News from Rincewind: Llamas!

Wednesday, April 16 1997

Llamas!

Ahh yes... the lamer. It's virtually impossible to play this game for more than five seconds without hearing someone accuse someone else of high crimes against the community. And almost everybody has at one time or another themselves been charged with lameness, whether it be excessive lagging, cowardly behavior, or a lack of humility. Furthermore, the standards by which such offensives are judged can frequently be different from arena to arena, meaning that someone who has achieved great success in the Chaos Zone may be looked upon with derision upon his move to Running. Newbies have it worst off because they aren't even aware that such standards exist, let alone what they are. Based upon my own experiences, I'm going to try to lay out what I think is acceptable and what isn't from arena to arena, advice which anyone is of course free to take as they wish.

Ratings killing is perhaps the most despicable of all crimes. People who do nothing but fly around in a zero-bounty ship and impact themselves against other player's fire are worse than slime. You can get revenge against a neg killer by killing him at a high bounty, but you can't do anything against a ratings killer, not to mention that your stats are much more negatively affected by killing a neg that dying as a neg. These little shits have lowered my average kill by as much as thirty points in one session, which I frequently have to remedy by greening up an alias to a large enough bounty and killing it with my real account.

Another universally agreed-upon dirty deed is the killing of negs. The easiest way to get yourself ostracized by everyone in the arena is to murder a poor, defenseless ship in cold blood. A few very lucky neg killers are possessed with enough tact and wit to be tolerated as a much-need source of comic relief, but don't count on it.

Excessive mining is also a no-no. It's perfectly ok to drop mines while being chased or to use minefields in order to catch a particularly annoying opponent, but if you do it all the time you're just a parasite. Repelling into mines is even worse, but I whole-heartedly condone such an act if directed against a large turret stack. Mass turrets are indiscriminate and tend to rack up neg kills at an alarming rate, and thus I believe they should be targeted with every weapon in your arsenal.

Bursting is perfectly OK in all circumstances. I can never understand those players who whine to the arena that I suck because I killed them with a burst. In fact, it's practically impossible to use burst effectively unless the opposing player is stupid enough to follow you into a crowded area where it's obvious what you intend to do. What a moron! Bwahahahaha!

So you want to vulch? Sure, go ahead, but don't be explicit about it. In an arena of seventy or eighty people it's impossible not to vulch, and you're simply going to have to use your radar to avoid becoming a victim. When less than forty people are online or if you meet two ships out in the middle of nowhere fighting, try to be more considerate. It's impossible to vulch a red, however. If you are carrying a flag, all bets are off.

There isn't much that's considered lame in the Chaos Zone. You have to wake up pretty early in the morning to out-mine, out-neg-kill, and out-turret some of the choicest picks in this arena.

Running Zoners are the most discriminating when it comes to potentially offensive conduct. The lamest thing you can possibly do in this Arena is to warp while holding flags, because the game mechanics are such that even a moderately skillful Javelin player can hold the entire arena hostage for hours with an itchy Insert finger. This applies even if you are facing certain death in the midst of a 6-on-1, believe it or not. Until antiwarp is made more effective, this taboo is not going to go away.

In the War Zone, mining in all forms is perfectly OK if used in the defense or attack of a base. This does not give you free reign to drop minefields out in the open like some people like to do, so use your brain. It's also fine to warp when holding flags or for any other reason, due to the skewed and segregated population distribution on the map.

[4/16/97]

Wednesday, April 9 1997

"I don't think so," spake JeffP

Wednesday, April 9 1997
Every week, dozens of game suggestion are posted to the official message boards, the vast majority of which have been suggested at least a hundred times before. Some are good proposals which have either been overlooked by vie team or put somewhere on the to-do list. Others are bad ideas that have been shot down again and again by everybody's favorite balloon-bursters, Jeff and Rod. In an effort to increase the signal/noise ratio on the SuggBoard, I've decided to make a list of the five worst suggestions and tell you why they would hurt the game.

Customizable Ships: Maybe one day when we're all on fifty megabit fibrop lines, but not now. The ship.bmp file that holds the graphics of all the ships is about 300k, which would mean entering an arena with 90 people all with customize ships would require 300*90=27 megabytes of downloading.

Homing Missiles: Heaven forbid we should have to aim our bombs! Let's just fire randomly around the screen and let the computer do all the work of finding our opponents and hitting them. Anyone who's ever been on a Quake server where only one clan knows the secret impulse for guided rockets can sympathize.

Tractor Beams: This has been suggested as a solution to all the warpers, runners, and pussies one encounters in the game. However, there are more than enough legitimate reasons to run (but not to warp, which is why antiwarp exists), such as when one has twelve hard-earned flags and is being chased by everybody on the map. Now imagine each of those pursuers using his tractor beam on the poor flagger. Lame!

Wall Phasing: Everyone who has lost in the War Zone has at one time wished they had this particular powerup, which would allow someone to phase through a wall right into the middle of a hostile base. Don't wish too hard, however. Two negs on the same team with phasing could easily rid any base on the map of its flags; one phases in, the other attaches and phases out with the flags. Now imagine forty negs doing this over and over again.

Fill-In-The-Green: I actually used to think this was a good idea, until I thought about it some more. Basically, a fill-in-the-greener hates spending 5-15 minutes greening and wishes that every green would give him something he doesn't have. This would not only cut the time needed for greening by about 75% but would remove an exciting element to the game, that of downgrades. Without downgrades, it now becomes much harder to take that enemy base or hunt down that flagger, which is already hard enough against good players.

[4/9/97]

The Trouble with Turf

The Trouble with Turf
Ahh, Turf Zone. For those of you still locked in the proverbial SubSpace closet, a couple months ago Virgin introduced a new zone called Turf. It was a flag-type game modeled after Risk; instead of having just 8 or 16 flags to pick up, instead there were dozens of flags scattered around the map that couldn't be moved. Instead, they would change color and be owned by the team who last 'touched' it. Teams were 20 people, and every ten or fifteen minutes all members of the team would get a bonus depending on how many flags they owned.

By all accounts, this was the most popular zone ever created for SubSpace. Turf quickly gained hundreds of fans and soon its players outnumbered those of any other zone, include War. However, not long after its release vie unceremoniously took it down, forcing all Turf players to relocate elsewhere. Why on Earth would they do such a thing?

Here is the official explanation, from JeffP himself:

...We learned our lesson all too well on player volume issues when we put up more zones than our player base could handle. The net effect was that is split our player base among so many different places that the game lost some of it's dynamic and all zones suffered. This is the primary reason we have temporarily gotten rid of the Turf zone...

Although logical in and of itself, it doesn't explain why Turf was picked to be the sacrificial cow. After all, vie could just as well have chosen Chaos or War to axe if the thinning of the player base was such a concern. Why did they choose Turf?

The reason is that Turf was just too bland. Bland, unexciting, and ill-conceived were the adjectives heard most often from the mouths of many good War, Chaos, and Running Zone players, and after a few days spent in Turf, I began to agree completely. First of all, the bonus for flag territory was simply pitiful. The ratio of points scored by flags over points scored by kills was simply too small, and miniscule compared to what teams were getting War and Running. This problem was exacerbated by the ridiculous profusion of green in the middle of the zone, making it so that greening up to 100 took perhaps 30 seconds with a 20-man team.

This led to the phenomenon where the majority of the players in Turf were there not to flag but simply to goof off. On any given evening you'd see three or four 10-man turrets careening through the zone blasting anything in their path, and dozens of people just doing nothing but shooting at anything in sight, dying, then coming back to do the same with a full ship a half a minute later. Turf completely lacked the focus provided by hotly contested flag games in the War and Running Zones, where huge points were at stake and many highly-talented players were competing against each other. It was laughably easy to get a banner since the points requirement was so low, and thus they signified nothing. In Turf, people just didn't care. You didn't care about the flag game, since the prize was so small. You didn't even care about your ship, in stark contrast to Chaos, since it was so easy to green. Instead, people used it as a place to socialize.

"Alright Rincewind," a Turf fan might say. "I'll grant you that. But no matter its shortcomings, Turf was still the most popular zone by far. On an economic basis alone, Virgin had no justification for dumping Turf." Au contraire, my friend. Yes, it was popular, but remember that SubSpace is currently a free beta. There are certain categories of people playing SubSpace now who will gladly fork over the $15 a month after it goes pay, and other categories who will not or cannot. The key to attracting paying customers is addiction. Think about what makes a game addictive - on one hand it's the excitement, the competition, the drive to get to the top. Complementing this is the social aspect of the game, the friendships, the teams you form, the squads you join. However, in a game such as SubSpace you can't separate the latter from the former and still be left with a dedicated player base. The friendships and the squads are forged in the fires of competition, which is either encouraged or discouraged by the design of the game itself. Without that, you'd merely have IRC - and who pays for IRC? This is exactly what Turf lacked. Turf was basically just IRC with a starry background, and that is why it is now gone.

[4/5/97]

You're Not Dealing with AT&T!

You're Not Dealing with AT&T!
We poor guinea pigs have been dealing with packetloss for almost a year now, and long ago it has become clear that Virgin is not the bad guy in this particular soap opera. JeffP has explained again and again how vie is paying big bucks to put their servers as close to the NAPs as possible, with east and west divisions to boot - as well as a new Chicago server coming soon. Rather, the problem of excessive ploss and monstrous pings seems to be the fault of a few large corporations who are simply not doing their job. As you all know, your packets are usually sent up and down the backbone of a number of companies in the process of going from one place to another, and it only takes a single choke-point along this route to screw everything up.

From numerous postings of Sub-O-Tronic and traceroute results on the Tech Support board, the two major offenders in this charade appear to be mae-east, run by hlc.com and MCI. (www.hlc.com is inaccessible from 3 PPP accounts even as I write... go figure). In this essay, I will choose to talk about MCI since the mae-east horse has already been beaten way beyond the point of death.

MCI has the world's largest internet backbone, and on their web page they make all sorts of grandiose claims about its speed. Well, as I just mentioned this means crap, since it only takes a single bum router to screw up all the packets going from one place to another. Unfortunately, if you want to play SubSpace and your packets have to hop through MCI's network to reach vie, you are screwed. MCI 'customers' have posted their results, and I have confirmed these results with one of my PPP accounts, which uses MCI. The verdict? 25% downstream - server to you - packetloss, which means the game is all but unplayable. And this is not only to vie. I get generally revolting performance to the entire Internet from this account, due to MCI.

Read this message for some representative numbers from Chakotay.

So what can we do? Virgin has no influence over MCI as they aren't an MCI customer. However, if you are stuck with an ISP that is, you can try to talk to MCI yourself or bug your ISP into talking to them. However, Chakotoy did attempt to talk to MCI and they blew him off. Here is what he has to say about it: 

..another thing: MCI is as stubborn as hell. I talked to HLC a while ago, and I really mean TALKED. they RESPONDED. they said they were working on the problem, they saw that MCI was a major misfit, and they were even considering changing their routers in such way that they don't pass the packets over to MCI. I sent many e-mails to MCI (polite ones, of course), and got NOTHING back. NOTHING. not even an acknowledgement that they got the messages...

Perhaps if we turned up the heat on our good friends over at la-la land stuff will begin to happen. I have searched the MCI web site and couldn't find a relevant email address or phone number, though. If someone does find such an address and could tell me, I will post it here for the world to see. It might also help if we MCI phone customers threatened to switch our long-distance carriers back to AT&T en masse - or better yet, Sprint.

[4/1/97]