Kazmo wrote:I don't know but I think fury figured out how the game worked and the admins gave up trying to come up with ways to stop fury from winning on the first day.
but seriously while Alliances were TDZK's best point it was also a point that hurt it a bit. Every round would have a max of 3 big alliances and most of the new players were solo or part of the small alliances. Small alliances then got throttled by big alliances and smaller alliances with the new players stopped playing. I really saw this in 3.0 in OotB. We had a good like 30-40 active or semi-active players and we started strong but then (due to questionable leadership) we got ownt and all the newer players went inactive for the rest of the round and we were comprised mostly of new players.
Solace wrote:I think the discussion here raises a number of strong points re: the decline of the game, but is missing the obvious: the game died because Nomad, in the end, was just not very good and should never have been released in the form it was in.
Sure, there were a lot of underlying structural improvements -- less exploitable code, a better base engine, more room for expansion, etc. -- but it was a mostly terrible user experience that couldn't hook new players and actively drove away the old ones.
zer0das wrote:Mechanically weak rounds was part of it (2.3, 2.7).
People cheating to the point that their actions affected entire rounds was probably the largest factor- and then these same people being allowed to play the game with scarcely a slap on the wrist. Carlos, Wolverine, etc.
The existence of trigger scripts which were around since god knows when... maybe as far back as 2.2 or even earlier? Their proliferation after it became obvious the admins 1. were not adequately punishing those who had them 2. it was questionable whether they could even ID who had them through their moderation tools, despite it being pretty obvious to anyone with a brain stem who actually played the game (at least the big names).
Prematurely ending 2.6 without a solid plan for 2.7 was also a huge factor. A return to 1.0 was perhaps the worst possible thing that could have been done. I'm somewhat convinced part of the reason this ill conceived plan was carried out was because the way 2.6 went down. 8002 was rebuilt putting the admins at a bit of a crossroads- do they let Fury dominate for another couple months, or do they yank the round before people get disinterested, even if they're not at all prepared for a new round? In either case, I think neither choice was optimal.
Also- 2.6 was pretty much the culmination of the cheating, despite 2.3's being much more well documented. Rereading my logs, the amount of questionable crap that happened in this round was unbelievable. We had people hacking an inactive account in our alliance, and the parties responsible don't get booted from the game instantly? What the crap.
zer0das wrote:I traded for a solid round. I watch every single "top" trader go down. Granted, most of them are idiots and have no idea how to survive, I get that. The fact that they all die in about a day or two though seems highly, highly suspicious though. 1. You have to know their locations. You can compile this information ahead of time, but they're going to move. Tracking them all is nontrivial. 2. You have to trigger on them. Point 1 is simple compared to this, because most of these people are on relatively fast connections- if you have the same ping/connection speed, the trader is essentially invincible barring a severe screw up.
Trading during Euro times was virtually impossible for me. It wasn't because I refused to- it was because the server was essentially being DoSed, near as I could tell. One person would come on, completely unable to do anything. Person idles out, lag suddenly improves to being tradable. Logs on again, reverts back to the previous situation. This happened for the entire round. Know how I died? I traded, the person logged on, I decide to make one last trade, and then I got a page not found- the server was overloaded, I was left out in space, and I died.
This happened exactly once in my entire TDZK career. I had situations where my browser would freeze but then resume shortly (I even died once due to that), never had one where it completely died and I was unable to login for an extended time. I pissed and moaned about the lag for the entire round to my alliance, and they were like "You're just imagining it." I don't really think you can imagine that sort of thing. Trading at nights was fine- it wasn't the difference in the number of people online either. I was pretty much fully expecting to die at some point, because the situation was absolutely ridiculous.
Then 8002 happens and we had trouble getting any significant number of restockers on despite the fact the planet is over a node and the raid was at a time no one is typically on. Yeah sure, planet raids cause lag- like that? I teleported from 8002 to a completely different sector, and then back to 8002, and then died. That's the tip of the iceberg as far as retarded stuff that never happened before then. You could say "oh, an event like 8002 was unprecedented" but that's not really true. Asgard had been raided by the Kitchen Sink, there was never anything remotely like that. The player numbers may have spiked over what the Kitchen Sink had at times, but anomalies were present before then. As far as I'm concerned, SD distributed trigger scripts to every single hunter in their alliance. And even if they didn't, they may as well have- the same stupid rainbowssss would have happened.
Not that I'm bitter or anything. we rebuilt 8002. So who has the last laugh.
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