Seibertron.com Energon Pub Forums

**What follows is my case for a 3rd faction. There is not actually a 3rd faction planned currently. (though there should be) **

It has recently come to my attention that both the upcoming Earthrise toyline and the ongoing TF card game have a Mercenary faction.

This is an idea I have wanted for this game for nearly a decade and these days it would be a godsend to balance out all the one sided missions we have.

The idea is simple: A 3rd faction that can enter a mission on either the Con or Bot side.
The functionality of adding factions has already been confirmed to still work by Ryan in the last couple years, all that might have to be added is a new radio button on the mission page where the Merc player can choose which side of the mission to enter on.

Not only would that help balance out the one-sided missions but it could also attract people back to the game that have drifted off this year.

At least until the new faction is tested it should be limited to those approved by Burn &/or Psych (I dunno if Psych even has the ability to switch someones faction) but maybe some day it can be added as a choice for new players.

Some players are extremely loyal to either the Bots or the Cons so this will not be for everyone but for those of us that are a little more, uhm, "flexible" it would be a great way to show that and potentially be another balance to the constant flip-flop of one-sided faction superiority that we tend to experience.
Given the timing of the outside factors and the current low-ebb of the game this is the perfect time to implement this.



Please feel free to voice your opinion on the idea (good or bad) so that the powers that be can see if there is support for the idea and maybe it will be implemented. Maybe (read likely) not. But at least we can talk about it and maybe get something going on this dead-ass forum.

Are you that bored with your year's tenure as an Autobot?

Pretty much.
My job was to help build up the Bots so there would be some actual competition.
With interest in the game (& especially the forums) waning, the "last 24 hours" tally almost always nearly 2:1 in the Bots favor, and the fact that 90% of the time when I'm playing I'm unopposed I think it's clear that I'm not useful in my current role.

Usefulness is not the issue when there is no one to fight. We have a lot bigger issues here as we know. We can only work with what we have and who actually is still playing the game.

What's the balance (or lack there of) at the lower levels? As most of my crew is now Level 7 or above, I have no idea what's going on down there.

I don't have any either.

Skimming the last 1,000 missions it seems there's very little meaningful competition anywhere and other than 1 lonely level 2 Bot I didn't see any characters under level 3.

If you want to be further depressed take a look at the High Score chart
https://www.seibertron.com/heavymetalwa ... r_page=100
The fact that there are only 7 pages (at 100/page) should be your first clue, second is that you only have to go to page 5 before you start seeing level 4's.
There used to be pages and pages of level 0's.
just glancing at a few of the level 3 & lower characters records I suspect most of them will be going inactive and falling off completely any time now.


Maybe it's all just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic but if SOMETHING doesn't change to bring people in and keep them it's clear the game is going back into deep hibernation at best.

Not to go off on an idea tangent spree but I'll float the idea (AGAIN) that coding in some drones to fight against in some missions would be a good way of helping keep people playing when they have no one to fight against.

But alas that requires actual work and is above the ability of anyone that really cares about whether this game lives or dies.

Couple of things I'd like to point out:

Don't expect any significant changes if hard coding is involved.

I pushed for a long time to get the control panel fixed up so we could make changes, the biggest thing was mission text.
Remember this thread? - This was open to the public, a chance for people to get involved.
It got three responses.

I've been open to help from other people. They put their hands up, they come on board, even in just an advisory capacity - then say nothing.

I've said it many times. We work with what we have. And if people are genuine about helping then they need to actually commit, they need to actually do stuff, and they need to be realistic about what we can actually do.

NOTE: I'm not shooting this idea down. It's been around for a while now, and it more than likely would be good for the game, but it's simply not do-able at this point unfortunately.

I know you're as frustrated as the rest of us (if not more given your position) I'm not asking you to change anything because I know you would if you could (at least some things).

New mission texts are a fine thing but hardly exciting outside of tourney settings (certainly aren't going to get butts back in the seats)

There really isn't much to advise about when nothing gets done about it. I designed a complete overhaul on new weapons & weapon damage some time ago that never went anywhere despite us having the tools to do so.

You, me, Psych, Sounders, and dozens of others have poured tons of creative energy into this game in one way or another and never get anywhere... We're told to just wait a little longer and a little longer for updates that never materialize.

It's frustrating as hell. Frustrating enough to just throw your hands up and walk away. Even you hardly play anymore.

*sigh*
I knew this was unlikely to go anywhere.
But I didn't want to just sit here and watch the game wither any further without trying to pull some kind of response.
Ah well.

Perhaps not the outcome you're seeking, but perhaps under the current circumstances, you'd be better off seeking to faction swap back to the 'Cons.

Evil necrobump from someone who's been out of the game for a while, but I seem to recall some Turrets that were in the Fallen missions. How hard would it be to turn them back on? And there surely are npcs like the Judge and the Magistrate. I may be wrong here, but since they're already there (assuming they haven't been wiped) can they be plugged back in? You said nothing can be coded, so don't code anythinhg. Use what you already have.

I apologize for the necrobump, but it's become impossible to keep my mouth shut while seeing how bad HMW has gotten. It makes me feel even worse for leaving. I know I had rl issues, but dang, I'm sorry. You guys have been through hell. If I'm wasting your time, don't pay my comments any mind, Burn.

As far as a third faction, it might be easier for them to just be placed onto whichever side has a player deficit. I'm probably remembering this wrong, but didn't we have some missions back in the day that allowed allowed cons/preds and maxis/bots on the same side.

Also, and this has probably already been brought up by better minds than me, but if the powers that be don't have time or inclination to fix the control panel, has anyone tried to see if maybe Omega Sentinel or MKALL would be willing/inclined/available to do a pro-bono check on it to see if it can be fixed?

I'm not trying to cause problems, just brainstorming, since input was requested. Just terribly late to the party.

KAMJIIN wrote:Evil necrobump from someone who's been out of the game for a while, but I seem to recall some Turrets that were in the Fallen missions. How hard would it be to turn them back on? And there surely are npcs like the Judge and the Magistrate. I may be wrong here, but since they're already there (assuming they haven't been wiped) can they be plugged back in? You said nothing can be coded, so don't code anythinhg. Use what you already have.

They're just not there. They MAY be buried in the code somewhere, but they're most definitely not accessible through the Control Panel (which Ryan did fix up to a point for us)

I apologize for the necrobump,

Totally not necessary.

If I'm wasting your time, don't pay my comments any mind, Burn.

I'm sitting at work, waiting for the clock to tick over to 12 so I can escape. You're not wasting my time.

As far as a third faction, it might be easier for them to just be placed onto whichever side has a player deficit. I'm probably remembering this wrong, but didn't we have some missions back in the day that allowed allowed cons/preds and maxis/bots on the same side.

We did a swap to balance things out. But like you, RL issues got in the way for some players and they disappeared/left.

In this modern age of augmented reality, this game has, unfortunately, very limited appeal.

KAMJIIN wrote:Also, and this has probably already been brought up by better minds than me, but if the powers that be don't have time or inclination to fix the control panel, has anyone tried to see if maybe Omega Sentinel or MKALL would be willing/inclined/available to do a pro-bono check on it to see if it can be fixed?

Mkall leads a pretty busy life these days. And as far as I know, the OS situation didn't end too well.

I'm not trying to cause problems, just brainstorming, since input was requested. Just terribly late to the party.

All good dude. Just throw stuff out there.

Burn wrote:In this modern age of augmented reality, this game has, unfortunately, very limited appeal.

I have to disagree with you there. I popped over to another text based game I used to play heavily back in the day. (I won't name them in the forum or give an active link, I know the rules). They have 258 players online as we speak. Over 1 million active players in the game. I realize that we are definitely a niche, but there is definitely an appeal to this type of game. Not arguing, just stating a fact. There has do be something we can do to build up our player base again. To get our inactive players interested again needs to be at the top of the list. This used to be a vibrant, active, communtity. We had one thread in particular that had to be locked frequently for [bold]too much[/bold] activity.

The players that remain are demoralized, too. Again, I know you guys are busy, maybe the masses (demoralized as they are) can be rallied once more. If anyone other than you and I bother to read this post, that is.

If you see more necrobumping, please, pay it no heed.

KAMJIIN wrote:

Burn wrote:In this modern age of augmented reality, this game has, unfortunately, very limited appeal.

I have to disagree with you there. I popped over to another text based game I used to play heavily back in the day. (I won't name them in the forum or give an active link, I know the rules). They have 258 players online as we speak. Over 1 million active players in the game. I realize that we are definitely a niche, but there is definitely an appeal to this type of game. Not arguing, just stating a fact. There has do be something we can do to build up our player base again. To get our inactive players interested again needs to be at the top of the list. This used to be a vibrant, active, communtity. We had one thread in particular that had to be locked frequently for [bold]too much[/bold] activity.

The players that remain are demoralized, too. Again, I know you guys are busy, maybe the masses (demoralized as they are) can be rallied once more. If anyone other than you and I bother to read this post, that is.

If you see more necrobumping, please, pay it no heed.

Part of the reason why I'm back for the moment is because I got an email recently saying that there was a reply in the weapon restock thread I was apparently following. Perhaps more necrobumping might bring other inactive players back to the game for a bit

It's a good game for work (ie site classification gets around the filters blockers, haha) and for me it's quiet at work this time of year, so I'm happy to play around for a while til real life starts picking up again

White_Noise

EDIT: Mercenary faction; pipedream but would be interesting

So I just found a setting in a completely different part of the Dashboard and I thought it might have helped.

It allowed me to edit Factions.

But when I tried to edit it, I got an error.

It might be more possible than I initially thought, but it still requires some coding intervention to get it working.

Burn wrote:It might be more possible than I initially thought, but it still requires some coding intervention to get it working.

Total necro-bump, take two.

I actually peeked back in yesterday (for something unrelated in the RPG forums, admittedly) and started tossing my Neocronians back into the mix. I'm redoing a lot of names on them and wholesale changing up some characters, but they're back in the mix again, which actually takes the 100-slot High Score up to 8 pages. Sadly, all of my guys are level 4s (I imagine, if I had played straight through from whenever it was that I started, I'd likely be up there in the top 100.

But, speaking from my perspective down here in the cheap seats of level 4-dom, I don't think it needs to be said how barren the cupboard is down here. Most of my matches yesterday were the 1-10 and 1-11 matchups, with a few 4-8s thrown in. Anything of the level 4, level 3-4 or 2-4 range variety... they're there, but they're rare. It's very... feast or famine is probably the best way to describe it -- when it's famine, I count myself lucky to get any XP at all; when it's a feast, I'm still losing half the missions, but I'm either getting rams on high-level opponents, or repairing what high-level teammates there are.

I can understand having a Mercenary option, but the question then becomes "Who's going to take advantage of it? And will it actually change anything in the overall balance (such as there is) between the factions?"

While it's largely a moot point since Ryan is doing jack **** with the game. I'm sure there are plenty that would... Well would have.
Sadly most of them have dropped away from playing at this point.

We seem to be stuck in a downward spiral where the player base is shrinking because no effort is being put into fixing/updating it and Ryan isn't motivated to work on it unless more people are playing.

Doesn't help the lower level guys that anybody that's still playing at this point has reached upper-mid to high levels, so the littles get trampled.
Nothing to do about that.
Well that's not true...

Could do away with the "no second account" rule
Could increase the number of characters per team
Could code in NPC/turrets to fill slots in empty missions
Could code in new ways to spend XP which wouldn't count toward level upgrades (size comes to mind...)

But again, moot point.
Unless some kind of coronavirus madness inspires Ryan to spend his quarantine time working on the game nothing is gonna happen.

Bun-Bun wrote:Could increase the number of characters per team

Done.

darksabrz wrote:But, speaking from my perspective down here in the cheap seats of level 4-dom

Quick question ... how's your energon? Are you making any or going backwards?

I can increase the level of free CR Chamber.

Burn wrote:

darksabrz wrote:But, speaking from my perspective down here in the cheap seats of level 4-dom

Quick question ... how's your energon? Are you making any or going backwards?

I can increase the level of free CR Chamber.

Honestly? I'm down about 200K energon, but I still have 1.9 million -- the reason I'm down is because I realized that the weapons I had on my team were all taken away, so I've been buying weapons back up again. That, plus actually upgrading armor on my characters (poor Incognito still has another 3 hours of CR time left on that, but that's because I didn't want to lose that War Within Optimus Prime altmode I have on him, and I went from 8 tons of Duranium to 8 tons of Vanadium Steel (10 hour CR stay -- OUCH!).

That said, I believe I'm actually holding steady, if not earning a bit (slowly, I confess). I have noticed that a fair number of things have changed (Heavy Vehicles and Weapons getting Repair with the required stat allocation popped out almost immediately to me, which will be great for Incognito).

By the way: what's the new character limit, Burn? I'm certainly not averse to making some new level 0s and running them through to help out the low-levels -- God knows, I remember what that suffering was like, and that was with over 10K active characters on the High Score list.

Crap, sorry. Accidental double-post -- thought I was hitting edit on my above post.

darksabrz wrote:By the way: what's the new character limit, Burn?

14. If it even works. Just because it's in one place doesn't mean it's not hard coded behind the scenes elsewhere.

Yeah, it didn't work. But it didn't take my energon either, so there's that at least.

darksabrz wrote:Yeah, it didn't work. But it didn't take my energon either, so there's that at least.

Of course it didn't.