Aileron

Well, its sort of a wierd arguement I'm making. By no means should a government think for its citizens. The citizens should be free to think for themselves. However, if you have a regime like China that already thinks for the citizens in the first place, then they should atleast do it properly.

Well, I'm a math major. The #1 employer of math majors in the country is the NSA. The NSA views knowledge of Arabic as a big bonus. Its one of the most politically tense classes you can take. Roughly half of the students are either ROTC or people who want to go into national intelligence agencies, and the other half are people who want to be translators or diplomats. So, half of us have a life goal of making peace with the same group of people that the other half's life goal is to create a high body count of. Many of the hard-core cultural lectures lead to an hour long arguement. If it wasn't so !@#$%^&* difficult I'd recommed it...the arguements are fun as !@#$%^&*.

Regardless, seige and fortification techs will be available next month. However, This poll is about whether or not they should be available THIS month. The reset bug doesn't occur if we are adding something new, and besides everyone is at seige level 0 anyway. Pictures won't be available until I get around to making pictures. Given how the new season of StarGate starts this Friday, fishing season starts this Saturday, and I'll likely have to write an Arabic textbook, that will be quite a while. They should be available by May.

Well, I did okay on the test. Generally, my teacher has given me an extra credit option though. All I have to do is write a new textbook and he'll give me an "A" in the course.

As for the addictiveness of MMORPGs, I'll tell you from first hand experience that they can be worse than alchohol. I have never smoked cigarrets or used any drugs that were illegal, so I can't make further comparison. The nagging feeling that you are going to be attacked when you sleep or go to work, which you carry with you 24/7, can add additional ficitious stress. Worse yet, they are based upon statistics and not willpower, which can be devastating for a type A personality. When a type A finds a problem, there is first an initial decision as whether or not to solve the problem. If the type A decides to solve the problem, they summon forth willpower and try and try and try again to solve the problem with more and more strength and determination each time. For instance, if a type A wants to smash a brick wall down, first they will try a fist, then a hammer, then a vehicle, and then some explosives, until either the wall comes down or they have exhausted their options. In an RPG, the willpower of the player is irrelevant. When a type A finds a problem in an RPG, they do their usual solution, except that their efforts are meaningless leading to eventual exhaustion. In your typical RPG, situations like this can occur fairly frequently, so the type A can run into failure after failure, which can damage their psyche. Finally, there are players with stats so strong that others can't touch them. In reality, such a position is impossible. There are always new challengers willing to take you down, and unless the champion stays committed into holding on to his position, he loses it. If a champion boxer stops practicing, a new challenger will come by and take his !@#$%^&*le. Thus the champion cannot get too !@#$%^&*y. In an RPG however your stats are your stats no matter how little effort you are putting forth into them. This leads to unjustified !@#$%^&*iness as these people have risen in game to god-like status. I have stated in one of the RPG related threads that "If I ever start justifying my in-game actions, please smack me with a getwithit stick." In reality, all action made by strong players is to prevent the weak players from catching up. That is actually HEALTHY behavior. However, when the strong player believes he can assign a justification to such action, that !@#$%^&*ertion must be based upon a statment that somehow the weak player interfered with the natural order of the game, that the champion deserves his position so much so that all challengers are inherently wrong for challenging him. I've seen such weakness over and over. In the last real MMORPG I played, the leading group, which I'll call "The Jimbob Alliance" to protect their iden!@#$%^&*ies, have reached this critical m!@#$%^&* of inflated egos. Then what happened was after some updates, a sort of glitch was overlooked. Suffice to say, a single player who had been playing as a "hitman" (players with no alliance and no stats who for a fee will create stats temporarily to attack a strong target, and then get rid of them so the target can't get revenge), had found this glitch and taken the Jimbobs down a notch. After spending a day whining on the forums, they proceeded to strike out at a bunch of random players, most of which had also been a victim of the aformentioned hitman. They justified their action by saying they "knew" these people hired the hitman. In reality they had no clue and were just making an excuse to themselves to take out some of their rivals. The alliances these rivals were in banded together to take down the Jimbobs, because that's what alliances do. At that point the Jimbobs cried conspiracy, that all of these alliances had conspired together to take them down. In the resulting war, the Jimbobs used about $1000 in donations to the site which gave them the stats to defeat everybody. In real life, their immature at!@#$%^&*ude would have taken them down. However, in an MMORPG at!@#$%^&*ude is irrelevent, you only have stats. Thus, no matter how weak or immature the Jimbobs were, they had the best stats and thus won. However, In my opinion the true winners of the war was the website who recieved quite a bit of real-life money in the process. Suffice to say, they aren't really that fun when you get to know them. If the government decided to ban them outright and gave a good enough reason to override cons!@#$%^&*utional rights, I would support the decision. The state does have an interest in limiting or banning them, because intelligence is only as good as the mental balance of the person who has it. The reason why the state gives out scholarships to students isn't a social program, its because over the long term that student will make the state a lot of money. Similarly, it is in the public's interest that geeks don't play MMOPRGs, because if they don't they will make more money in their professional lives and go farther in their social lives, which means the geeks make more money and make more geek babies. I still say China is wrong. The reason they are wrong is because they don't grant their citizens the natural inalienable rights. However, given that they do so in the first place, they are making a correct decision, because nothing good will ever come out of an MMORPG.

That's pretty typical for China.

North. And, when it says ~50, it means 70.

Well, my competer is a Dell Inspiron 1100. Seriously, when I buy a PC game and ask for technical support, they tell me to buy a new computer.

Did I not say that I know it was my responsability? I'd be pissed though. If having to waste time tracking down cheaters is the straw that breaks the back of the camel that is my academic career, I'd be pissed. Putting it this way, to graduate from college, I need 120 credits and to get 120 credits I need 4 credits in an extremely difficult Arabic class which I, nor anyone else for that matter, am not doing well in. I have passed all of the other requirements, and have proven that I am a capable Mathematician. I just need the 120 credits. To be honest I was a fool for taking a foreign language and such a difficult foreign language at that - I shouldn't have taken the chance and should have taken Basketweaving 101. But frankly, I fail this test and my entire life has been ruined. If you think I'm "stupid", how about YOU try to learn Arabic. Its so difficult it took my class months just to learn the alphabet. Infact, ARABS don't like to speak in Standardized Arabic. They know their localized dialects, but when communicating with other "arab-speaking" persons who know a different dialect, they use English. One thing I want to make clear, I am NOT a stable individual. I may be intelligent, but time and time again my temper and other issues have gotten in the way. I cannot afford the help I need. I need to graduate first. All my life I have walked along the edge of reason verses emotion. Tomorrow the outcome of that battle will be decided. I didn't want to be smod - I was drafted. Still I had some responsibilities here, so when I saw a problem, I had to fix it. I would have preferred to study though. If I fail tomorrow, NOTHING will be able to hold back my temper ever again. I already have a contempt for all life. When i go to sleep I hear voices, so I hate sleeping (as many people here have noticed). I have developed an involuntary twitch in my right eyebrow. I am afraid of what may happen if it gets worse... I hope Shock is proud of himself...he just very well have made the difference between a genius and psychotic. And for what? So he could prove that he could crack the security of a forum game that runs on the honor system in the first place. I know that the fact that my life is on the brink of falling apart is my fault...don't remind me!!!! Let me vent a little. As for the "cleverness" of his scheme, he wasn't even the first person here to do it. There are records in March of other players doing the same thing. Deathboy-evil was the one who came up with it first. The difference is they didn't use bots and didn't abuse it. They tried it until they got bored, and then gave it up. The point of this RPG isn't in actually winning. You are supposed to spend 5 minutes out of 8 hours playing it, and then spend 10 minutes on the forums bragging about your decisions in a funny manner. I'd say Shock is about as clever as these people: The Cheats Its the same idea. The reason why it was so easy is because the prize was an award for being re!@#$%^&*ed. People weren't looking for cheaters because they !@#$%^&*umed no one would waste their time cheating for it.

Alright, Sampico isn't even on the RPG staff, so he can't limit transfers Its not even a feature on the core, so Polix and I really can't do it either For preventative measures to take place, it is going to require that the Army Core system come up with another patch. Quit acting like Robin Hood here. If you noticed a flaw, just simply PM staff!!! Fundimentally, all security systems can be breached, it is only a matter of whether or not its worth it to. This game works on the principle, "Yes, its easy to breach, but at the same time there isn't much gain you get out of doing so." It's like taking steroids to win the office softball game. Trust me, I have a BIG exam tomorrow, which I didn't study enough for because I had to spend time dealing with and arguing with cheaters. I know studying is ultimately my responsability, but I swear if fail this exam, you people are NEVER going to allowed back in.

I think I can speak the truth for everyone when I say this: Yes, Global Warming is an issue, but no one is going to elect a President based upon it. Basically, its a problem for Congress. If we were to reduce Global Warming, the bill to do so would have to be created in Congress. All the President would have to do for the process is sign the thing. The overall goal of the next Presidency involves dismantling all terrorist organizations before they acquire a nuke or lesser WMD. It involves tracking down all nuclear materials in the former USSR, taking out terrorists organizations, and taking out other possible developers. What I (as a Republican admittingly) would like to see in a Democrat, is though the party stands against the Iraq War, I'd like to see a candidate who didn't complain too much about it. Point being it was a leadership decision. If they didn't have WMDs, we'd be involved in an unecessary conventional war...if they did, we would eventually be involved in a nuclear war. There's no luxery of hindsight in such a decision. Whether we knew that they had WMDs or not was the CIA's job, the Presidents job was to measure the risks based upon what he sees and make a decision based upon that information, with the knowledge that no matter what he decides the decision is the wrong one because no intelligence is perfect. Its analagous to the difference between playing poker, and watching poker on TV. When you are watching it on TV, you see all the player's cards. If a player is sitting on pocket Kings, and his opponant is acting weak, he raises. However, if someone watching TV sees all and knows that the opponant has pocket Aces, he doesn't have a right to call the player a moron, because he sees the outcome of the hand, not the information that was available at the time of decision. They want to say it was wrong, that's their opinion. However, if they do not understand why Bush made the decision he did, and wish to call him all sorts of names, then they are not ready for a leadership position.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/111240926.png Alright, this isn't even funny. I didn't even know I had Qwest...cheap ASSS.

Well, actually, I can't implement ANY of my suggestions without radically altering the core, which is both time consuming and beyond my abilities. As for super savings, it might be removed or it might be increased, depending upon what some prediction curves say. Odds are, it will likely be removed, because it will be hard to balance out with the rest of the game. After looking over the core, there are a few things that can be done: Commander support Siege and Fortification Upgrades SVS based armory Obviously, Siege and Fortification upgrades will be in place by next month. My thoughts as to what to call them are: Solo Attack, Team Attack, Attaching, Dep Attaching, Sneaky Dep, Anti-Warp, Suicide Bursters, Bricklayers, Portaling in, massive Thor Barrage Drop in Space, Drop in Base, Attaching, Home Anchor, Entrance Guard, Second Anchor, Warping out at the last second, Minelayers, Flanking, Bottleneck

Well, the solution to the transfer problem so far is to just moniter the transfer logs, because this really isn't that subtle. I will say that this isn't the worst bug this game has, though I won't elaborate.

You think that idea of yours was origional? Equivolent to SS, that would be like downloading an aimbot, going to a new zone, having the bot attach to you, and then when the staff comes by and bans you, point out that they didn't get around to putting up rules in A1 yet. This isn't the Kings of Chaos main server. This is a small event done on a forum that is devoted to Subspace. It doesn't have the population or resources of a huge MMORPG, because it isn't. If you want, we could start charging people to come to the site in the form of "donations" for "upgrades", and hire a programming team to make SSForum hack-proof. However, that is absurd for the scale of this game.

Hold on, I've looked the core over now...most of those things cannot be implemented without editing the core.

Actually it probably wasn't that hard to do.

Well, right now, you should send 1 spy for all operations, and the losses for failing a spy attempt couldn't get lower. You have a point though. Maybe set the covert phaseout to 16 and make sabotage count for 3 recons.

Well, you are correct Audry, not all of them whined so much about it. It was mostly 3 or 4 kids who said all that much. As for the start of your post, I can't really understand what you are saying because you aren't using complete English. However, provided you haven't changed your race 10,000 times so far this month, I'd expect that you won't be confused with the automated accounts. Its also interesting how all 7 of these "friends" who have spent several hours a day resetting their race haven't said anything so far.

Its pinned. Generally, it was most of the MG Terrorists clan, with a few exceptions, who had each created a second automated account. Those accounts when active were programmed to continuously change race, and then transfer the 100,000 points (in the form of weapons) and 100 turns to the master account, repeating this process several times a minute for hours at a time. The transfer logs are literally spammed full of 700 pages of evidence of these transfers.

It really didn't have anything of worth Veg...I'll skim it over for you. After revealing what had happened, the cheaters initially tried to confuse the issue, stating that transferring is legal (it is - that isn't why they are banned though.) Then, they claimed that these accounts were just friends of theirs when the logs clearly imply some sort of automation. (If they said "indentured servant" instead of "friend" I might have believed them, except even a slave needs to rest and take a break once in a while.) Then, they accused me of using my new position as smod to advance in the ranks as a player. When I resigned my player account in response to this accusation, they accused me of having been cheating myself and using the resignation to cover it up. Then, when they ran out of illegitimate criticism, they just started a string of childish insults, including the use of a well-known racial epithet starting with the letter "N" when infact I am caucasian, and a recomendation that I commit suicide.

As I said, that's why there are turn limits. These people simply had unlimited turns.

Well, actually I wasn't planning to ban them. They didn't directly participate in the scam, though they were recipients of a lot of resources the cheaters acquired at the last minute after I banned the robot accounts but before I got around to the players's accounts. Afterwards, about five players played hot-potato with the illegal weapons in an effort to confuse me, which was successfull to be honest. I still don't know where all of them went. Without a record of what they had before, I'm afraid to just blatantly take weapons away from them, even if its obvious they got them from cheaters. I dealt with the turns. I dealt with the source of the income that was necessary to support these weapons. Without it, I'd expect that they are going to fall apart within a week anyway, especially since there is likely a mob of pissed off player forming to m!@#$%^&* them. What these people are guilty of is not cooperating with staff, as well as violating forum rules in the topic that had been trashed. Frankly, I'm waiting until Polix shows up, and I'll have him decide what to do about them. (By the way, he's probably going to take my side...the reason I was promoted was because I did the math, and found out that the MG Terrorists' income had exceeded what was possible from the total population. I was essentially granted the position to look for possible cheating.)

This topic is created for R&D purposes. Generally when we run into problems over the course of the round, we will add to the list. Basically, here are a list of features in my little dream world I hope to be able to impliment for the next round. I will leave the thread open so as to receive feedback. Transfer Services will be limited to 5 transfers per day. Players will be limited to 5 race changes. (Before last night, I could never figure out why they had that rule in my last RPG.) Weapons repair costs will be fixed. Weapons will also deteriorate at a much faster rate, so that you HAVE to repair them on a regular basis, and it will be possible to m!@#$%^&* players in order to induce weapon damage. All attacks that do less than 1/5th of the damage that the defender does to the offense will be considered critical failures and will cause no casualties or weapons damage. Income per soldier will be increased to about what it was last round. Last round the income was balanced, there just happened to be a super saver account that caused people to generate ridiculous point values. Whether or not you can attack somebody will be a rank-based check instead of a population-based check. For ships, if it is possible I plan to reinstate the 8 ships. This is to make new players who haven't been playing Subspace since the 90s feel more comfortable. However, the 5 oldskool ships will be available as a bonus to players who have participated in previous rounds. The ships won't be more stastically powerfull, just cooler. A player's clan will be visible on the attack page. There will be a clan ranking system. A market feature will be added, where you can trade turns, points, and units. Exchange rates will be based upon the number of each resource on the market, which will grow at the same rate the total population does. Though I do not know why, players will be limited to 5 trades per day. (I suspect that there could be a technique for lameness with infinite trades) Finally, sabotage will be rebuilt from the ground up. Recons will not count towards the covert phase limit. Sabotage attempts will cost 5 turns to carry out. You will not be able to specify which weapon you wish to take out. Instead, your options will be limited to "offensive weapons", "defensive weapons", or "general". Sneaking in will be easier for groups of spies of more than 1. Damage will be automatically calculated by the sum of the target weapons, the strength of the attacker's spy, and the defender's covert, the ranks and army size of the players, and the number of spies sent. That damage will be done all weapons, starting at the weakest and working to the strongest until a weapon has strength greater than the remaining damage. Basically, it means that the less spies you send, the greater your chances of success. However, the more spies you send, the more damage you do to the weapons. It will be tuned so that it takes a couple hundred spies to do a realistic amount of damage to the defender's stockpile. That way, if it fails, the attacker actually loses something. Also, since sabotage is intended as an alternative way for players with weak offenses and defenses to take down stronger players, rank and army size will also be a larger factor. Comments on any of these ideas are welcome.

Indeed...I don't know if this round is going to last until May at this point. While I dealt with the source of the illegal funds, there are still 3 or 4 players with hundreds of weapons who indirectly benefited from them. However, keep in mind these people received free turns as well as free weapons. Without them, they won't be able to attack as often as they did. Which reminds me...I forgot to track down illegal turns last night. All players who were !@#$%^&*ociated with the banned accounts, or were one of the two probationary accounts, have had their turns reduced to 200. And don't try to tell me you got those 50,000 turns by any means that were close to fair.