"You look like you've been losing sleep,"
said a stranger on a train.
I fixed him with an ice-cold stare and said,
"I've been having those dreams again."
N e w s o f t h e D a y
27 February 1999
The Slayfest presents CTFBRAWL '99
Captain Harloch recently updated on the Slayfest page with information on today's events, which I was too stupid to link to earlier. This is happening at 8:00 eastern, TONIGHT (i.e. very very soon) so cancel all your plans; you are cocooning and spending quality time with your mate (i.e. your computer). If it doesn't get plossed out again, this events is going to rock like nothing you have ever seen. Extreme Games settings, nice big 2-base map by CPRman based on designs by Roseo and The Romulans, lots of flags.....hopefully a nice big bloodbath.
I am posting this update early to get the word out as soon as I can, so please excuse the lack of proofreading and the bad link to Bolero's interview. I will have these things fixed later today.
RiSC secession explained
A couple of weekends ago, RiSC left the SSC abruptly and with no apparent explanation save a reported argument with Baudchaser over planned score resets used on the iNET billing server. It seems that what happened here was not a planned secession per se but s sysop level decision on the part of Kice. The official policies of the RiSC and SD server banks is that the zone sysops decide which billing server they wish to use and whether or not they wish to be part of the SSC. At the time of the name and billing changes, I believe Kice was either sysop or co-sysop of every RiSC zone except for mine, which was being moved between machines and had several days of downtime. I will be moving the zone back to SSC unless another council member objects to this. Kice does have the agreement of NfoCipher and the rest of the zones will remain on their own billing server under the RiSC name unless they change sysops.
Bolero relocates
In response to threats by Captain Harloch and Kafka to take down Bolero's Subspace Cheat Information Page if he would not produce his anti-cheat program The Deliverer, Bolero asked that his page be taken down. He is now at Warstrike, thanks to Wampit, who had the page set up less than an hour after I put in the request. For the record, this is not an endorsement by me of Bolero in his fight with Zetasquad, and I did suggest that he only move if and when his account actually was removed by Zetasquad. At present I take no position in any of this except that I don't believe in denying someone hosting over unproven statements or an appearance of seediness. In fairness to Zetasquad.com, they are not a web hosting service but a squad page, and don't necessarily have a journalistic obligation to host pages they disagree with.
The interview
Bolero has been quite a controversial character for the last several weeks. After launching an informational page on Subspace cheats, he began testing in Extreme Games of an anti-chreat program called The Deliverer. By late that month, it had become clear that more than a few people were out to get him. Falsified screenshots were published implicating him in the creation of dCap, and a mysterious publicity campaign was launched in service to this fact a full two weeks later. Meanwhile, the messageboard at sog.java.net was rife with fake Boleros. It came as no surprise, then, that when he was accused of cheating in Extreme Games earlier this month, some of his accusors met appeals to reason with hostility and seemed to be feigning ignorance of these fairly well known incidents.
The forces aligned against him slowly mounted, however, and the people at the highest levels of Extreme Games became increacingly convinced of the charges. Bolero eventually left the zone in what can only be called disgrace. In this wild tale, Bolero discusses the mysterious history which he claims led up to his being framed, and explains how the Extreme Games brass can have done the right thing while being completely wrong--if you believe his version of the story.
Bolero Speaks
The Dark Zone returns
One of the first super zones (predated only by Shine World and Pure Hell), and in fact the first player zone ever reviewed at this page, is back up and running, with Byobong7 as pointman, he being one of the old zone's mods. They will be using one of the classic TDZ maps for atleast a while, but may do some experimentation in the future. Welcome back. :)
The problem with Find Servers
You all probably think you don't need to read this, but read it anyway because you might learn something. :) It is common knowledge that to update servers you must now use sscentral.vie.co.uk instead of the old sscentral.vie.com, but what is less understood is the client's tendency to crash while updating. For some time, the old address was mirrored to the new one, but this is no longer the case and attempting to connect with the old one will likley crash the program. More importantly, because the front-end client just plain sucks, don't do anything while you are downloading the server list! Just sit there like an ass and stare at your screen for the fifteen seconds it will take to get the list. Don't even touch the mouse. Don't breathe. Almost any change in your facial expression can cause the update to crash on you. For some reason this has been happening to more and more people lately who never had a problem with it before, so I thought I should mention it here.
War Zone turns to map cycling
After a preliminary floating of the idea, Peasant's Paladin sent out a list of the maps which will be up for consideration as the next War Zone level. The zone is taking a conservative approach and easing into the process by narrowing its options initially to only a few different maps, all of them tried and tested. Up for consideration are Happenstance's and Arctos' maps (both known from about a year ago), rodvik's old map with the fish and the funky tileset (this was the third WZ map), and Mixman's level from June of 1997, which only saw about one month of use and is very spooky for some reason. :) Personally, I think Arctos' map is the best one up for consideration (and one of the best, period) but I would also like to play in Mixman's map because it was not up for very long. Good things come to those who wait, however, and Arctos III is a tried and tested masterpiece with lots of good bases, dense greening terrain, and nice floating artifacts to make red chases more interesting.
Sick fuck link o' the day
Since I get so many of these I figure it might as well get its own section for a while. :P This is pretty harsh but it is one of the funniest things I've seen on the web in quite a while The whole site is pretty amazing actually so take some time to dig around it. Thanks to Dariakus for the new hole in my stomach lining.
ewww
You know you have no life when it is 9am and you
have already played Extreme Games for two hours.
- Minbari Warship
And when you wanna kill it dead
you let it throttle you instead.
update for the week of...
24 February 1999
Kidding !
Don't worry I'm not doing weekly updates from now on, I swear. ;) It just turned out that I am doing one at the moment, but hopefully the next update will be of the daily sort...
BoleroGate continues . . .
An accusation no one seemed to take seriously, againt the secretive Bolero by an incresaingly hostile and shadey Mongoose, blossomed into something much nastier when Zennor backed Mongoose's accusations this last week. The accusations quickly gained the support of Captain Harloch, Kafka, and many other EG staff. This follows an apology last week by hunter2 with regard to previous accusations. Bolero has said he will now be moving his Subspace Cheat Information Page after implied threats by Harloch and Kafka to take the page down for its anti-Zeta remarks and a lack of activity or credibility with regard to The Deliverer, an alleged anti-cheating program which has been in the works now for months. Bolero has recently lost favor with many of the Extreme Games staff (dominated largely by Zetasquad), because he is unwilling to produce evidence that The Deliverer exists even to the sysops there.
Dolly gets a makeover
SilentDragon has given the Sheep Cloning Facility page an update, with a nice new look and the infrastructure what what will soon be news posts by all six (!) of our sysops and different sections for various events such as Slayfest, TNT, and Armada. I would like to rebuild the map archive along with a history section of sorts, but haven't really got time for it. Any volunteers? I have all of the maps and can put together notes for each one, but I'll be damned if I'm going to cut that page together. :)
In special event news, the Slayfest on Saturday was awesome, and while SSX' trademark packetloss was a problem, it didn't hurt nearly as bad as it did a week before. The bunching of ships in the Death Star trench run was a bit much, however, because every time you lagged out you would have to get back on your old team and then get in a legal ship without getting negged. The game moved on to the incredibly fun if perhaps inane ;) Braveheart event which has to be seen to be believed. After that I had to go but the events continued for quite some time after. TurfNight Tuesday was a lost of fun yesterday, with a medium size turnout. Split between only two teams, we had some long and very violent fights in the grid area of Giga's Megaplex map, which resembles a chunk of General Rage's map floating in a big oval. There is some really nice terrain all over this map so be sure and remind yourself to come next week if you are a tunnel rat. ;)
In the next month or so you can expect a few full blown scenarios from the Reverend Spork, Mailiw, and RuneCaster (who is doing a shipset and sound replacements or his), and I'm working with mDk to get the ASWZ League games set up for Sundays, hopefully with The Romulans doing his big ol' Armada game as a kind of halftime or post-game show.
Proof that War Zone is really back
Peasant's Paladin sent out a mail yesterday to the moderators of SSCU War Zone SVS soliciting suggestions for (gasp) could it be? A map change! The ruin of Subspace, to be sure. On the table are three classic VIE designs, at least two Arctos maps, two each by Warhammer, T2-17, Happenstance, and myself, and work by The Romulans, B8_Factor, Gommy, and Shanoyu--so if you want a say in what map you play in next, start doing your homework. ;) Damn, and I thought we were all just mapping for the love of tedium.
Giga does Chaos
GiGaKiLLeR, best known for authoring more Turf Zone maps than everyone else combined, is trying his hand at a map for Chaos Zone and the result thus far is a beautiful and original level which may actually be the one to unseat the Battle Drone if the Chaos old guard are willing to give it a trial run. Careful with those diagonal walls over there, my friend; they are still very much WTF material in the Chaos subbacultcha...
I'll post a teaser screenshot as soon as Giga is willing to let me. This is the first new Chaos map since SilentDragon released his this last Fall.
Subspace . Net legit?
According to WiZT, who was on the staff of the first Subspace.Net page, the domain is still owned by The $niper, but CybeRise has assured me that he intends to buy it from him, and that the actual machine it's hosted on is owned by a trusted friend. The last incarnation of the site (the hacking one) was in fact running on this machine. "The only reason we took ss.net away from a shadow rift was because we didn't like the way he was running it," WiZT said.
JeffP interview
Last Friday, Infantry HQ posted an interview with JeffP. I didn't read it because I didn't really give a damn and figured it would be a lot of stuff about Infantry that has been asked time and time again. Well guess what, it's not about Infantry but about Harmless and the people who run it and the ideas behind it, and various technical and industry issues, a kick ass read if ever I read one. Big props to slick brick for doing such nice work here.
Infantry HQ interview with JeffP
Boring . . .
It's been easy to not update for the last week or so because almost nothing interesting has happened, so I'm going back to my old trick of just writing about nothing. ;) Let's see, just now I turned my heater off because it was getting too hot. Later on today I hope to have an interesting interview with my cat for you to read plus a review of last nights episode of Felicity and some reflections on the new planks they are replacing on the wharf down at the beach.
the skinny . . .
The lowdown on Bolero's departure from Zetasquad.com and RiSC's departure from the SSC, tomorrow's update.
Important opportunity for Subspace players
mDk sent me this link so he can get into Hell. Just think of the possibilities, though, for increasing the Subspace player base. Let me know when I can claim my finder's fee.
<tennin> but they raise the price of sleep on you once you're hooked on it
I'm a little teapot,
short and stout.
Here is my handle,
here is my spout.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
18 February 1999
RiSC leaves the SSC
Old news, but not clear until just recently the why and where of it. Warstrike reported Monday that the RiSC server bank had bailed out of the SubSpace Community deal "after Saturday's billing server outage", implying that this outage was the reason for the secession. While that may be RiSC's position, there is no reality to back it up. RiSC changed its name from SSCE back to either late Friday night or early Saturday morning, before the billing server disaster (an iNET-wide crash, in fact, which had nothing to do with iNET's Subspace administration). In fact the departure seems to have been over power issues and peeves involving the use of the billing server. In particular, RiSC co-sysop Kice had voiced objections over Baudchaser's planned score resets and Star Warzone's jackpot announcements. This in my opinion is the only explanation for the fact that RiSC left the SSC without any warning or statement. In my opinion, considering what the rest of us have been through, and what many of use have compromised, to make the SSC work, departing in this manner is very bad form, not a mere rejection of someone who has done a great deal for the game, but an unabashed insult.
Turfin' plossed out
Mine GO BOOM's organized mini-Turf game in the Philosophy Club on Monday fell to pieces because of extremely high packetloss, and will probably be rescheduled. This was the second event in a space of three days to have been spoiled by packetloss, Assault on the Death Star having been postponed a week from this last Saturday. The SSX servers have been experiencing worse and worse problems with packetloss due to routing problems with a local backbone. We are aware of the problem and looking for a way around it, so bear with us and give Turfin' another chance next week. (Details forthcoming.)
hunter2 apology, retirement
PCGaming staff member hunter2, who recently took some heat (mainly from me) for posting a "Queer of the Year" award against Bolero based on cheat-authoring allegations made by AWOL and Mandude, posted an apology Monday to Bolero, effectively retracting the story. Two days later he posted his retirement message to PCGaming. He will remain on as an occasional staff member.
Witch Doom returns
The oldest and best of the super zones is back after some down time, unless I'm mistaken. I didn't see it listed for quite a while. Witch Doom is about as nasty as a super zone can get without crashing the game client, but is set apart from other zones like it by the superb Arctos map which has been used since the zone's inception. On that note, Arctos pimped up his new SSCU Warball zone on Warstrike news. I haven't had a chance to go there but I know the map well and it is excellent. Expect a very biased review of this zone ASAP.
Yeah, yeah . . .
I know, I neglected you. Tell it to Cybrid. ;)
DAMMNNNN . . . !
If you missed the first two installments of Storm of the Century, consider your life and reputation utterly ruined. This sucker is GOOD. Don't leave it on your to-rent list for any longer than you have to once it's out on video, and for God's sake don't spoil it for yourself by joining the fray four hours into the story. You'll be sorry. ;)
<Nemmers> Man was given a brain and a penis and insufficient blood supply to use both at once
Innocence is hurting,
a world speaks out of tune.
Promise calls, promise falls;
what are we to do with a clouded view?
N e w s o f t h e D a y
13 February 1999
Assault on the Death Star
Can't pimp this up enough! Last weekend's Slayfest event was the most fun I've had in Subspace in a long time, and stayed at its max arena size of 60 for nearly five hours. Captain Harloch is making this a weekly series, and the newest installment is a proven favorite from the series' roots in Star Warzone. Be sure and read up on the rules and ship types before the game as they are a bit different from SVS. However the Star Wars settings are very nice and this is indeed going to be a pilots' game.
Please note that the map presently up in Sheep Cloning Facility may not be the finished version, and the settings are left over from this week's TurfNight game. I just uploaded what I had there as a precaution because I am getting an FTP error from SSX at the moment. The game starts today at 8pm Eastern in SSCX SCF West.
Bolero hits back
Subspace's best known anti-cheater, certainly a controversial character but most likely not a cheater himself in my opinion, has updated his Subspace Cheat Information Page and sounded off on recent accusations against him. An obscure trash talk page by AWOL and Mandude posted a screenshot in mid-January implicating Bolero in the authoring of the cheat known as dCap. Nearly 2 weeks later, hunter2 of PCGaming fame reposted the story for no apparent reason other than to celebrate the confirmed spoofing of Bolero's identity on the Pro League message board. More recently, an IP faker apparently used his identity in Subspace to wreak havoc in Extreme Games. It seems that fake Boleros are on the rise.
(I should point out that I invited Bolero on to my squad after two of the above incidents had occurred, and he is a member because I have respect for him. It probably doesn't need to be said that my defense of him has everything to do with the ludicrous nature of the accusation and nothing whatsoever to do with squad loyalty.)
Quest for the Necronomicon
No, it's not a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, although there is plenty to do with Zombies. ;) Mailliw's new scenario, based on the Sam Raimi movie Army of Darkness, involves more of a Trench Wars style attack on a castle, with the living attempting to defend a certain less-than-sacred relic from the dead until the Sun comes up. Tentatively scheduled for February 27th. Check the page for details. A map outline should be posted soon.
oh PLEASE . . .
Subspace.Net is back in yet another laughable manifestation. Hasn't this gone on quite long enough? First a disappointing Subspace page pumped up by three weeks of advance hype--useful only for its realaudio show and often phony affiliations with prominent game hosts. This site started collapsing almost from the moment it opened, then closed without warning, leaving no archive to speak of. A few months later it returned with a grafitti looking logo and no content at all this time, and then that too was gone--in its place, a hacking site, declaring Subspace to be dead. Now they're at it again, this time sadly enough with staff members who are (were?) actually reputable, again promising great web design and--yup--squad hosting. I have one thing to say to the squads foolish enough to go to this place for hosting: Back your shit up, because if history is any indicator someday soon it will be GONE without so much as a rude email explaning why. By the way, do you all really have the word Squad in your names?
To CybeRise, Tombstone, and (wtf?) SilentDragon: get the hell out while you still can with your good names intact. To The $niper or whoever is running the stupid place now: get a life and sell the fucking domain already. It is a disgrace.
Freedom good, totalitarianism bad
(a Tribes manifesto, with apologies to Cybrid)
In the first week of Tribes' retail life, there was much confusion. Team damage was the order of the day, and it created problems and dilemmas among responsible players--and those problems and dilemmas were good things. Multiplayer gaming is at its best when it demands decision and creates suspense--but it wasn't always working here. At least once a night, on any given server, an individual would use team damage specifically to ruin the game for his teammates, and unfortunately it was very difficult to kick these players off of the server. In a system designed to be abused, kicking a teamkiller required consent from the enemy team. Often his victims would need to switch sides and teamkill the enemy just to get their attention and thus a voting quorum. Rather than deal with this confusion, the game's population--unaccustomed to team damage in first person shooters and weary from the player-killing endemic to Diablo and Ultima Online--began choosing to get rid of the problem by eliminating team damage altogether. We have only the team killers to thank for this, but all they ever did was spoil individual games. By contrast, well-meaning response to their havoc spoiled Tribes as a whole in meaningful ways.
For a few weeks, team damage was turned off almost everywhere. This was justifiable; players who had become tired of losers screwing up their games learned how difficult it really was to remove these people efficiently. Worse than simply requiring help from the enemy team, one of the inexcusable flaws in Tribes is that in voting an abstention effectively counts as a no. While perhaps this was meant to discourage people from opening the same votes repeatedly in an attempt to slip one past, there is already a delay mechanism to this end, and it's always possible to kick people who spam the voting system. There is frankly no good reason to count an abstention as a vote against. Because they are in fact counted this way, it takes an unreasonable amount of work to disable team damage, and even more to turn it back on. Disabled damage thus became something of a guarded prize, and a single attempt at reenabling often resulted in bids to kick whoever dared initiate the vote.
Most folks can't spend all of their time playing Tribes, and it's easy for a TK incident to become ugly and ruin a 30 minute game, so all of the above was justifiable--until Kaptain Kickass' Anti-TK script came along. With Anti-TK it is still possible to ruin the game, but such attempts actually involve work and cunning--a scarce commodity among troublemakers--with a payoff amounting to little more than the mild irritation of one's teammates. Anti-TK has other, more serious problems than this. Defensive mining becomes almost useless, either shallowing the game across the board or providing an overwhelming advantage to the more experienced team; the most conscientious defenders are punished regardless of how many times they send mine warnings over radio, and players who screw up their team's defenses by stepping on mines never learn their lesson. Anti-TK is also not a good setting for new players to learn about explosive weapons for obvious reasons, and removes much suspense from the game for all players: Do I lob grenades into the control room; is my teammate in there or on the roof above? Do I hurl discs at the flag carrier; is my teammate in pursuit keeping his distance? The skilled player thinks analytically here, types quickly, makes difficult decisions based on the moment's importance to the objective, and usually manages not to kill his teammates. Usually he isn't killed by his teammates, either. The unskilled player, on the other hand?
Well, this is a after all democracy. Unskilled players can simply band together and drag the entire game down to their level of ability--and it's not uncommon to see those who want team damage disabled resorting to teamkilling in order to drive home their point. I was recently present for one such campaign that destroyed two whole games. With no teamkilling problem visible, a player took it upon himself to show the other twenty-odd people using the server that disabled teamkilling was better. Did he leave the game for one of the three hundred servers where team damage is turned off? Hell no. He massacred his teammates and destroyed their equipment, then changed teams and massacred the enemy as well. Between him and four or five other like-minded, equally frustrated allies, the server we were on became a waste of bandwidth without any strategy or objective to speak of. More surprising--and more loathesome--was the degree to which he successfully made his case, as players not participating in the havoc increasingly were willing to buckle under his coersion. "Just vote so we can play," they cried. There is no word for such behavior but cowardice.
For players legitimately concerned about intentional teamkilling, Anti-TK does what it's supposed to, and is a superior solution. Why, then, do we more and more often find team damage voted off on servers that are running Anti-TK?
Because the next best thing for a lamer to do is camp.
The maps are not designed for this. The once beloved Stonehenge is now reviled. Much of the richness of Scarabrae and Siege are gone. Too many times now have I seen games end in a stalemate because someone discovered the art of tossing mortars around inside their own base. And who is going to object? Bouncing grenades around corners into your own generator room no longer carries a penalty. Combat in the field is quite a bit easier when you've got two or three people standing half a map away in heavy armor, hurling explosives into the area at no risk to either your livelihood or their own. Far beyond an already despicable need to remove a dilemma from the game, what's really going on here is these people actually want less strategy. They don't want to look at their map, they don't like to type; most likely they can't pilot or aim either, and again, who is going to complain? No dignified offense player would lower himself to criticizing enemy defense as too strong, and teammates of the mortar artist are likely not to notice him; they have not been needed in a defense capacity for ten or twenty minutes and will only be home long enough to suit up and load their weapons. The game degenerates into a flagless dogfight in the open while defense in its entirety consists of one or two people dropping mortars down a tube. What's really sad about this is that team damage has been so rare for so long now that many players probably have no experience of its virtues and don't know what they're missing in these situations. As a matter of fact, I have never witnessed a public objection to such behavior.
Anti-TK is, all things considered, bad for the game, but its advocates mean well, and may have single handedly saved Tribes from becoming a silly rehash of team pickup Rocket Arena. The depth they have removed from a once-sophisticated game is unfortunate, but forgivable. The modification is also first generation; the future may hold more surgical solutions that further revive the team damage factor. At very least it is a good precedent.
By contrast, simply disabling team damage absolutely ruins this game. Advocates of the solution have now shown their true colors, and proven that they neither understand nor actually enjoy Tribes as it was designed to play out. The seasoned disabler will complain that the kicking mechanism doesn't work, that troublemakers can simply reenter the game under a different IP, or after the game has ended. What of it? So can anyone else. Further, he will complain that the issue of abstentions makes it flat-out impossible to kick another player from the game most of the time. This simply isn't true. Just try sending racial slurs over the public channel next time you connect to a server, and see how long you last there.
Without the option to disable team damage, we'd have worked this all out by now, kicking being the only viable solution. We would certainly not be looking at the present standard: a starting vote without explanation amounting to 6 for, 1 against, and 15 abstentions. It's a computer game; people will learn to play it properly, but not in the presence of so many easy solutions. Instead, what has happened is that a tool supposedly needed to combat lameness is now used primarily to combat player frustrations with their own faults, with the faults of their teammates, and with the complexity of Tribes itself. Many players unfortunately see this complexity as a liability, because they choose to see their own inexperience and laziness as design flaws in the game. In fact the only true design flaw in Tribes is that team damage can be decided by a vote. The players ought to have no such control; those who require it don't really want to be playing this game.
In the spirit of fairness
For those of you who will never sleep soundly again because of the Hamster Dance, I offer sweet revenge. Azure Mercy, better half to RuneCaster, sent me this link to Hamster Golf. Rune, don't let this one get away man. ;)
Erm...click on the games button....you'll find it.
<RuneCaster> Do you why Big Macs are so cheap? :)
<Golbez> RuneCaster- why?
<RuneCaster> Lettuce is cheap, meat is free when you have traps, a dumpster and a thriving metropolitan stray animal population
<Golbez> big macs are good, dammit
<RuneCaster> Lots of homeless people, lots of stray animals, the answer seems obvious
<Golbez> and anyway, DC rats are too big. Subway uses those. ;)
Oblivion has always been such a friend.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
10 February 1999
SSX becomes SSCX
That is to say that the SSX zones will now be listed as SSCX in keeping with the Subspace Community naming standard established by Baudchaser. This was decided at a meeting Monday afternoon and puts to rest the question of whether SSX would be assimilated into Baud's evil world domination plan. The official name for the server bank remains as SSX. In case anyone is curious, the servers are located in Washington state. At the above mentioned meeting it was also decided that Dueling Zone will stay with SSX rather than being hosted with iNET.
Turf Lives !
Thanks to a billing ad from Baudchaser and hydro's recruiting of players from his own zone for the cause, TurfNight made a huge comeback yesterday, with the game peacking out at 39 players and lasting for a few hours. This came after several weeks of poor turnout which resulted in short, boring games.
Followup to Clockwork Chaos this Saturday
The next game in Captain Harloch's scenario series will run this weekend at the same time and place (Saturday 8pm Eastern in the Sheep Cloning Facility) and is back to the Star Wars theme for which the Cap'n is well known. You will need a ship pak and sound replacements for this, and the game will be a little more complicated, so take a look at the propaganda ahead of time to avoid confusion.
Captain Harloch's Saturday Night Slayfest
New installment of Cyb's Soapbox
Cybrid chimes in with a second issue of his new editorial series for Warzone. There's a shout out to me and I can't exactly figure out why :) but I'm proud of it anyhow. This month: Baldur's Gate, dealing with teamkillers and other lamers, and the Tribes map editor. Enjoy.
Oh hell
That's my update for today because it's almost midnight and I have to eat dinner. Tomorrow: details on Mailliw's scenario-in-progress and a huge Tribes manifesto which is kind of a response to Cybrid's pantywaist approach. ;)
<Moby> c'mon, trashtalk us some more
<Moby> god FORBID i'm not popular with the "pro" crowd
while the cold wind blows
the heroes return
left are troubled souls
that nothing but yearn
N e w s o f t h e D a y
7 February 1999
A future for Turf?
The ballsiest zone in the history of the game is risking its neck (and huge player base) yet again with a radical set of changes. Incoming to Extreme Games, what looks to be one of the finest Turf maps ever designed, courtesy of EG's resident mappers Dr.evil and hydro. Yes I finally got to see this map in progress. :) Yes it will maintain the spirit of the zone, with a big dogfighting arena in the center, a soccer goal as incentive to hog the powerball, and safe zones deep in the bases for ballkilling wars. What's not necessarily in the spirit of the zone is the size of the hallways and fighting areas. While there are a few of the cramped networks of snake tunnels and closely spaced obstacles we all (well, most of us) know and love, there is also a good deal of classic VIE Turf Zone territory here. The rescue of Turf from obscurity? Perhaps. At present I am attempting to broker a test of the game for TurfNight Tuesday. If I survive the negotiations (and secure permission from the authors) I will meanwhile be putting up some teaser screenshots here. Stay tuned.
Oh, I will say this much about the map: It looks like Castle Mafia may finally be getting the echoing corridors and bloodstained walls it has deserved for so long. >:)
Board spammer exposed
Suicide named the culprit in a recent spamming of the Sog Java Net webboard, publishing his IP information and other nasty details. More importantly, he has provided an explanation of how the mischief was accomplished and how to counter the problem as well as an attack made against the board a month ago. If you use Matt Wright's Webboard script this is highly recommended reading, as there have been many such spam attacks on Subspace related message boards in recent months.
L E G E N D S
I'm not usually one to report on League matches, and usually I don't enjoy watching them or playing that sort of game in a prac, but I have a few friends in Legends and have been a quiet fan of the squad for quite a long time now, me being largely a Chaos player and all. Wow, what an ass kicker of a match, not a dull moment and both teams played superbly. Too bad most of the spectator frequency didn't really deserve to watch, or for that matter deserve to continue breathing, as there was little to see there but endless bitching (mostly vicious) about Legends' lag, for the better part of an hour--specifically that suffered by Silent Death, who is located in Australia. Sadly enough for the spec freq, lag settings were kept the same as they had been all season, and a strong lead retaken mainly by Moby in the last moments of the game (without the aid of Silent Death) pretty much erased the issue.
I have to say that Elements were very, very impressive though, forgiving some rather ungraceful retirements pronounced by Underachiever and Aero in the game's aftermath. Legends were the better team, but sadly could not withstand the crushing humiliation of the immortal nivaG calling Silent Death "fuckboy" after the game. (niva also carries the distinct honor of being the first League player I ever managed to repel into mines.) Whether the squad's bruised ego will heal in time for next week's match versus RaDaR (or maybe ONE, probably not, heh) remains to be seen.
Congrats especially to Codeine on MVP and Moby on those two awesome kills. :)
The (attempted) rape of Chaos Expert
Some time ago an argument ensued over the nature and purpose of VI Chaos. The majority opinion (i.e. not mine) held that the zone was needed because North American lag to iNET Chaos Expert was unmanageable for many players. Finally, a place to play Chaos without lag! And certainly a welcome addition to the Favorites list to those serious players unwilling to fight with over 300 ping, etc.
Two weeks later, VI Chaos is empty, and now making a second attempt to draw players in the form of a map change, to none other than the immortal Battle Drone. This makes VI Chaos a near complete mirror of iNET Chaos Expert. Baudchaser made an admittedly fair-spirited billing announcement late Saturday, for the second time suggesting an exodus to VI. I happen to disagree with this move, but it may be the only way to give American hosted Chaos a fair shot before it goes the way of VI Jackpot.
So what do we have here? A respectable attempt to bring life back to the American zone, or the death throes of yet another zone everyone wanted around but no one wanted to actually play in? This was a busy Saturday, with a major League game following a large SCF event and a RiSC Star Wars tourney. A nice way of putting this would be that over the next week we'll see if VI players really want an unlagged Chaos as much as they claim to want it.
The realistic way of describing this? Undignified player grab which will probably amount to nothing because Chaos Expert is the most well organized and lively community in the game. No one dedicated to Chaos will leave it unless lag actually holds them in spectator mode constantly. Guys, if you want to play Chaos so bad, give the zone to Bortas and run small maps and arenas there, like you should have done with iNET Running Zone three weeks ago.
Correction re ASWZ tourney
mDk, sysop of A Small Warzone, is a DAMNED LIAR. The tournament he announced on Friday is not actually happening Sunday the 12th, since the next time Sunday falls on the 12th is in September. ;) Oh well, I should have caught this. The tournament is today (!) in ASWZ at 2pm Eastern. If it goes well, this tournament may go weekly and become ASWZ's answer to a league season.
Clockwork Chaos - Hope you didn't miss this one !
Captain Harloch's first scenario for the Sheep Cloning Facility was packed last night, and one of the most successful event-style games I've ever seen. With the arena size locked at 60, it was difficult to get in for most of the night, but nevertheless the game went on for five hours before dying off around 1:00 in the morning. Even in hallu's WSL games I have never seen an organized event go on for so long. The Cap'n spiced things up with a little variety in team sizes, ship limits, and so forth, but it still amazed me that such a simple game could keep going for so long and stay that fun. I guess that quote about simplicity is true.
Details on the next game are already up, along with Harloch's review of last night's events, at the Slayfest Events Page. My thanks to everyone who helped out with this, especially Baudchaser for the billing spam and the moderators who kept the game orderly, moreover the players in general who were the damned nicest bunch of people I've played with in some time now, and most of all Harloch who brings glory and honor to the SCF and all that good stuff. ;)
Red up on next week's event early as it will feature slightly more complex rules and be best played with some shipsets and sound replacements.
New name for Sheep Cloning Facility
No biggie here really, as the IP information has not changed and if it's already in your favorites list you won't notice the difference. SCF West is now known as SSCX SCF West in keeping with the new standard established by the Subspace Council. Other SSX zones haven't done this yet, as it is optional and has not been enforced by Xalimar, but if you notice a few zones missing from the roster, check lower down the list for SSCX or possibly SSCW.
New can of worms
sage386 has released his "final release of subspace update", whatever that means. To me it means a lot of talented people wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell the program does, whether it works or not, etc. Thanks to mDk for the can opener.
My left frame works now !
Or so I think. Thanks to QA Man of Subspace at PC Gaming for pointing out the obvious error. If you've become accustomed to opening news.html here, please load the proper index page, and please don't hesistate in letting me know if you have problems with the left frame in your browser! This page does NOT favor one HTML-incompatible browser over another and if it still has problems in any frames-enabled browser I would like to know about it. Thanks.
Shanoyu updates
And it's still only the first week of February! Fear the misc.txt.
Cute beyond the limits of good taste
Giga sent me this and will spend long hours in Purgatory for it. Anyone caught praying for his soul will be punished severely. :P
Famous stands up for abusive moderators
He's right, too. (Reposted because I screwed it up last update.)
<Leigh> spike doesn't like my hair cut
<Leigh> but i'm not changing my hair cut just because the cat doesnt like it
Kcab og cisum eht ekam uoy,
gnikaeps Natas raeh uoy!
Kcab og cisum eht ekam uoy,
gnikaeps Natas raeh uoy!
N e w s o f t h e D a y
5 February 1999
Clockwork Chaos event this Saturday
The first of Captain Harloch's new scenario series will be held tomorrow (Saturday the 6th) in the Sheep Cloning Facility. This is actually a continuation of a long line of scenarios which Harloch has run in Star Warzone and SW Events, but he seems to be moving away from scenarios per se and towards the kind of events Hallu ran in the World Subspace League this last Fall. Clockwork Chaos is going to be awesome in my opinion, even if not very many people show up, but with the Star Warzone population and Zeta-Squadron behind it there will probably be a good size game.
This week's scenario is an rumble-type elimination game with a different ship type for each frequency. Teams will start at the outside of the map and converge on the center for....well, for a slayfest, I suppose. :P If this doesn't rock, I quit! Game time is 8:00pm Eastern. If you're not there, you will be required to show evidence that you were with a female at the time, or it's the Minefield Beatdown 4U.
A slightly more helpful Extreme Games teaser
hydro mentioned in the Extreme Games news.txt that the new map for the game is going to be back to a Turf style game. If you were there for the early days of EG you should be excited because Turf style flags rocks in that zone. ;) Best of all, I talked to hydro the other night and he has hinted at a more open feeling to the bases....hmm, an evil/hydro Turf map with rooms like the ones in that huge cathedral of theirs...I think I'm going to be a little harder to reach if this happens...
Upcoming tourney in ASWZ
mDk is holding a squad tournament in SSX Small Warzone on Sunday, February 12th at 2:00pm Eastern time. To enter you will need to contact mDk before noon that day with your squad, its captain, and the number of members in the squad. There will be a cap on the number of players allowed to participate, so it is recommended you enter soon if you plan to participate. br>
Why does e only ever talk about SSX?
Because none of you wankers from iNET or DSG ever send me news! (The VI people send me things in unmarked packages that I am afraid to open heh.) If you are running an event or a new zone and think I should know about it, please feel free to send me the information on it. I've always tried to use this page to keep folks informed of new games and maps that go up, but there is a hell of a lot to keep track of and if I played in all the zones my girlfriend would leave me, not to mention SilentDragon would probably kick me out of the Space Police. :(
Got a new map or zone? A tournament? Tell me, dammit! :)
Famous stands up for abusive moderators
He's right, too.
<Golbez> whoa
<Golbez> squirrel's got big nuts
When the May rain comes
all of this shall be washed away.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
Groundhog Day
wtf new map??
It seems that someone loaded a new tileset into the Battle Drome map being used in iNET Chaos Expert. This wouldn't be much for news except that either the tiles are in a different order yet fit anyway in a weird way, or someone went through meticulously replacing all the joining pieces of the walls with the correct pieces from a different set of wall tiles. It's a bit hard to describe, but you should notice it immediately upon entering. It's as if the material used to connect the wall were made up of a different material than the walls themselves.
And just as I've finished writing this the mapis back to normal. Turns out the changes were part intentional, part mistake, and the whole thing was a planned 48 hour trial period. Bortas has said that he is open to more experiments like this if the actual level design isn't altered.
A not very helpful Extreme Games teaser
I'm not sure I can say anything specific at this point, but some fun oldskool type stuff is going to be coming back to EG, including a favorite old base of mine from way way back...I will have the details of this soon, hopefully...
How to bring back Jackpot
The VI and League folks seem a bit bummed lately at the failure of Jackpot to return to life despite an apparently availablity of people who say they want to play. While it took two months to revive War Zone and no more should be expected of Jackpot, it is true that the zone does have the ability to come back and just can't seem to make it happen. I understand that it is Poor Form™ to link my own messageboard posts, and I'm sure I'll get more than my share of (negative) feedback from the board regulars, but I'd like to hear from some config artistes about how this might be pulled off, and there are some possible problems that might be solved through mapping. I also don't think it's a bad idea at root, and it could use a few shouts of support or a revision by someone who understands the League settings better than I do. Anyway if you're interested in bringing back the Running style flag game in any form, please have a gander.
Tribes Stuff
I meantioned the other day that Tribes sucks.I don't have the time or energy to write about this for the present update, but I assure you the game is still quite fun and I am about to play it just after I am done uploading here. My objection has to do with the intricacies of piloting, which I've concluded really is more of a level design problem than a flaw in the game's overall philosophy.
Meanwhile, the Prima strategy guide for Tribes is finally out, and the new PlanetStarsiege page is also hosting its own guide. The player authored one is good in parts, but the Prima one is horrid, not to mention short and largely pointless. (It spends 85 pages on things found in the manual before launching into a general primer on internet gaming.) About half of the book actually has anything to do with strategy, and most of that is taken up by cursory breakdowns of the different maps. The guide at PlanetStarsiege has huge chunks of trivial and useless information, and contains scattered gems like "The first technique, which is imperative to the awesome player, is the ability to move sideways." Nevertheless, it is a good page for new players, and there are some veins of information helpful to intermediate players. I'd recommend reading the PlanetStarsiege one and burning Prima's guide.
I haven't seen much press about this, but there are at least a few full-blown custom maps running right now. The only place I have seen these is on the WarWorld server, but I've heard of two other servers running custom maps. One particularly interesting level has two ships grappling so high above the ground that it is apparently impossible to survive the fall. Another map, aptly title Tunnel Rats, is very rough but still great fun to play in. It features an endless and chaotic maze of corridors winding about underground--and I do mean chaotic to the point of real confusion. As soon as I get a chance to spend serious time in these levels
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