Mistarbob

The bottom falls out of that type of solution when you consider that there's no way to define when a flag game "begins." In most cases, "lame winning" occurs when people have been playing enough that the jackpot is in the 10-20k region, but the majority of players are uninterested in flagging. In other words, because the jackpot is already roughly a function of time/kills, the solution you've proposed will add no new restrictions and therefore accomplish nothing as is. In general, it may be said that the complete kill history of a game is useless to examine due to the impossibility of establishing its correlation to the current circumstances at any given time. However, I believe it is possible to define a metric that is very likely to correlate to the current circumstances: total number of kills made while holding flags and in a base. It's almost unheard of for a flag game to get going in earnest and then stop without one team winning, so the number will almost always reflect that history which is relevant. I don't know how much work would have to be done to keep track of kills so specifically, but it would adequately refine your solution. Note that the requirement that flags be held is also not strictly necessary, but would serve to make games more interesting by requiring that players milk while holding flags at the front line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQFwMbWAQU

We're seeing the same problem with thors that we've seen with just about everything else in HS: when you get enough people coordinating it, it becomes painfully overpowered. Bomblines were never a problem until large teams of leviathans made them impassable, and then they had to be almost completely phased out; a field by itself was no big deal, but even a handful of skilled players covering a large area with them won flag games almost by itself; repels weren't seen as a problem until everyone started making rush AD setups that let them rep 8 times; and more recently, summoner lancs weren't a problem until you had entire teams of them playing like it was DSB with antideath. Everything in this game gets exponentially better as you tack on more of it--even gunlines in base eventually get so powerful that cloakers can never leak through, allowing the rest of the team to focus on other things. The whole zone is mostly balanced around low/moderate population, and things tend to break when you get enough people working together. However, unlike all of those other things I just mentioned, thor strategies have one crippling weakness: antiwarp. If the thor users are antiwarped, it will almost never be time- or cost-effective to thor the enemy team because they simply can't provide much DPS. This changes slightly when several players coordinate thors and rain them down on the enemy team en masse, but if they're antiwarped, this is a time-consuming setup that can be made useless by a few players repelling and blocking thors with big ships. It's not unreasonable to have to actually try to stop this tactic, either--you can't expect to fight coordination with disorganization. Speaking as the #1 abuser of thors, trust me when I say we could be just as obnoxious with coordinated fields; this is just the currently popular metagame. In reality, the majority of players crying about thors just aren't doing enough to prevent them. You already have a few all-star players in the field of thor prevention who consistently go out of their way to protect their team from thors: yin-yang and death's embrace have antiwarp lancs that we simply can not kill with thor volleys no matter how hard we try, and the permanent free antiwarp forces us to do something else; players like cxc, urx, and several others keep semi-constant AW up and usually even block thors, making us thor users have to spend a lot of time thinking about where to thor so we don't end up killing our own team. Seeing any one of these players on the other team is usually enough to make us reconsider thoring, and since coordinated thorstorms that don't rely on warping are only possible with big teams, it is very unlikely that we'll get to enjoy many thor combos before some of those guys step in. In every single case that I've successfully thor'd the other team, it was entirely their fault for not antiwarping or repelling. tl;dr: you have viable options already that completely shut down thor users like me; learn from the silent heroes who always force us to do something else instead of picking up your team's flags in a warbird with 150 energy left and then crying (this happened today and it was glorious) EDIT- Another thought: 3-4 players synchronizing thors in a way that will make them actually hurt the enemy team is much more difficult and time-consuming than you might think. If your team can't make significant ground while several of the enemy's high-exp players aren't actively engaged, then there may be something else wrong.

In order to really compete, you need to really care. Saying you don't care is one thing, but people who actually don't care are useless.

I guess I'm going to have to be the one to say it: people don't make fun of someone because they have cancer. It just doesn't happen. What does happen, though, is that people make fun of someone however they can and laugh at their misfortune because they don't like that person. And while it is certainly not in proportion to laugh at someone's impending death over dislike in an online game, it should not be unexpected; who or what you are in the real world is of little bearing to the people you're complaining about--all of us lose perspective when we compete, else we are not true competitors. If you make yourself into an object of dislike in a competitive environment, you can expect to be treated as no more than that, so instead of asking for special treatment because you have cancer, you should try improving your relationships with others if you wish to lessen the edge of your assailants.

finished my ship awww yeeeee I'll be there

To clear up the Tri-Sector issue: I went to the zone, tried it out, and talked a bit with the owner. The similarities end at "multiple points to control," which is no different than the case with any other turf arena. Tri-Sector and what Ceiu has in mind are radically different, so that issue is hardly even worthy of consideration.

I think this is a great idea, actually. You can flag in pretty much any other zone, and this seems like it should be less annoyingly binary than the current game mode, which has either "flagging" or "centering" and a lot of wasted map space as a result of the division between them. My only concern regarding this is that "staleness" will just replace "lack of direction" as an issue, but given the more dynamic nature of this game mode, it should be easier to smoothly integrate other activities if it becomes necessary. I also like the implications the new item system has for an actual economy in the zone. The current buying system is little more than an enhanced version of the ?buy repel you see in other zones, and there's no real reason to allow players to trade items that they can always deliberately obtain anyway. If you manage to implement this well, it should be exactly what HS needs. And really, if even I can't find a real problem with an idea, then it's probably worth running with. I'm looking forward to seeing what you make of it.

If you're going to effectively merge all of those zones into one, you should have the zone listing in the continuum client reflect that. Instead of: SSCU Death Star Battle - 150 SSCU Extreme Games - 150 SSCX Chaos - 150 SSCX Powerball - 150 it should really say something like: SSCU/X Network - 150. The problem with the way it is now is that is breaks the very reason for having a population indicator; I don't want to join a zone with 5 people AFK in spec, and I'm just going to be irritated if I do so because it said there were 300 players. The idea of jumping from zone to zone without having to exit the game is neat, but falsely reporting hundreds of extra players across various zones is too big a price to pay for that functionality being implemented smoothly. It IS an actual problem if the population indicator does not accurately represent the actual number of players; if this functionality is going to stay, it needs to do so either while still representing the correct number of players in the respective zone entries or by means of completely merging access entries of the participating zones into one. As it is, the population indicator is simply broken.

0 I don't even need to look at who's above me because everyone in this zone is terrible

Yeah, unfortunately, the one failing point of this zone has been its staff. The staff above Rareitanium is competent, but they apparently don't have a lot of time to dedicate to the zone. As a result, the moderation team is a circus full of sad clowns with little to no oversight. You learn to mostly ignore them after a while, but then they do stuff like this that gets on your nerves from time to time. Nobody said the zone was perfect.

Present.

this looks shopped

Unreppable prox mines/bombs for the win! This is going to make basing a lot of fun for the defenders. =D

In regard to the last part of your post, I'd have to say that I agree. There are a lot of minor instances of staff abuse in the zone, and I really think they should be more heavily discouraged. It's not any one staff member, and the abuses themselves aren't usually a serious concern, but I think that there's a general attitude of moderator powers being taken too lightly that is a problem. As a result, we wind up with more notable cases of abuse, which are the subject of another conversation for another time. And while Arnk may, as you say, be a bit of a jerk at times, I have said before and will say again that some respect is due for the fact that he is one of few to have the power to do as he pleases and the responsibility to not abuse it. As much as Arnk trolls and annoys you, "conversations" with him are a two-way street that you can turn off of at any intersection; he's not going to show you any more respect than you show him, and nothing he says is going to stop you from playing the game as usual. In that sense, I think the rest of HS staff should be encouraged to follow his example of "resolving" conflicts through less "disruptive" means, rather than reach for those powers they can so easily make use of. As unpleasant as Arnk sometimes may be, I can think of nothing more disrespectful than using moderator powers to quell an opposing point of view.