spidernl

So, basically, the extremely boring games of the past where one team was utterly stacked and farmed the other team until they considered the jackpot high enough to win, and most of the enemy team had quit, were keeping the zone alive? Interesting, especially considering the zone has been quite alive without bountying* and jackpots for plenty of time. And no, counting overall population decrease of Subspace and its effects on Hyperspace earlier on as the zone 'dying' is not something I do. Sorry. *+Edit: Bountying in center still seems to work fine for me, though.

ppl been saying this for a long time and since it adds to jackpot it will eventually start fgs but why it hasnt been done yet noone knows Presumably lack of time. You'd have to change the formulae and then test them for oddities, rebalance them, etc. Plus I don't even know if Doc wants changes such as these to be made.

May 26 2011 Added the Evoker, a limited summoning device that can be used by Spiders, Leviathans and Lancasters without giving up an FTL slot. It does take an Addon and Signature slot, though. The limitation is that it can only summon Warbirds, Javelins, Terriers and Weasels. Hope this'll help with small-scale flaggames where getting a lanc gives up such a large percent of the team's firepower that it's better not to get one.

Options one and three, with three being the most important factor. Although 'conquest' isn't necessarily the answer, Hyperspace is just getting old. Needs change. The question is just what change.

I like the idea, but I see a hole for abuse. You can drop the ball to a perfect stop easily if you have your maxspeed set right and you move backwards while releasing ball. People who do this would be able to farm a lot faster and get an advantage. I say this because to make balling worth the effort you have to match the reward to time/effort put in. It takes significantly longer to get the ball in the goal than even the slowest duels at low pop. maybe $200-300 would make it enticing (not sure). But if you use the maxspeed matching technique you can carry the ball quite quickly. Making the $200-300 reward a little too much. EDIT: What might cure this abuse loophole is a jackpot for all goals increasing over time since the last score with a maximum cap. That way if you're scoring too fast you're not going to get as much money, but nobody is going to stop you from scoring fast Moving the goals and changes to ball time so that people who know how to drop it to a perfect stop aren't at as much of an advantage can fix all of these issues. If rewards are going to be changed, goal placement can surely be changed as well. Edit: Also, knowing how to score efficiently rewarding players isn't necessarily a bad thing, now is it? You can drop the ball to a perfect stop in pretty much any ship by carefully keeping your speed at a certain level.

Yeah, and quite a few people (too many, really) in the United States believed 3% of the world's population was going to fly up to heaven at May 21st, with the other 97% doomed to horrible death. Who of you two regularly checked the database and actually knew the number of people who had Nanomite? Oh.. Edit: I'm not here to have a fun little flame war, so unless you have something that makes sense to back up your silly claims, just give up. Nothing is going to change about Nanomite unless I have a reason to. A good one, backed up by facts. And no, population going down (quite long) after I introduced Nanomite is -not- proof.

I'd personally like to see balling become somewhat rewarding at (very) low population, maybe up to mid-high population, after which it would automatically become more rewarding to flag. This would raise population steadily until a flag game could be played. In other words, balling as the only person playing should grant you a small amount of money, I don't think it'll ruin the economy to let people farm money by balling overnight. Then, when two people get in, you'll want to make balling rewarding enough to not just make it boring dueling, but actually make it a fight for the ball. This way, you at least have some 'purpose' to playing at very low population.

Read my post in the other thread you mentioned this in. Desert Storm just had standard static flags to be captured turf-style, which granted points over time. It's completely incomparable to Conquest, which has a 'victory condition', captured-over-time control points, deaths coming into play, etc. Desert Storm had no modules (not even ASSS) for its style of play, so it's not like we could grab a module and have less programming work either. And the bots just allowed you to spawn at controlled flags, which I don't think will even be a part of Conquest.

Desert Storm did not use any modules whatsoever, since it wasn't ASSS. It was turf gameplay, and incomparable to Conquest. Conquest is far more like a 'match' than Desert Storm ever was, due to the ever decreasing number of tickets. Desert Storm just had a couple flags you could capture for points (and could spawn at once captured, I think). In other words, 'chasing down' Desert Storm is like 'chasing down' Trench Wars, since they also have a single flag you have to capture..

I'm mainly altering items that seem 'out of place', could be balanced a little better, or just had no use. So, for the 3 mentioned items: 1) Reinforcement now has a role as an armor that provides some overall protection. Not a lot, and I'm certain other armors are more useful 9/10 times, but now it has some use. It also offers some early bomb protection during resets. 2) Gamma ray was just pulse with a tiny bit more delay and a tiny bit less energy use, which in my opinion was kind of pointless. It did have a role when ammo existed, but when ammo was removed, Gamma Ray was largely obsolete. Maybe it won't be anymore, now. 3) Phoenix was an item I never really got the balance right on. I hope I did now. Edit: my point here is that changes like these will rarely affect existing ships, and therefore a reset is not necessary.

1) You could have said that, instead of defending the placement as if it was intentional to be awkwardly placed. However, you can just move the tiles and edit a config file for the warpgate coordinates? You've messed with warps before, so I imagined you would know how to do that (disclaimer: I haven't messed with it thus I do not know which config files have to be altered). 2) Sigh, you still don't get that the wallhack thing wasn't my main point about the warpgates, it was just a possible side-effect. 3) My only reply to this should be "lol", but oh well. Mainly because I already said why this is 99.999% not the reason the zone died in an earlier post (it may have to do with the one or two people who actually had nanomite, and the fact that population was already decreasing before they had it). Also, it's kind of comical that steps b, c and d were standard play even before nanomite. Remember "Stop camping and rush!" and similar shouting in flaggames? Yeah, those flaggames before nanomite even existed.. Conclusion: +1 death stays, and I'll just laugh at anyone who claims a single item owned by one or two people killed the zone. Edit: You're also making staff look like fools by arguing silly things like nanomite killing zone, when every sensible person would know that is complete nonsense.

Working on semi-large modifications to the current item set at the moment, can't be bothered to write down all the changes, buuut.. Here's the list of changed items: 1) Reinforcement 2) Gamma Ray 3) Phoenix Missile More coming up.

It looks terrible. Period. The wallhack thing was just a possible side-effect of it being horribly placed. So I did test it a little, but not enough to find out positioning required to wallhack. I'm not trying to just flame you, I'm giving you my opinion, and I think a warpgate placed right INSIDE a wall looks messed up. I can also say I'm not the only one. Of the few people I've talked to (read: one person named Noldec) EVERYONE (lol) agreed. But hey, if you want to be defensive of your work and not listen to *constructive* (yes, you can easily fix it, just move the warpgate an inch and you've fixed it) criticism, go for it. Also, lol @ nano killed zone. Think about what you're implying by saying that (and also keep in mind the very, very limited number of people who actually had nano at the time the zone started visibly dying).

Protip 1: TW isn't supposed to be a bountying tool. Protip 2: High ID doesn't eat your bounty and at full energy is quite reliable.

The down-right warpgate is horribly placed. As in, it looks terrible. I also wouldn't be surprised if you could 'wallhack' to some odd places by abusing the location of the warpgate. Other than that, I'm not really sure if this is that big an improvement. I mean, subspace just *isn't made for* angular surfaces. Half the time your (bouncing) bombs blow up due to the angle at which they hit the wall. But hey, it looks fancy. And it's a change, and we need changes. Edit: Also where did minibase go? Edit 2: Improved clarity @ rant about bouncing

He did kind of have a point. Unless you're going to claim your posts are worthwhile to read. And yes, I know I just did read one.

One of the problems is that conquest isn't being worked on. Or at least not enough to be finished anytime soon. At least, I think Doc said that recently.

Except you're all 'bounty hunters' in subspace/hyperspace, and therefore it's not that far-fetched. Also, the point made is still clear: why should using less equipment on purpose reward you, if the point of the zone is to get a customized, fully-equipped ship?

Because in reality, bounty hunters also use as little equipment to do their job as possible, since that increases the reward. ^Sounds harsher than I meant it.

Feel free to let us know the solution to population problems. Conquest looks/looked like a good chance to boost population for a while, but something to last until that's finished would be nice. And really, the inevitable trolling is not going to help.

Your sense made is little.

Whoever does it has to make sure they're making it look flash/fast-paced/interesting, because people won't be too interested seeing terrible graphics fly around at terribly low speeds killing one another with a single bullet (I'm looking at you, Trench Wars).

What BZAP is asking for is not unreasonable - the idea at least, I'm not sure about programming it. I can think of some other ways to help revitalize the zone if you want. I've been under the impression though that ideas put forward in this forum are laughed or/ignored/determined to be code-wise infeasible/or otherwise set aside. Changing prices isn't a "difficult programming task". An sql query can change all weapon delays and energy costs for april fools as easily as it can change all prices. My point is simply that it isn't impossible to get back population, and adapting to an extremely low number of players (like 3 average playing over an entire day or something) might just permanently keep the zone at this stage.

It'll also make the zone largely pointless. One of the main 'gameplay elements' of Hyperspace is the process of getting money. Making that easy peasy to make a couple players happy isn't exactly a way to revive the zone, it's more like waving a white flag and giving in to low population. Which by itself is practically the final blow for the zone. Getting population back sounds like a better plan than accepting low population as 'our fate'.

Waiting to see how conquest turns out when it's not being worked on due to lack of time might not be the best idea