by sprockitz » Wed Oct 10, 2007 2:07 pm
with all this talk about popular weapons I've seen no mention of why they were so popular.
Basically there are two types of weapons no-recharge and short recharge. Where with no-recharge every attack is with the weapon and short recharge you punch kick while a weapon is recharging. Basically there was a bug in the code where no-recharge weapons never missed which is what made things like the sword, vibro axe, sar, mecha fangs, and twin swords so valuable. Once this bug was fixed those pretty much died out.
Way back in the days of only 4 active transformers (basically july 2003-nov 2003) it was possible to enter transformers into the arena or missions without actually being active (so you could use more than 4 even though legally you were limited to 4). Also it was easy to manipulate URL's, as already mentioned, to cheat. Now that was taken care of, and further insurance was given with the passcodes, which have recently disappeared during some debugging of site slugishness I believe, and never bothered to reinstate them...perhaps because the passcodes were around for so long that anyone who needed to write scripts to play for them had already conquered the passcodes or given up and fallen so far behind that they wouldn't bother playing anymore...regardless this seems like a relative non-issue now as does account sharing and multiple accounts which were both popular, or at least appeared to be going on alot. Ideally there are plans to make this more difficult in V2 with a kill them first ask questions 2nd approach.
Initially the high scores only ever listed the top 25 players, and had an all time and active list...so you could see what everyone was doing from the list...I used to just hope the top players weren't playing so I could see myself in the top 25 active. A few times I got screen captures of myself at #1 in the top 25 because I was the first person to get on after an outage...speaking of which the game used to get very slow everyday back in the early days starting around 2-3 pm central time (seibertron time)...basically the time all the kiddies were getting out of school. Those problems have mostly resolved themselves, but still manage to creep up every once in awhile.
My personal quest to reach #1 finally game around end of Oct. 2005. Basically took it over despite getting banned a few times for accusing others of cheating, which was finally proven. Of course, I wasn't completely clean myself in that several of us tried the whole missions with all repairers because we saw the xp it could produce. All in all gained about a weeks worth of experience from those fights but attempted to right the damage by resting my character who joined those fights for a week (about how long it would have taken me to earn that xp). After the initial fights, it was made explicit that those conjurred up battle were wrong (though we certainly felt a little uneasy about it being right, we chose to test ryan's motto of "if the game allows it, you can't be faulted for doing it")...though it's certainly not something I'm proud of in this game. These 3-4 battles resulted in a public decree by the mods saying these fights were illegal, and eventually led to the retreat function. Several months after it was made explicitly known, but before the retreat function was in place, others continued to do them and faced the consequences. Whether that was the sole reason they were kicked off or it was combined with proof of multi/shared accounts I'm not even sure.
Anyway, through at least two big xp resets, an outage lasting several months, and for me a summer long ban for questioning the character of some players, this game has improved tremendously. I'm not nearly as addicted as I once was, and I'm also not as in tune with the daily goings on on the discussion board, but those are both for the better I believe. The game is fun, and has had it's crap in the past, and I'm sure stuff will come up in the future, but what I've seen time and time again that out of the crap in the past improvements to the game have been made. I'm excited for V2, I'm sure I won't be #1 anymore, and heck don't even know what faction I'll be (y'all can start recruiting me now), but from what I've seen the past few months, I'm confident it will be even more fun than V1.0 thru V1.99999.
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