The Energon Pub

Yeah, but unlike Tam, you're a man, and we don't listen to you. Grow a pair of baps, or at least shave what you've got, then we'll see.

Burn wrote:You know what is the biggest cause of imbalance?

A lack of a REAL playing population.

This game is restricted to Seibertron.com. People only begin playing if they go looking for TF's and find Seibertron.com

I've suggested it to Ryan in the past. This game needs to go "public". We have google ads running next to the game advertising that MVC Transformers game FFS!

We can sit here discussing the pros and cons of balance and imbalance, but the simple fact is, we don't have enough players to truly balance the game. One or two players drop out at higher levels and bam! Game goes screwy!

If a player drops out, their absence shouldn't affect the game (except in a emotional way when people mourn the absence of their team mate) but because of a lack of numbers it does.

If you're going to give players the ability to switch sides, then you need to increase the player base.

is this it?

Tammuz wrote:and if it can't Ratboy? what then?

Mkall has said the current HMW code is streamlined to the maximum of his ability. so the only other options are; turn off HMW entirely & forever, or turn off HMW while Mkall writes a new version from the ground up, which could take years, as he has little more free tome than he two predecessors and look how far they got.


the sad truth probably is that there aren't enough players to warrant 4 factions. sorry.

Were you the one to suggest splitting core elements of the game up into sections?

If so, then if we write a brand new game from scratch, why can't we have mulpiple programmers looking after certain sections, such as missions, characters, weapons etc.?

Mkall can't write a full game from scratch, no offense, but he struggled with the current code. Yes, if he wrote it from scratch it would take years, but if multiple programmers made up the code, based on starting foundations to connect them all, then it would take much less time.

Personally I can't understand why there's only one porgrammer. Yes, I'm fully aware that the game is one long code and why it is one long code to begin with, but when V2 was planned, wouldn't it have been a better idea to build a brand new code with a team of programmers that is sectioned into core elements.

I don't see why we don't do that now.

Tammuz wrote:

Burn wrote:You know what is the biggest cause of imbalance?

A lack of a REAL playing population.

This game is restricted to Seibertron.com. People only begin playing if they go looking for TF's and find Seibertron.com

I've suggested it to Ryan in the past. This game needs to go "public". We have google ads running next to the game advertising that MVC Transformers game FFS!

We can sit here discussing the pros and cons of balance and imbalance, but the simple fact is, we don't have enough players to truly balance the game. One or two players drop out at higher levels and bam! Game goes screwy!

If a player drops out, their absence shouldn't affect the game (except in a emotional way when people mourn the absence of their team mate) but because of a lack of numbers it does.

If you're going to give players the ability to switch sides, then you need to increase the player base.

is this it?

Close enough to it!

Hollow One wrote:

Tammuz wrote:and if it can't Ratboy? what then?

Mkall has said the current HMW code is streamlined to the maximum of his ability. so the only other options are; turn off HMW entirely & forever, or turn off HMW while Mkall writes a new version from the ground up, which could take years, as he has little more free tome than he two predecessors and look how far they got.


the sad truth probably is that there aren't enough players to warrant 4 factions. sorry.

Were you the one to suggest splitting core elements of the game up into sections?

I beleive that was red but yeah it sounds like a good idea so i'll take the credit

Hollow One wrote:If so, then if we write a brand new game from scratch, why can't we have mulpiple programmers looking after certain sections, such as missions, characters, weapons etc.?

Mkall can't write a full game from scratch, no offense, but he struggled with the current code. Yes, if he wrote it from scratch it would take years, but if multiple programmers made up the code, based on starting foundations to connect them all, then it would take much less time.

this is true, more programmers would take less time

Hollow One wrote:Personally I can't understand why there's only one porgrammer. Yes, I'm fully aware that the game is one long code and why it is one long code to begin with, but when V2 was planned, wouldn't it have been a better idea to build a brand new code with a team of programmers that is sectioned into core elements.

I don't see why we don't do that now.

there's only one programmer becuase we can only get one programmer, hell if it wasn't for Mkall jumping in the driving seat their would be No programmer.

SITE DOWN AT 22:34 GMT, resumed 23:18

THE DECEPTICON GUIDE TO SAVING HMW

Two Brits, One Canadian and One Australian in a random MSN conversation wrote:• Remove the arena - Done
• Rejoin the factions
• Reduce the number of missions available - this should result in the mission generator being less taxed

What else was there?

If that doesnt do it we're **** whatever way we look at it.

Burn wrote:THE DECEPTICON GUIDE TO SAVING HMW

Two Brits, One Canadian and One Australian in a random MSN conversation wrote:• Remove the arena - Done
• Rejoin the factions
• Reduce the number of missions available - this should result in the mission generator being less taxed

What else was there?

I believe I suggested the last one to you and Tam. No 'tag team' missions, less types of mission, greater numbers in each mission. Maybe removing the xp and energon gain from no opposition missions would stop players entering them.
I also think that reducing the number of times per day that the High Scores updates itself might help a little; while removing lesser elements of the logs like ram's stun effect, or armour, would ease each log's generation slightly.

Jeep! wrote:I believe I suggested the last one to you and Tam. No 'tag team' missions, less types of mission, greater numbers in each mission.

Yeah that was the whole reducing the number of missions available. That should also include changing up the mission bracketting as well. I think we worked out there'd be 48 possible missions for use.

One other thing that may need to be done (and I think Tammuz has brought this up numerous times) is changing the mission generator back to being player pushed rather than player pushed AND automatic generation. There's no need for missions to self generate if there's no one around to enter them.

Maybe removing the xp and energon gain from no opposition missions would stop players entering them.

Definitely not. What if you enter when the mission is first generated, 40 mins to close, 20 mins for it to process, a whole hour wasted just because no opposition turns up and it was the only mission you could enter.

I also think that reducing the number of times per day that the High Scores updates itself might help a little;

Or we could just temporarily disable the high scores page and see if that helps.

I think disabling the high scores or only updating it once a night would be a good thing.

what about the auto CR option? is that cron job based?

What about those routins that add people to their respective sides' subforums?

i don't think we can cut them; how would newbs get to the subfaction forums?

By being added manually.

Frankly i'd rather see that done manually then have to go back to putting my bots into the cr chamber manually. Remove the auto cr chamber AND the arena and it will turn a lot of people off completely.

but would it be possible to code it straight in that after mission you automatically enter CR, no option it's auto CR no matter what.

Tammuz wrote:but would it be possible to code it straight in that after mission you automatically enter CR, no option it's auto CR no matter what.

If we do that, we need to remove the $$$ for CR. Especially now that players can't depend on the arena for an income.

Then let's remove the energon gain from missions entirely. Weapons and armour are free.

I know we're out to save the game here, but just how much are we willing to cut out?

I'll say it now. We're starting to go a little too far in what could be removed. Some things need to be retained for HMW to retain it's identity and be an interesting game to play.

this is true burn.


we've had what, 2 site crashes in 20 hours? that definetly seems an improvement if we follow through with the plans Burn has outlined above FIRST before we move on.


after all we don't know that the Auto-CR is even Cron job based.

Hey, I'm not saying we should make the CR free, I'm just saying that we pretty much have to if we make it automatic only. There are, after all, quite a few people still at the mid-to-lower levels who live just-this-side of bankrupt.

Although, I'm not really sure what the point of charging you for the CR ever was. Especially since the game programmer has usually just advanced money to whoever has gone bankrupt.

Well most games involve a currency of sorts and generally the higher the level you get the more things should cost.

Higher levels = bigger weapons = bigger costs.

Unfortunately we've been hit with so many energon/xp bugs, handouts, glitches ... the economy is pretty much stuffed.

you know we open an entire marxist debate on economy, the basic off it is that aslong as things have a fixed value their is no viable in game economy solution, indeed there is no REAL LIFE economy solution people get poor and starve, and get rich so rish they can't spend all they're money even if they wanted to.

the reason we need CR to cost something is to balance out the winninngs you get as in any battle between TFs of the same level the energon earned is in excess of the cost of repair

Adjust energon winnings to reflect that, and then remove CR costs?

Calm down people, before we go on a witch hunt for what can/can't be cut from HMW, let's just keep an eye on how the site's doing right now. Remember that seibs did have the occasional hiccup while HMW was completely off.

well jp in that case You'd get just the mission winnings andearn nothing for killing your enemies

Burn wrote:Unfortunately we've been hit with so many energon/xp bugs, handouts, glitches ... the economy is pretty much stuffed.

Ach, the way I remember it, three months into the game people were kicking around 1mil+ trying to figure out what to do with it.

I think a lot of the trouble is that Vir underestimated what "expensive" would actually be.

The Fusion Cannon cost, what? 100,000? So 1.2 mil to equip what was supposed to be the best weapon in the game to your entire team. But most of the leading-edge players had that sort of cash before level 3 IIRC.

I can't fault him though; hind sight is 20/20, and even now I don't know exactly how you'd properly balance energon gains at different levels against energon expenditures.



Edit: Now, if Energon cost for CR chambers was actually related to how fast you repaired, that would have been far cooler. Paying 0 Energon gets your bot repaired in 6hrs. 10,000 Energon gets him fully repaired in 10mins. We could have burned a lot of our excess in tournies if we'd had a system like that back in the day.