Nude For Satan

Personally I am not a fan of the long safe timer. I'm probably not as adverse to it as Ninespike is, but I will admit that I don't like it. I'll try to break down all my thoughts on it. As I'm clearly the most skilled pilot in all of Subspace, my opinion should carry the most weight The timer has been changed to, what? 12 hours? 13 hours? It used to be 15 minutes? I was always used to Alpha's half hour safe timer. 15 mins and 30 mins are kind of the same, not much difference between them, the purposes of their duratin are fairly comparable. What was (apparently) the original purpose of a safe zone timer of 15/20 mins? A pee, a crap, a courier delivery, a phone call. Maybe just a PM convo with another player to plug a squad or talk about what some player was seen doing, etc. Basically for when you need a time out but expect to hopefully resume before too long. Safe zones are also used to safely change freqs, bonus those boosters and rabbits. Stuff like that. What is the argument FOR longer safe timers? Seems the main point is that if someone has played for a while, got themselves a good bounty, and wants not to lose it, but has to go out for dinner/movie. You can stay in safe and keep your ship (spikes notwithstanding). Pros : - Keep your bounty if you're on a roll. - Looks like a higher population in play (at first glance) - hopefully attracting more players. - A player might hang around seeing if the guy in safe come out of afk soon, long enough for a third player to arrive and voila we have 2+ active players that might have missed each other. - We're all older, our afks are more sudden, longer and more important. We don't have a known time to play up til mum calls you for dinner at 6pm. We have an unknown time to play before the sound of our children crying from another room calls us away. Longer afks, maybe even an hour or 90 minutes, I feel, are definitely indicated. Cons : - Antiwarp on plays havoc for fifteen minutes, let alone 13 hours! Bit unfair. Hallu: you had an awesome coding addition auto-turning off people's AW after a few minutes in safe. It seems to have dropped off the system. Can it be reintroduced? - This player is not playing. Another player waiting for them to exit safe could understandably be pretty annoyed after sitting around a long time in hope.A regular is not going to be confused, but a newer player (eg someone from EG or TW just checking CZ out) is gonna go back home with a very disparaging assessment to share. - It feels like a lie to new(ish) players (as above). I have seen players from other zones speak up obviously feeling ripped off. It looks like there's an active population here when four players are out of spec, then you see they're all in safe. I've seen instances of "How does this shitty zone get away with cheating the stats this way, those ships could be bots for all I know". Of course it's NOT actually cheating the stats, but appearances always count for something. (It must be said that the introductory bot PM describing players in zone and players in safe IS a good idea that allays some of this). - Safed players clog public freqs. The counter-argument is: change freqs. "But sometimes three freqs have long-term safed players." "well, change to another one." "What, so I change to freq 11? So when new players enter I can be guaranteed not to receive any of them onto my team by default?" Also, *new* players need to be taught the pewpew, not the freqchangewhenplayersareinsafepew. They're not going to readily get the concept. They're going to go back to their own zone. Or to porn. Also, sometimes you've jumped in, played, done well, gone 5-0, but now you're low in items and could do with assistance as people start to focus on your bounty. //you there? //??? //????????? ... you've done your dash before finding out that the freq is a TRAP, If you're any good, you're now a bounty farm. There are some seriously emphatic rivalries in CZ (and subspace), you don't want to be caught out like this when your arch-nemesis is starting to challenge you. Overall, I don't like it. It's good that AW is or used to be turned off automatically after a timer. It's good that streaks are ended if you're there too long. It's good that the enter-zone green text warns you if players are in safe. But I don't think this is enough to clear the way for such long safety time. That's just my 2c, all I can think of right now. I'm sure there's many more aspects.

I also blame ... wait, that's me

As the years continue, people keep slowly sliding away from the game. Some can forget it altogether. Some of those are elated to be reminded. With everyone despondent about the decline of the player base, social media starts to emerge as a vehicle to keep the game current even for those who don't play it anymore. Pissfarting around facebook a bit I've noticed there are a lot of different groups/pages devoted either to Subspace as a whole or to individual zones. Sometimes a community is clearly defined, but othertimes a group labelled Subspace generally actually has leaning to one segment of the population only. I wonder if it's worth compiling and describing the various communities. This is only from Facebook. I don't use any other social media. Member numbers precede each community, though often a 2-member group has conversation between many more than 2 people inherent) : (Facebook has altered it's searching format, making it considerably difficult to find anything anymore) 435 Subspace/Continuum - https://www.facebook.com/groups/subspace.continuum/ 383 Continuum/Subspace - https://www.facebook.com/pages/ContinuumSubspace/20806916745 133 Trench Wars - https://www.facebook.com/TWSubspace 73 Metal Gear / CTF - https://www.facebook.com/groups/2212215812/ 76 Subspace-Continuum - https://www.facebook.com/SubspaceContinuum 59 Refugees Of Alpha West - https://www.facebook.com/groups/121271761234869/ 52 Extreme Games - https://www.facebook.com/sscuextremegames (also twitter.com/SSCXEG ) 31 Subspace - Warzone CTF - https://www.facebook.com/groups/warzonectf 27 Subspace Chaos Zone - https://www.facebook.com/SubspaceChaosZone 18 Warpath Squad (seems to be a TW squad but doesn't specify) - https://www.facebook.com/groups/380412220295 8 Desert Storm - https://www.facebook.com/groups/315432285147154 2 Subspace Players Association (1 member but 2 admins heh) - https://www.facebook.com/groups/2246450925 2 I'm A Subspace Player - https://www.facebook.com/groups/2215087999 2 Death Star Battle - https://www.facebook.com/groups/17416688376 1 Subspace/Continuum - https://www.facebook.com/groups/2297982974 1 Subspace Continuum - https://www.facebook.com/groups/41983617496 1 Old Bones DSB Squad - https://www.facebook.com/groups/9017141262 I saw a bunch more groups with just the one member, and gave it up. What else is out there? I know I didn't find them all. Surely EG, TW, HZ, maybe Hyperspace have something as well? Search is terrible in Facebook. Edit: added EG and TW details, also MetalGear CTF If you run into someone in a bar who says "Ha! I used to play that. I wonder what ever happened to {someone}" make sure you tell them there's communities online. They might feel its too much work to install, but this is simple enough, and then the relevant community can work on them.

I don't know what MLG is but this looks cool too.

Somebody, I have no idea who, keeps going on about getting the Alpha West map another run as the Chaos map for a reset. The DZA map is also often put up as an option. I also wish to add to the list the Hybridrome, a map that was used in Chaos once a while back (prolly mid-2000s, I dunno). It wasn't terribly successful as a long-term option but I think it's kind of fun for a short term, an event weekend or half a reset (or maybe a reset). For anyone who has no idea what the hybridrome map was, or has forgotten it, you can see it at ?go hybridrome .

I'm still playing with the graphics set, it's bloody awesome and the sounds are a treat. I spend time just toggling stealth, x and aw to create little techno riffs that keep me amused for minutes at a time

Lonely zone

Can you at least use an announcement function to alert people no matter where on the site they browse? I'm sure I'm not the only one who 99.9% of the time only really looks in their zone's subforum. I'd be happy to contribute.

Enjoying this right now. Got a much higher res happening. Thanks for providing! It's to be noted that unless your screen is physically pretty big, you may need to change the text font size in Continuum's options to be better suited, Way too small for me to read under this so upped it. Someone suggested using ProFont to further refine text size but not sure how to do that. Marioman how's about including the cat screen window functionality in future versions

Does that mean you're going to do it? I'm housebound so can't go out to buy anything. This would be perfect.

Awesome, get it onto some tees on cafepress or whatever the latest incarnation is, and I'd order one.

No wonder nobody plays here.

Terrible zone.

I forgot to congratulate Reno on his stellar acting career (4:05) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PrAVhXkN6c#t=3m30s /Lame spider.

PURPLE DOTS HNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

The fact flags exist encourages people not to fight.

This needs one of those green pub spam messages, something like "Wanna try 4v4 but not sure you can match it with the vets? Start an internship with massacre, message BloodyEssence for more information."

terribibbletrocious?

Hallu, just so you can have someone who's never satisfied while Eth is asleep - re the old messageboards: is there any way to retrieve them even as a read only archive placed somewhere for viewing? (well done though, pretty much everyone has been hanging out for this day, and this is one thing that really CAN stem pop loss to an extent - stats on the web!)

Feels like a response to declining populations

I could disagree with you if your thread hadn't remained at the top of the page for nigh on three weeks!

Only saw the intro for this one, started brilliantly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v09MLjnU2zE

Just wondering what people prefer as their primary ship when tackling/pwning/laming Chaos Zone. I've always preferred warbird because I'm quite boring and need enough help as it is without clunky steering nobbling my attempts to run screaming from the mere thought of an exchange. But I thought I'd ask you buggers, what do you drive, and why?

harrumph

Damagewars, Psy. Why aren't you doing everything I want when I want it.