spidernl

How about scaling parts in the editor? Now, I know that the textures won't like being stretched or reduced in size, but it's still freedom for the mapper and people are guaranteed to find a use for it eventually.

When did this topic turn into Avast obsessing over DSB?

Opportunism, meh. More like selective entering in order to stack freqs. Also, quite often, players doing this from spec will accidentally join the team they don't want to be on, spec, and retry later. That's hopping in my book. Except you know just as well as I do that things will go very badly if we use such an IP lock. It'd be stupidly easy for a number of players to completely wreck a flaggame by entering a freq and then spectating for the rest of the game. The evener would place fewer players on that team (if any) and thus you'd get situations like 10v3. And no, fixing that by making it temporary, for example, is not a solution. People would then just wait until they can hop. If it's not temporary, the above applies. If it turns off in "extreme cases", that still means it'd be easy to create extreme imbalances with it on demand. And since HS' population has quite some players in it who would gladly abuse this system, it's not going to be a possible solution. If it were, don't you think someone would have already made it? Edit: if you'd read my to-do list, you would've seen that the planned solution to this problem is to simply make it less rewarding to spend time in spec for a while and then join at the right time, than entering right away and letting the balancer do its job. Now, I'm sure there'll still be idiots who want to ruin flaggames in the population who will wait a while in order to stack flaggames, but I'll figure something out for them. Like making it incredibly difficult for players with a high flaggame win:lose ratio to join a freq with fellow high win:lose ratios on it.

That's because it needs to have a -f when it's not PMed to someone, for safety reasons. I don't want you degranting the entire arena's... ahem... item. Ah yes, I forgot about that. I'll keep that in mind next time I castrate the population.

If this was all a terrible coincidence, consider it bad karma. You can't deny you actively hopped very often. The fact that it came back for you doesn't really worry me much. And you know just as well as everyone that this isn't out of a grudge towards you, I have no grudge against all that many people, and you're not on the list. I've actually made a post on the staff forums relating to balancing and hopping so we can make some rules for all staff to follow. If we deem it necessary I'm sure these will be added to f1. Edit: Also see my to-do list in the development sub-forum for a possible solution to hopping.

In short: yes.

For my own reference and for anyone who's interested: Cloak/Xradar changes. Making Oracle oracular! Modify cloak and xradar levels to a 'range' system. Better xradar allows you to see cloakers further away from you. Better cloak means you can get closer to someone with xradar before being seen. To go with cloak and xradar: make Oracle oracular. In other words, make Oracle System enhance the xradar levels of players nearby when its xradar is turned on. This helps prevent the "Well, I have Oracle and I call X, but nobody actually does anything about it because nobody else sees it." issue(s). Make Sensor Disruptor disrupt sensors. Sensor Disruptor could act as the opposite of Oracle system, by making enemy's xradar worse within a certain range. Would probably use the Stealth button for this. This would cost quite some energy (possibly negative recharge). Make Interphase's area cloak stack with the cloak of players within it. In other words, powerful cloak + interphase = very powerful cloak. This, again, might require an increase in energy cost for Interphase in order to stay balanced. Might not be necessary because of its fairly limited range, however. Shields Modify the module to allow negative drains on weapon hits ("absorption shields"). Shields could use some interesting new functionality, like shield-sapping weapons. This could either drain energy (damage done in energy is converted to shield strength for attacker) or shields (the same thing, but for shield strength). Maybe interesting for a shield that has negative recharge, but can be kept up by being aggressive? Balling & Flagging Modify flagging freqs to also be balling freqs - balling will be possible while the jackpot is under a certain value, and be very rewarding. This'll probably be played in a soccer/hockey/football field-like location in center. Flags will be spawned once balling is 'shut down' (at a specific jackpot value) to allow a flaggame to start. Make flaggame rewards depend on time spent on one frequency. Being on the losing freq for a full flaggame and taking the loss should be (much?) more rewarding than a last-minute move to the winning freq followed by a quick win. Get rid of flagging and do something new?! Misc A lot of things I can't think of right now, but that are hidden somewhere in my memory (must be getting old). Long-term.. If ever Make multiple ship 'profiles' possible. As in: a 'rushing' warbird, a 'centering' warbird, a 'balling' warbird and a 'crazy random stuff for giggles' warbird.. All on one account. Might not be worth doing if Cerium is overhauling things in the future (which may or may not use HSCore). New item set with all kinds of cool things integrated into it? More distinctive shields? More interesting stuff regarding gun levels, with high level guns being harder to protect against than lower level ones, but more expensive to fire? In other words: a refresh for HyperSpace. Again, quite possibly not worth doing with Project Cerium on the horizon. Find out why HyperSpace crashes, and fix it! Yeah right..

That quickwin thing was more of a joke really, you can judge by the fact that I added male genitalia in the second sentence. If you didn't know, ?grantitem -c -1 penis does not work. And Unix, your definition of hopping is fine. But when I see you sit in spec for a while, when teams are incredibly imbalanced and one team is almost winning a fairly high jackpot, and then within 2 seconds of that other player joining, you go in and 'happen to' get onto the team that's 80 seconds from winning and has all the 'veteran' players, it's good enough for me. Also note that I first let you do your hop-from-spec magic, and then moved you over to the enemy team which was around 3 players smaller than the team you'd just gotten onto. This was done to at least try to get teams somewhat balanced, population doesn't gain anything from a 7v4 flaggame followed by 5 hours of HyperSpec. You then decided to spec and do the same thing you did before to get on the winning team AGAIN. Then I moved you back and degranted you. Fact is also that you have a history of hopping. You've done it so many times it's not even funny. That automatically leads to staff like me treating everything you do that "slightly resembles" hopping as exactly that - hopping. You're not going to convince me you weren't moving to the winning team on purpose. Be glad I only degranted a tiny fraction of your money, instead. And you're correct, there are no rules about staff balancing flaggames. But i've found that doing so helps flaggames grow and be competitive. I do so whenever I feel it's necessary. Around 10 minutes ago I had been actively balancing a flaggame for around half an hour, and it grew from a measly 5v5 to 12v12 and bigger in that time. Now, I'm not claiming that was my epic balancing skill, but I'm sure it helped keep the game going. As to how I do it, I generally just pick a random player or pick a player who would fit a hole in the enemy team. Like, move a lanc over (generally after talking to them to see if they agree) if the enemy team has no lanc at all. Or, of course, if you're a known hopper, don't be surprised if you're 'favoured' to be moved over to the other team when balancing is needed. Edit: And if you want it 'on paper', try the 'no bug exploitation' and 'no lame behavior as determined by staff' rules. Bug exploitation because you're trying to use the balancer's simplicity against it to stack teams in your own favour, and lame behavior because, well, it's pretty lame behavior, no?

I'm sure that if you set up a nice, fancy site with a trailer and all that good stuff for a new client, as well as give it some (settings for) shiny graphics, you can get a few reviewing sites to do a review. With some luck you'll get a couple hundred thousand VIEWS at least if multiple gaming sites do a review. There's bound to be at least a small percentage that checks the game out, and if it's actually good, a few hundred should stay.. I hope.

The most important part about releasing a new client is advertising it or getting it reviewed or anything like that. It's nice to move the population we have left to a new client and have new toys to play with like client-side plugins or a less limited protocol, but what we really need is new population, which will only come if we get some publicity.

Cheese's alias ingame is Cheese!, by the way.

who

Heh, other than the name..

I would personally love to see some of the ASSS plans get realized. Like, make the spawn-choosing system and spawn capturing more intuitive. Could try to mimick the Battlefield-like spawn points in that when you die you get a couple seconds to pick a spawn location and then spawn there. Would make it all look a bit fancier, updated, and all that. That always draws players. And really, stay away from bounce and the whole 'basing' idea. I'm sure it sounded like a good idea once, but basing with bouncy bullets and reps and all that doesn't suit DS nor its settings, in my opinion. Turf gameplay that's as polished as possible is the way DS could thrive, if you ask me. Can't help you with the server though. But I'm sure you'll find one. I'd go with ASSS though, it's "the future" (as far as Subspace has a future, but let's not start about that), again, in my opinion. Leaves options open, plus, I believe bots are compatible with it for the most part (or with some compatibility modules), so you could reuse them.

It might be a good idea to give it a bit of an overhaul when you put it back up - it didn't exactly thrive before going offline. Other than that, good luck. DS was pretty much my home zone for quite a while.

It definitely worked for Hyperspace. While we had OVER 1000 population, we got 'round 20 new players who actually sticked around. And another 50 or so who just wondered what the population was about. Claiming inflated population is meaningless, is silly. Everyone knows that whoever inflates population when others don't is more likely to get players to 'come in and have a look'. However, that's also the key to this all. When everyone inflates population, nobody gains from it. The only effect is that whoever doesn't inflate population, if anyone, looks bad in comparison. People get used to 100 population meaning 'nobody playing in a pub arena at all', and thus expect (for example) Hyperspace's 40 population to mean that as well. And then there's the obvious effect of looking like a bunch of elitist idiots to any player new to subspace. And the fact that it completely wrecks population statistics.

Needs another update for shields *cracks whip*.

Because SSCE as a whole is down. It's not Hyperspace itself crashing or anything like that. Edit: Strangely enough, HZ just got back up while HS stayed down. Hrm.

The real solution is to admit that these subarenas aren't there for the .1 millisecond of time they save people who want to switch zones, but that they are there to increase the population visible to the client to draw players to the zone. Once that's admitted, they can simple be removed. No 'fix' to subgame is necessary.

II

I guess people just don't like seeing how their "awesome population boost plans" by faking their own population count indicator aren't working. And now they don't want to revert the changes and face the fact that their population is incredibly low.

Inconvenient

Isn't half the population if not more of zones like EG and TW bots anyways? It's not like their population figures are 'realistic' ignoring those inter-zone arenas.

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