Mr. B-Hole

Intertubes is on fire!!!!!! My freaking addiction is starting to speak in tongues to my cortex. Dammit.

If you have '%red as a macro, you can see the bty of the nearest flag holder if he is anywhere on your radar.

I flag constantly. It's basically what i like about chaos. I don't have any suggestions for changing it because I think it works great the way it is as long as no one is "gaming" the rules. Since Axe left, no one is gaming the rules. There is now a healthy flags game with a decent amount of interested players. The reward makes for high BTY ships which is attractive to hunters and I really don't think anyone minds the high bty ships being present (I could be wrong, dunno). I'm not opposed to lowering the reward some. But you can't fairly divide the bty reward amongst the winning freq members according to flags held as a freq member may hold almost all the flags for most the game and end up with only a few or none at the end, even though that member was hugely instrumental in procuring the win. Almost all of the other changes you are proposing really open the door more for those who might wish to game the system. Changes to the flagging that do not encourage flagging both for current flaggers and for flags newbs are a bad idea. The more interested the zone gets in flagging, the more fun everyone has, including non flaggers.

This response is as I expected. When faced with facts and reason and reality, you spew meaningless macros. No one is buying it Axe.

He believes that he should rule subspace chaos but if he can't, he should at least have his own arena. He abuses every aspect of the rule system (from flagging rules to safe zones); not to win but to irritate other players so that they will leave the arena. He believes and openly professes that his opinion is worth more than other people's opinions. He uses blatantly condescending and insulting language to belittle anyone with whom he disagrees and then ends the sentence with a smiley. He admonishes people for "spamming" the zone when his posts to chat are invariably 70% or more of the total chat volume. He makes many people have less fun and play less. Safe zones are not the problem. He is.

I'm not surprised to see people giving up chaos pub because of the single player who intentionally makes people's time in the zone a negative experience. I often come in to pub, see that he is there and simply leave because I don't want to listen to his mouth. He doesn't play to win, he plays to irritate people. He tries to get them to give up and leave. He doesn't want to use skill to defeat the competition, he wants the competition so get so sick of him and his tactics that they leave the arena. Why would it be surprising that people are doing just that? He'll stall a flags game for two hours by grabbing a single flag and running away to stealth in a corner while others drop flags. Then when you are about to beat him outright, he'll switch freqs TO YOUR FREQ so he can steal the points. But I'll make a point here about the safe zones. If you have a look at the stats page, click on his name and look at his kills and deaths and the times that they take place, you'll find that he is ACTIVE in the game for around 65 hours PER WEEK. No, he is not idling, he is actively controlling a ship and having kills and deaths for around 65 hours a week. He is basically EVER PRESENT even without the safe zone idling. He sometimes plays for 10 hour stretches. My point here is that it's not going to change anything to get rid of the 13 hour safe zone. I honestly don't have an answer. You can't get the guy to shut up or play by the spirit of the rules and I doubt you could get him banned. . I've spent plenty of time in 4v4 and I enjoy it to some extent. The players in there are mostly better players than in pub and the competition is more well defined. But there is also a great deal of "waiting around" to even get to play in there. I don't have the patience to sit in line for .cap in there and then have some d-bag forcecap someone else and kick me off the freq. So I've spent time in pub because I can play for myself and without waiting. I'm curtailing my game play now in general because both places have the huge drawbacks I've noted here. I don't really have another alternative as I use SS for relaxation and recreation and I'm not finding either when i play.

There is no doubt that the flags game is currently more easily won by not fighting. Time and time again, I hold flags and Axe holds all the rest of the flags and he runs away and hides, hoping I will drop and he can just pick the flags up without having to fight. It makes the Jav's speed much more valuable because it can arrive at free/loose flags sooner. It takes the skill out of the game and rewards cowardice. It means that Axe will stealth and sit by the last loose flag without picking it up so that everyone elses timer is running out and he can get a fresh timer at the last second. But there is no good solution because without a timer, Axe will just run untill his opponent has to go to work on Monday morning and must leave the game. But, such is the state of the game. There will always be unskilled losers who want to act like they are winners by gaming the system instead of improving their skills. I personally am spending less and less time in pub for these reasons. Luckily there is no good way to do that in 4V4, which is why Axe stays out of there. The only suggestion I can come up with is that the zone needs to be smaller so that people can't hide. The population is remaining low in pub and that won't likely change with Axe's embarassing mouth running all the time, so a smaller arena might be appropriate. Just my 2 cents.

Is there a URL where I can see pub stats for each reset, past and present? The old address I had is dead like a drunken babbling ethylene.