fresh

LOL capt I never really buy bonuses, but if we had the one you suggested, id be buying it all the time ! yes this would be a great bonus. i would spend all 50 of my unused bonuses on this. ideal price like 2 or 3?

out with the bonuses, out with the ranks, imho. i think it's better to focus on giving casual and new players something to do when they enter (flagging, a ball game, an EG-style King of the hill, etc) than to just heap advantages on the daily players. they're gonna log in anyways.. we hope. its the casual and tourist players we want to trap.

it's been a progression. i'm just advocating taking the next step in that progression. 0 bty start -> 30 bty start-> 50 bty start -> 50 bty start with full charge, thrust, and rotation -> xx bty start with full recharge, thrust, rotation, bombs, bullets, and max energy, and preserve the greening dynamic that many chaos players love but limit it to getting x, anti, stealth, cloak, and the special items that are the lifeblood of many chaos strategies. when you say it doesn't work and hasn't worked in any zone that's implemented it.. can you clarify? more people might prefer smallpub but that doesn't make the scaling a failure. i'd actually argue it's pretty damn good, considering the alternative. warzone on sundays uses similar start bty / attach bty scaling. this is a fair point - but I don't think it's so black and white. adding full energy and full bombs and bullets to the things you already start with doesn't make *that* big a difference in chaos (given that with 50 greens, you start with something close to what i'm proposing at least 1/3 of the time) and yet, and this is the key, would mean a lot of the people who aren't hard-core chaos junkies would be much more likely to hop in and explode spaceships on a casual basis. this would be a good thing for the zone.

fully greened ships have never been the case. my point is that chaos as we knew it (7 player freqs, 100 player arenas, huge map, etc etc) doesn't exist anymore anyways. we need to do what we can to both a) preserve existing playerbase and encourage people to play. this or some population-based on-the-fly adjustment of starting bounty is the best compromise. sometimes you have to compromise. convoluted rankings and bonus systems aren't the answer to this problem.

pretty much yes. not as important. could go either way. my main thrust is to leave the vast majority of the greening to be in pursuit of specials. repels, bricks, bursts, whatever floats your chaos boat. that way people who don't care about specials can still just hop in and fight without being afraid of / annoyed by dying and the greening that comes along with that. we just dont have enough players anymore.

there are more greens. green quantity was increased for the same reasons that start bounty went up. whether it's your max nrg, bullet, or bomb level, you're fighting at a distinct disadvantage without a greened ship. this is not a generational thing. people of any age will jump through hoops when they think it's worth it. the point is this: when most of the time there's less than 10 players in chaos, it's not worth it to jump through the greening hoop anymore. we need to remove the barriers to entry in this zone. the skill barrier is more than enough on its own.

i think everyone agrees that some sort of change is needed - what i'm saying is that the best place to start would be with the green settings. with this change, everybody gets something. 1) other pilots from other zones can hop in, get a taste of our near-perfect ship settings, and get hooked. 2) existing players still get what they want out of chaos pub. 3) league players aren't so disgusted at the thought of jumping in pub when they know they don't have to green just to get a fight-worthy ship again. let specials be what they are - icing on the cake of the SVS settings we know and love. if people want to eat icing, let them - but don't make people pay to have their cake.

yea I had thought about this. that way, the more players, the more like chaos it becomes. wouldn't be terrible hard to implement either, right?

let's just face it: there aren't enough players to support the traditional model of greening in chaos anymore. starting with 0 or 30 or even 50 bounty was fine when there were 30-100 players in the arena and you had teams of up to 7 helping you green and getting you ready to fight. there was action enough for everybody in those days, whether they wanted to green or not - and what's important is that the promise of that action meant players were willing to green up and make it a little more high-stakes when they did make it to the fight. forcing players to green was fine when there were *always* other pilots in; that's simply not the case anymore. a substantial portion of the time, the zone is empty. THIS IS A TERRIBLE THING. when there are no other pilots in the zone, or only 1 or 2, the fact that you have to spend 2-4 minutes greening up before you can fight on an even keel is a huge barrier to entry for most people. we want to ENCOURAGE people to unspec. making them green up before they can fight DISCOURAGES THEM from doing so. worse, it discourages them from dying. this leads, eventually, to the kind of play that drives most league players away from chaos pub in disgust. you guys know who i'm talking about. * IT'S NOT CHAOS PUB WITHOUT GREENING. okay - i accept that. but chaos pub, to make sense, always depended on a bigger population of players than it has now. we need some sort of hybrid - a zone where greening is still a part of play, but one that also immediately encourages players to unspec and jump in the action right away. we can have this zone. start players with a full ship - full energy, full weapons, full ?status. those who want the traditional chaos flavor (mine repping, lobbing blueberries from afar and repping anybody who comes close) can green for their specials - for reps, bursts, bricks, whatever. you can even make people green for antiwarp, stealth, x-radar, and cloak. but don't make people green just to be able to play - you can't afford it anymore. please, chime in. we need a discussion.