<Shackled> i'm taking my pants off
And all around you is the warm bluegreen breath of heavens
Do not fear
Around you is the vast blueblack space of stars
Do not fear
This is the great ocean
On which the endless waves crash down
H a p p y N e w Y e a r
12 / 31 / 99
The world is not ending woohoo
Is this the shit or what? I wasn't expecting disaster but I was expecting some rioting in supposedly non-ready countries and a bunch of people to lose utilities, but guess not. Now all we have to do is manage to convince all the nutty people in the United States not to shoot anyone or blow anything up until at least January 2nd, and we'll be set.
I was gonna post more than this but I think I'll leave it for now by just saying happy New Year and peace be with you and all that stuff. Oh yeah, the Pope rocks. Go Pope!
<ift> i think its sad that you spend time memorizing japanese names
Hurry now: the sun is descending
The shadows wait to play
N e w s o f t h e D a y
28 December 1999
Not my fault this time dammit
Well, it sort of was, but only because I was suckered and then acted without thinking and then took bad advice. Not because I am lazy. (However, please do not infer from this excuse that I am in fact not lazy.) See, I was going to update sometime before Christmas, honest I was. I was going to finish the map for Resistance SVS, too, but then I got this framerate lust and tried to do this wiley thing with my computer, and it didn't work. The end result being I had no computer for about five days. Oh man I have not appreciated that little 486/33 in the other room so much in quite a while, you can be damn sure of that.
Anyway, Merry Christmas.
Respect to Minbari as always for doing that cool Millennium thing at DS98. It's so sad that the show isn't around to see what would have been a fun season, but Chris Carter deserves it for fucking up what, for one season--thanks to the immortal writing team of Morgan & Wong--was the best program in the history of primetime dramatic series. It was really that good. It was amazing to the point of un fucking believable, and Carter went and gutted it for reasons I do not care to find out. Combined with the lunacy of the ridiculous X-Files movie--released the same summer he dismantled Morgan & Wong's brilliant and unprecedented storyline--I no longer bother with his foolishness. What a pitiful waste.
I was very happy to see all the stuff I won in the DS98 poll. I was honestly shocked to even be nominated for best player, but after considering it, in light of statements I have made in the past, I actually went and voted for myself, and I meant it. That probably sounds vain, but I don't really think it is. I have an odd opinion of what makes a good Subspace player, and I live by that opinion, or at least I try to. I'll go more into that tomorrow, but please don't take it as some kind of an ego thing because it's not. It is however midnight and I'd like to pretend it was only 10 days between updates instead of 11. Thanks for reading as always. :)
Update 12/30/99...it's taken me this long to get the update posted thanks to my darling DSL provider accidentally putting me behind a firewall. You figure that out. Thanks SuperFly for uploading it since I still can't.
<Golb\DoNotDisturb> I CLICKED FOR MORE PORN BUT IT GIVE ME NO NINA
With hat pins baby stick me where it hurts -- ooh, I love it!
N e w s o f t h e D a y
18 December 1999
Zemnh kicks ass . . . and yet he does not
Zemnh of the NMEbase today posted a long editorial on the topic of sensationalism. More specificially, the piece was about the abuse, within certain elements of counterculture, of unfortunate people for the purpose of humor and other entertainment. No, I know what he's referring to, and it's not just about humor. Often it's a simple matter of cruelty for its own sake. Some of these folks, in the course of mocking an innocent person who has been harmed in some way, don't operate on such lofty motives as "just for laughs". Some of them just think it's pretty cool--or maybe just pretty cool to look at.
For a long time now I have suspected that, in private, such people number in the millions.
If you doubt me, I offer The Darwin Awards as the tip of the iceberg. Clocking in with almost three million viewings this year, this relatively obscure web page reports--often using a snotty, self-congratulating tone--needless tragedies which befall everyday people, allegedly as a result of those people's own foolishness. See here for a particularly disgusting example. If you laugh, hope to God that there is no karma--or hope to your television set that there is no God. But rest assured other people are laughing, and most of them never gave God or karma a second thought.
Excuse me for not sticking to the party line that has been crammed down all our throats as American and Western "values" since we were born, but while Zemnh's moral outrage is well justified and his heart is in the right place, his unwillingness to marry opinions to action is horribly misguided, and I consider it an epidemic societal disease, so entrenched that many of us are without the lexicon with which to oppose it. Objections are easily dispelled by nothing more than canned slogans. Well, they say, it's a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Who are you to decide?
How on Earth did this civilization cultivate such a pathological fear of drawing the line?
Make whatever arguments you like about slippery slopes, where-do-you-draw-the-line, and who decides, but I reject the principle of "I don't agree with what you have to say but I'll fight for your right to say it." I do not believe that this holds up under honest analysis, nor does the simplistic argument that "my right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins" cover all the bases.
One of the biggest problems in the world today--no, the biggest problem--is our excessive and even dogmatic toleration of evil, and our lack of willingness to judge. It originates in the kind of careful anti-condemnations of which Zemnh's article is a perfect example. When good people see wrongdoing, we do not fight to protect it; we fight to destroy it. The sanctity of free speech has nothing to do with our right to do and say as we please without consequence; it comes from the fact that nearly all speech, in the end, is in fact valid and objectively harmless. Most conceivable speech, however angry it might make some of us, is actually rational and legitimate, and ought to be acceptable as such. Even where violence is advocated, there is a long history of uprisings against oppression to support that, and the real question becomes the definition of oppression, and where the line in the sand gets drawn.
Oppression can come from several places. In the past, it often came from dictatorial governments. Today, in American culture, it comes from any armchair philosopher or amateur comedian whose confidence in his patchwork of opinions directs him to do everything short of actually hitting people in the nose--and it comes from the people who defend those armchair philosophers or amateur comedians. Their positions, if any, are based around hatred and mockery of the standards that theoretically protect them in the first place. Slippery slope or not, their contempt for the principles that provide them with rights equates to their forfeit of those rights. Unmotivated by serious political or moral content of any kind, irreverent treatment of human suffering is not harmless or acceptable, and it is dead wrong to stand up for those guilty of it, no matter how vague or noncommittal your support.
What happened at the Tea Party
I was honestly not expecting much, but the opening of SSCE Resistance was quite satisfying, peaking out around 15 people, probably 30 total...not a lot but not bad either by today's standards. The scoring seems pretty well balanced, with roughly equal awards for the different styles of play. The map was unfinished but except for the tilework (heh) it at least looked like a small finished level because I took out all of the structures that hadn't yet been completed. Most of the areas we played in worked to my satisfaction, but it needs more to do near the center, and an easily accessible dueling area or two.
At any rate I want to say thanks to all the people who helped me organize and promote the event as well as everyone who came in and tried it. The response was mostly very positive. Now the trick is to turn positive words into fun gameplay. If you have any suggestions feel free to write. This zone's purpose is to provide something for almost everyone (and nothing for people who can't deal with that philosophy), so any reasonable request will be taken seriously.
One last note on the subject of lag. Packetloss was bad for a few people, and this is something I expected. We are using the DS98 server--in fact the slot Duck Space Battle just moved out of-- and under certain conditions it just won't carry a certain number of people. If this becomes a problem I will consider switching it with the SCF until some other option shows itself.
What's happening at Slayfest
I have no fucking idea what will happen at Slayfest, and boy is that ever a good feeling.
Music
Amazing shit I am listening to right now . . .
Jerry Bonham, Trance Global Nation 3
Tear Ceremony, Resin
Sasha, Global Underground 013 Ibiza
And amazing shit I got tired of recently . . .
Leftfield, Rhythm and Stealth
Loreena McKennitt, The Book of Secrets
James, Whiplash
Tear Ceremony, Emulsion
Intravene, Flotation Toy Warning
I'm going to be talking about music more on this page soon so I guess I might as well start somewhere.
I know those people by internet-long-distance-smell
- Baudchaser
We are Siamese if you please.
We are Siamese if you don't please.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
17 December 1999
Resistance is never futile
Point of disclaimer: this is an advertisement for a zone of which I am sysop. By no small coincidence however, the words are also from the bottom of my heart, and are few things in the world about which I feel more strongly.
If you are here because the news story on GameHacker caught your attention, thank you for looking. For new and potential players, I will explain some basics about Subspace in a second article below and provide links to the free game client and a few new player guides. This article is directed towards people who've played the game, although I do hope to perhaps raise an eyebrow or two among skeptics and maybe whet a few appetites.
If you've looked at SSCE Resistance on the server listing, you might have figured out from the description that it is my zone. With apologies for Chaos Zone and Alpha Zone, in my opinion there are no zones left in this game that present an untouched picture of Subspace as it was originally designed. Alpha Zone, although quite essential, was designed for newbies, and thus eliminates many of the elements which appeal to advanced players. Chaos Zone, for its part, has seen many changes since it was first handed over to player control, and though from time to time it fluctuates back to standard VIE settings--or "SVS" for short, with VIE itself being short for Virgin Interactive Entertainment--changes are proposed and voted upon regularly. Meanwhile, a conservative player base holds the now insipid map (sorry) in a state of cryogenic torture. This is not in the spirit of Subspace as directed under the control of its original creators.
JeffP, programmer for Subspace and now with Harmless Games, was once vocal about what he referred to as "social engineering", and declared that it had no place in his game. Player operators--many of whom created amazingly fun zones of their own design--did not stand by this mantra. Hoping to cause certain kinds of fights or to give their zone a unique dynamic, they often made special rules which people had to follow. No antiwarp in the safe zones! No ball-killing! This base is too strong, so let's remove it. And no going outside the perimeter wall! While some designers such as dgus, hydro, and Captain Harloch succeeded in their ambitions, micromanagement of player activity became epidemic, until nearly every zone in the game had at least one obscure requirement to be enforced manually by moderators.
This is all fine and good, but what the hell ever happened to just playing Subspace? If we have surpassed it, why has it become so empty an experience for so many people?
I wonder how many of the present players know that Subspace was once a rich experience. That, because of its range and intensity, this game once inspired emotions in people that were as strong as the ones we experience in daily life. Sometimes stronger.
Whether this game's time has passed, or a particular variant's time has passed, is not necessarily at issue here. What is important is that Subspace's nature as a massive multiplayer game holds great potential for different styles of play. The good old days of Subspace were not good simply because they were old, but because in those days one found lone heroes, cruel victimizers, roving gangs, protectors of the weak, and close knit teams of reputation-seekers all in the same zone. At the same time. And let me tell you, it was truly incredible, like no game before or since. Outside of the big, free, wonderfully versatile Subspace zones, never have I seen players organize to fight enemies they actually considered to be a menace--and never have I seen people play so dirty in attempting to become known as a menace. You can play the most violent action games, the most character-intensive role playing games--but you will NEVER see the fierce competition, the righteous anger, or the unapologetic rottenness that we saw every single day in JeffP's Subspace. We used to secretly distrust our squadmates. We used to threaten other players physically. The Blind Justice Jihad was formed--39 members strong--to protect helpless players from "neg killers" and to humiliate such players out of the game. These people fucking hated each other. And it was all over things that happened inside the game, the resulting vendettas carried out within the game.
This is why, when EverQuest or Ultima Online comes up in conversation, some of us just shake our heads and keep quiet. For a short period in history, the real potential of massive multiplayer online gaming was realized; today it lies totally dormant. Untapped. Some of us feel very strongly that this should not be the case. I believe that something can be done about it, and that a lot of people will be happier when it happened.
SSCE Resistance is my attempt. With standard settings untouched from the design we playtested for two years, no rules of conduct except for standard restrictions against cheating and moderator abuse, and a wide variety of games and objectives incorporated into the zone, my goal is to build a traditional style zone where players are free to compete in whatever way they please. Honor optional, check your rulebooks at the door--fly where you want and how you want, and feel free to sieze as much of the map for your own personal fortress as you like. No experimental configurations, no special rules, no bullshit. If someone pisses you off, settle it in a duel.
You do remember how to duel . . . don't you?
The Resistance is proud to sponsor our first Tea Party tonight at midnight eastern time. Check the zone out a few hours early and you'll have the rare experience of seeing the finest Subspace level ever created, Arctos' first map for War Zone. The real map for this zone is brand new and will go up right before midnight. Spread the word, and bring your pissed off old friends who used to play Subspace and hate it now. They might like this.
What exactly is Subspace?
Those of you who've come by this page because of my post at Gamehacker might be wondering what the hell it is that I'm getting all worked up over. Subspace is a 2D multiplayer action game in the tradition of Space War, Asteroids, Gravitar, Solar Jetman, and SubTerranea. Beginning as an obscure beta test in late 1995, it in some ways resembles the earlier Netrek--but unlike Netrek it takes place inside enormous mazes, supports up to 120 players in one game, and is based on precision skill.
Because of the physical size of its setting and the balance between weapons and health, long duels are not uncommon, a single game of capture the flag can last over an hour, and a good player can survive even longer than this without avoiding other players. Nevertheless there is fast action to be had if that's what you crave, and in many ways it remains the most satisfying combat in online gaming today, more closely resembling the considered sparring of a good Starsiege: Tribes duel than a Quake style fragfest or an ordered RPG style tactical battle.
For more information on Subspace, read Captain Harloch's excellent explanatory guide at Subspace Headquarters.
You can download the game directly here, or if you have concerns about security look over the DS98 Filebase. The player community has worked hard to address security problems in Subspace, but make no mistake that since the game's manufacturer was sold for scrap metal it is indeed a player-supported game. All downloads come from the Subspace page at DS98, a long-respected Subspace site run by Minbari Warship, who has been with us almost since the beginning.
When you've got the game, read The 10 Minute Subspace Primer in my own Get Subspace section, and you'll be ready to do battle. Make sure and at least read the third item so you can find the game servers. When you are ready for more advanced tactics and strategy, visit Rincewind's Strategy Guide.
By the way, those screenshots on Captain Harloch's page are funny, and I'm happy he used them because they were taken in the zone I run, using a map I made . . . but they frankly look like shit because there are so many ships onscreen and the map had not been completed. Subspace is old, but it's actually pretty nice looking for a 2D game. I really should have a screenshots section up. Maybe I will add that later. Right now I have a map to finish. :)
Tomorrow
It's done but doesn't quite fit the mood today. I've got my trusty knife and fork out, napkin tucked in, newspaper covering most of the floor, and now I'm going to chew up Zemnh and spit him out. Sorry man, if you're not a part of the solution then you're part of the problem, and stuff. No hard feelings. :P
and i was waiting for the new tools to make levels!
screw that, im making my next .bsp in notepad!
- J.Frost
I’m living in the weirdest dream
Where nothing is the way it seems
Where no one’s who they need to be
Where nothing seems that real to me
How can we build our lives upon
No wall of stone, no solid ground
The world is spinning endlessly
We’re clinging to our own beliefs
N e w s o f t h e D a y
12 December 1999
Silence
The problem is I have nothing to say about Subspace and don't know enough about any other games to comment on them. My existence online has taken on the form of a research project lately, focused on the Map Vault. I am updating that site almost daily with the same stuff I'd be talking about here, so don't think I've been that much of a stranger. I've probably done more reading online in the last three weeks than I did in the previous six months, so desperately do I now wish to be involved in something else.
I knew I shouldn't have stayed involved in Slayfest, but I figured I'd have some fun just making scenarios and leaving the running of those scenarios to other people, who otherwise would have had to make the scenario as well. That doesn't work, and I end up getting involved in maintaining order. Last night I enjoyed a particularly despicable incident where Minute repeatedly abused the ?scorereset command (which had been implemented in the zone by someone who is now on my shit list) to let himself back out of spec during an elimination game. When confronted, after being kicked out of the zone, this person who had been to I don't know how many Slayfests had the nerve to tell me directly that it wasn't right for me to do this to him because it's part of the game now. No, it's not. Nor was it my obligation to make sure everyone's opinions are considered and feelings assuaged while I am trying to run something. Meanwhile, people I don't know are complaining that the game takes too long to start, because I am trying to explain elims to a new mod; the older mod isn't there and I'm not supposed to be there until the scenario is ready. Of course, I've run five elims by the time this person--no, by the time someone else--informs me that the /*smoderator I did on the on him didn't work, because some fuckwit patched the game so I can no longer add moderators on the fly yet the game still tells me they now have smod powers. And some other fuckwit uploaded it to the SSX server without notifying me.
So that's the end of it; I don't need this. I was going to do a scenario for Christmas and you can be damned sure I'm not going to bother with that now. I don't need to be depressed and frustrated about this sort of nonsense on that particular day.
There are a lot of ugly retirements in this game, because the players drive away everyone who tries to pull their own weight or do anything for the game. Worse, they drive them to a threshold--literally, I believe--of emotional and mental instability where they cannot stand to be involved any longer. Only if they are addicted do they return. This is why nearly every time someone who has made any difference at all--who will be remembered by anyone--retires, it is ugly. Usually he is angry and upset. At the bottom of his dignity he fires off a hideous retirement message, and the people he has served for years make fun of him for it. In time it is all they remember of him.
Do you not see how empty this game is today? Does it never dawn on you: Wow, Subspace pretty much sucks now! How did that happen? Sucks worse than when 80% of the zones used super settings, sucks worse than when 80% of the zones were overrun by cheaters. People raised their voices in protest then. No more. If the game were to face that sort of a problem today, who would complain? No one whose complaints would stand a chance in hell of changing anyone's point of view. That would require someone intelligent or articulate; so many of those individuals have now gone off to do something else.
I could probably count on six hands the people I'm grateful to who departed from Subspace upset, frustrated, or just acutely aware of human rottenness. What's worse, more and more I get the feeling that I'm the only one left around here who ever thinks about that, or has the sense to miss any of those people.
Ignorance
I love reading these pronouncements people make about the Quake III Arena CTF maps. As if, because they have been playing CTF since Quake came out, they know more about the game than the people who designed it in the first place--and more about it than the hundreds of players who are having the time of their fucking lives in those maps. Fortunately in the Quake community there are enough intelligent people to counter those who are xenophobic with feedback that is either far more positive or at least critical of id's work in a way that is classy and respectful.
I had more to say about this but it always ended up with me talking about Subspace, so I'm not going to.
I will say this much. Anyone who claims that Tim Willits of all people designed a map which removes elements of skill from the game is an unmatched fool. I actually saw this in print and can't find it now to quote, but sir, you are a fool.
The ruin of something beautiful
Christ I loved Tribes. I played it nonstop when it came out, and for about a month no one heard a word from me. Bought it the day it came out, and I was so excited, and when I got it home it did not disappoint. The fighting was so well balanced, so geared towards long, thoughtful duels where you actually had time for things like cunning and planning and retreat....ah hell, here I am writing the editorial I was going to apologize for not finishing. Tribes collapsed under its own weight, caving into its own vacuum center, like nothing I have ever seen. It was like watching a very stupid person go through a nervous breakdown. To this day I cannot forgive what happened to that game.
My only real dabbling in the gaming world outside of Subspace until recently was in Tribes. I wanted so badly to make maps for that game, until it became clear that Dynamix would be dragging its feet on support for the game in that and many other capacities. Even early on in my Tribes career I was lashing out at what I believed was ruining it, and my one attempt at getting involved in the Starsiege community in anticipation of all this was an editorial I wrote for Datumplane::Starsiege, a cool Tribes site which is now closing. I feel something of a kinship with the guy there, actually. Oh well. Datumplane will soon be no more, and I'm going to be posting an editorial on what happened to Tribes soon, which will be something of a followup piece. Plus this update is so full of insane ranting that I guess it's appropriate to put up something structured and well thought out to balance it. Not that I'm a bit sorry for that ranting, mind you. Also, I want it in my archive and I'm not sure it's there.
Respect to schnoz at Datumplane for putting this up and for running a kick ass site.
Aight, here we go then.
Good Times for Friendly Fire
(editorial for Datumplane::Starsiege, March 1999)
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 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.
By the way . . .
I didn't mean to leave that Quake II .wav up for so long, and it wasn't really meant as a reference to me ending the page or anything. I'm not, and the mine sounds will probably stay here forever in some form or other.
<_ct> yeah. it's always the man trying to keep a brother down. can i get a witness?
There's got to be someone we can trust
Out here among us
Happy birthday to me
1 December 1999
The plan
It had been my intention to spend a great deal of time today working on the first stages of revamping and redirecting the page. Unfortunately I didn't have a great deal of time at my disposal. On top of that, I haven't had a great deal of time to work out exactly what it is that I mean to do here.
I know that it will indeed involve Subspace--in fact I may be doing a bit more playing now that I'm not going to be so embroiled in other aspects of the game--but what I hope to accomplish here is to claim the same niche on a much bigger food chain. It's not that I necessarily crave big food, but we all need some change and some expansion, and there just isn't a medium size when it comes to gaming and the web.
And I'll be honest. It irritates me that I've been following both 3D gaming and realtime strategy since well before their acknowledged inceptions (that is to say, not Wolfenstein 3D and Dune II, but Ultima Underworld and The Ancient Art of War) and yet I never became deeply involved with either or deeply knowledgable about either. So this will be a bit of a research project for me, and those of you with experience in gaming outside of Subspace, Infantry, and Nintendo might roll your eyes a bit as I marvel over old news and sightsee on well-traveled roads.
I mean also to get back to my writing about music, abandoned four years ago when an incident on the ambient listserv, combined with a release on the 4AD label which offended me to the point of insult, caused me to walk away suddenly and angrily from that entire chunk of internet subbacultcha, if you'll excuse the expression. I'm not a very nice record reviewer, so you might want to skip that part if you have corny tastes and thin skin. I didn't get the name meek for nothing. I gave it to myself as a gesture of contempt for others. :)
What else. There will be a bit about movies, a bit about photography, some porn if you're nice to me, and probably a dramatic increase in gratuitous rants against the forces of evil as I start hunting around out there instead of noodling around in here. Probably stuff I should have done ten years ago, but oh well.
Stuff you probably won't like that I'm going to do anyway. First, I'll be putting a banner on this page. For a while the absence of a banner was about peevishness and class, but if I continue then it will be about vanity, because this page costs my friends money to host and I'd like to start pulling my share of the weight at GameAddicts. I'll also be changing the color of the page. After a few weeks of reading Salon and Coming Attractions, I've come to understand and appreciate why there are so few web pages out there with white backgrounds. It aint paper, it's radiation.
One thing I'll try to avoid is more rambling like this nonsense I'm posting right now. I'd feel a little wrong putting up nothing at all on the page's birthday, but things really have been very busy lately and I'm afraid I'll have to ease into this.
Thanks for reading.
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