because they have nothing to do with it.

Morons on both sides. Knightflame doesn't have true faith. God exists whether other people believe in him or not. If you want to convert someone, people are only converted by example. Show them good deeds first, and only then should you ask them to change their faith. As for !@#$%^&*, God isn't vindictive or punishing. !@#$%^&* doesn't exist to punish people. However, sin exists and cannot be let into heaven. !@#$%^&* exists to dispose of the sin in a safe manner, like a trash can. !@#$%^&* itself doesn't explicitly torture the inhabitants, but it is full of sin and sin by its very nature damages everything around it. Again, like a trash can. It doesn't stink on its own, it just happens to be full of trash and trash stinks. To that end, !@#$%^&* is more of a self creation made by those who live in sin, rather than a hot place that everyone who disagrees with you is sent to. Now for the other morons. The most fundimental Law of Physics is that nothing can be created or destroyed. That law is the only thing in common between Classical and Modern Physics. Each individual can be certain absolutely of their own existance, those of us religious "nuts" refer to this as a soul. Nevertheless, one can be more certain of the existance of their own soul than the existance of the rest of the universe. Granted, one has absolutely no reason to conclude that everyone else has a soul. However, the notion that one is the only being truly in existence seems incredibly selfish, so I'll ignore it. It could be possible that upon death, the soul simply dissappears, but that is unlikely because nothing else in the universe simply phases out of existance. The Hindu model of the soul being recycled seems to be the simplest. However, the world population isn't constant, it is increasing. If we were to assume one soul per person, the implication that souls like everything else cannot be created or destroyed would imply that over time there would be an every-increasing population of soulless people, which would imply elitism. However, Hinduism does include the notion that animals also has souls, and thus the increasing human population might be being followed by a decreasing animal population. However, that in turn implies complexity, as some sort of mechanism would have to exist which prevents animals from being concieved when there is a lack of souls available. Most religions, and Hinduism as well, believes in a sort of heaven. This model would involve a seperate place outside our universe where souls can go in and out of, The polytheistic models were exactly as the athiests imply...supersticious notions !@#$%^&*igned to phenomina. The monotheistic model is different. It stems from a different question: Is the universe random or is it planned? If it is random, then there are been a lot of improbable occurances in history which happened to be necessary for our existance, (a one-in-a-billion type of chance for the creation of Earth, of life being formed out of primordial ooze, of life eventually evolving to form intelligence, etc.) wheras a planned universe explains those improbabilities easily. A planned universe implies some sort of planner. As for why we cannot observe this planner, I'll pose a rhetorical question: Why is air invisible? The answer is that the atmosphere came to exist before humanity did, and our eyes need to recieve an EM frequency that is transparant within the atmosphere. Otherwise the only thing we would see would be air and our eyes would be useless as a practical sense. Similarly it will always be impossible for us to sense God, because the existance of order in the universe is ever-constant and there is no need for a sense to moniter said contancy. I've ranted enough. Point being, most Christians HAVE thought things through. Its just that the ones that don't are very loud.

1) Spell my name right 2) Getting negative points is in the FAQs 3) Don't blame me for your carelessness 4) Negative merc income is the only way to prevent people from buying all the mercs, so its not going to be changed.

Yeah, sorry. I logged on, and viewed evidence of activity from non-staff and !@#$%^&*umed everyone had permissions. I did double-check to see if the army core was on. Other than that, I didn't really know what was wrong to be honest. Oh, and sorry for attacking you, though I swear I did NOT go after you specifically. I hit anyone who has cash out.

Moved to gamer's lounge.

As far as I can tell, SS RPG is up and players have permissions to enter.

Now that I think about it, Ron Paul looks good right now because he's a minor candidate. He hasn't been targeted by critics. He hasn't had to anser questions. He hasn't been the punch line on the Colbert Report. At this stage he can show only his good side. Republicans seem to like running moderates though. The Democratic race seems to be that they are arguing about who is opposed to Iraq the most. They are actively going towards that particular extreme. All the Republicans need to do is nominate a moderate. For instance, Guiliani. I hate his domestic stances. But, if he was running against Hillary or Obama, I'd vote for him. This is exactly how Bush got elected twice, especially the second time. The Democrats found the most anti-Iraq candidate they could find, and Bush picked up everyone who was uncomfortable with Kerry.

Keep in mind that Bush is going back to Texas in a couple years. He can't take a tough stance on illegal immigration because immigrants have a lot of power down there.

I don't know President Bush or anyone in the Bush family, but my small town has a family just like them. They talk down and act really friendly, and I thought they were idiots until they all came back from expensive colleges with medical liscenses. I find it strange how people who claim to doubt everything only just doubt those who are elected into government and blindly trust anyone else. It is said that in politics, a lie that is said a hundred times becomes a truth. In this case, the lie that Bush is some sort of simpleton farmboy was told by Gore in the 2000 campaign because that was his election strategy, and the New York Times because there is some bad blood between the Bush family and that organization. They repeated that !@#$%^&*ertation enough that everyone believed it. Their downfall was that they eventually started to believe it themselves. Bush is a second generation president and a Yale graduate. While he probably could do so and survive, he's *probably* never done a week's worth of manual labor. Between his family and his education, he could easily act like an academic in public, but he doesn't. He uses the farmboy facade. In half the pictures you see him, he's in working clothes at some sort of factory with the workers of that factory behind him. Do you honestly think he can't afford a suit? There is an entire region of Texas which the Bush family owns, like on one of those 80s detective shows. If there is some sort of hidden workings which put Bush in power, Bush is probably in charge of that too. Bush's only mistake regarding Iraq is not putting enough PR towards it. We've accomplished every objective of the war. We've won the war. The problem is that neither we nor the terrorists *know* that we've already won. Granted, its hard to win the press when your family enemy is the New York Times, but every day Al Jazeera displays propaganda for the insurgency while our own press asks if we can win this war. Keep in mind in order for us to at this point fail in our first objective, Saddan Hussein would have to rise from the dead and with some sort of army of zombies re-take Iraq. The Baathists are gone and the democratic genie is out of the bottle. The insurgents were at first fighting for the country, then provinces, after that cities, and now they are fighting to hold on to neighborhoods. That seems to show that their area of operations is shrinking. However, 100 lies become the truth. By !@#$%^&*erting that the war is going badly enough times, the press has convinced everyone that its going badly. But other than the press game, and given the fact that this is a war and that you always have setbacks in war. Intel is never right, and enemies never give up easily. We couldn't honestly be asking for it to be going any better right now. And, to understand Iraq's tactical significance, one has to extrapolate where the Middle East is headed about 50 years from now. Which goes back to Bush's intelligence. He was smart enough to see what was going to happen. Both Iran and Iraq would have developed some sort of WMD. They would point them either at each other or at Israel. Hussein would die, one of his stupid inexperienced sons would take over, use the weapons within a month, and the fallout of the resulting war would be rather unpleasent. In a more general case, Iraq was acquiring military power faster than they were advancing socially which if continued would inevitably mean problems developing somewhere down the line.