You what now trickster Before 2.2 was released, I played 5 hours on a workign day minimum. I only ever played on german server before 2.1, and then KillerMangoose and Napalms. How the f can you think i havent been playing is just baffling. After 2.2 came out, sure i did take a break and played less often untill weapons got buffed again.
Well ,tbh only a handfull of people that stuck around liked the crazy shit of that map. The rest 80% or so of players hated it's polygons.
Maybe you didn't play on the same server or just were on at different hours. I'm mainly talking about over the summer holidays that year. Was the KillerMangoose server the z4g guys? I think flasche was with them but I forget their members exactly.
To be fair, when you started driving towards a clan a lot of the older players were tailing off, as well as migrating to American servers because that's what they were more used to. I learnt the game on an American server with a 130 ping which gave me a sense of lag which I was able to compensate for easily because it was so consistent - and Empires is that forgiving. But...my point was, that many people stayed on the american servers because there tended to be a little more stability and they were just used to it. I digress a lot on this subject for no apparent reason ^_-
No, killermangoose was the big euro server that everyone played on, zone for gamers was setup by a bunch of german guys being lead by ultralow. They got some attention, but quickly were forgotten. Some of the z4g guys stuck around for a while, ultralow being one of them but they were always not rally taken seriously due to mediocre skill and heavy accents. Something to the like of ghosts server if memory serves right.
To be honest I don't even remember when I joined CW. It felt as if i pubbed around for like a year before that.
Yeah, I think you did. Tbh, i'm starting not to be able to remember it so well...there was a point where I stopped being so active in Empires, but that was a fair bit after we'd been very active as CW for quite a while. Closer to like...when Retrofade joined and etc. We did have a few years after release before we dropped off. And then a few more before I ...uh... kinda dissolved the clan... In my defense. I more or less asked everyone if they would like to do clannish stuff, and they really said no. It kinda blew me away at the same time, since while I don't particularly like to scrim because I feel there are better players, I did like to think I would be getting there eventually. But...I dunno. Probably my bad, lol.
Ohhhh you mean [KM] server. I had absolutely no idea that actually stood for something. KM server was great. My memory sort of has it like this. CW were pretty dead during 2.12, but started to come back a bit towards the end and for the early 2.2x versions. Then they died off and became an IRC clan. During that time, CW and EPIC got together and played months of TTT together. And those TTT games were fantastic. Like an absolute joy to look back on, I had incredible fun and really got to know people better. It was just a really wonderful time, and some good inter-clan bonding as it were.
hotel squad represent, also you forgot opie faggot anyone remember pixelized? dude was the beastiest pubstar, he never joined jpl also classic district, everyone on the roofs and shit, shame nobody made that into OB version
I just saw pickled heretic hasnt been on steam for 194 days, I wonder whats up. Dude was fun, kinda mad but fun. Trickster you write so prolifically about your babies, all you have really done is assert your dominance so fucking hard that no one had the energy to humble you. I'm not really given to delusions of grandeur or anything, but I would honestly say that there was like a week or two, when I played every day all day, that I was the best player in the game. That combined with having actually been around for long enough to observe most all of this shit gives me the right to say this: This absolute assertion that you are the best judge of all skill in all your days is so obnoxious. I like you and I think you can handle the criticism but man, get the fuck over it. Your guys are good we get it but so are other people. You write really well on the subject, but come on, move on, we've all read that same shit like 28 times. The fucking lambasting of others to promote your own shit above all else bugs me so much. And then, you also do all the balancing. Like, come on, a massive drop off in the effectiveness of the gren, combined with the class being riddled with bugs, gave rise to the *LOTR theme* Age of the Rifleman. - coinciding with the admittedly rifle-whore heavy clan dominating the scene, not that there was much competition left at that point. The game is a prettier, more stable, flashier shadow of its former self. Much of the change is due to the community spamming more and saying less, and games following suit, but some of it has been done to the game motivated what more and more looks like needless complication for complication's sake. I hope in your next iteration you will take a more arcade-style approach to balancing and less of a fine edged system of counters, cause that shit is too damn complicated for a dying game that needs to be accessible. Make the game move faster, like it used to. Make infantry a threat to vehicles again. Stuff like, where are superlights? Why is my tank so fucking slow? Why can't I shoot more than 5 shots before I overheat? IMO the heat bar should be twice as hard to fill. That shit is not fun. Make heat a lesser inhibition on tanks. Get the speeds back up, oldfags am I right? Are Superlights, or just 3 phase in general, totally neutered? or are they the same and I'm just remembering it wrong? I just ranted, when I meant to leave a pithy one liner, as one does. I ranted because on this forum I can't even get through a thread anymore, too much alternate wanking each other off or insulting each other. So I put some shit here. Trickster when you get closer to that scout update lets seriously talk about infantry balance, get a couple people together and figure out how to reinvigorate it. Hugs.
Who Knew DP had a head on his shoulders. And Agreed with 90% of what he said. Also fuck you epricks. Meep Meep.
I have the energy!!! Though for real this isn't a bash on Trickster or EPIC though parts might be misconstrued as such. It is just a general observation that I thought needed saying. I really don't mean this to be insulting & this is a scatter shot aimed at nobody in particular but any kind of clan superiority is a moot point when none of you actually play! (reiterate, I am talking about clan players in general with notable exceptions). Each clan has a handful of active players at best & of those very few are either willing or able to lead a pub. Over half won't assign at the start of a round, because the fear of starting without a commander, or being that commander & many don't or can't lead squad (I don't claim I can, but I do at least try!). There is a big divide between active clan players that can actually make a notable difference even in a pub game & those that are just good with a mortar or a rifle and really add very little to the fun of a normal game which makes up 99.9% of actual rounds played. In this I mean actual communication and leadership, not being able to swap squad lead and spam squad heal, etc. It is a shame to say clans are irrelevant but its fast becoming true & I'm not saying it is anyone's fault - it's just that the current model (lets try and beat EPIC) really isn't worth a damn. A quick scan of my friends list, which is full only of empires players basically tells me that people I would consider (IMHO) "active participants"; (communicative squad leads, commanders, nice characters & especially valuable, engaging players they don't know) really doesn't tip that far in the favour of clan players at all. There are quite a few notable exceptions that are currently flying the flag for their respectives and I would name them but 1. I would forget people and feel bad & 2. they will all know who they are. Basically what I am getting at is; Get over it, whatever clans once were are bunk right now because lets face it, when clan leads aren't even in game once a month who really cares. It isn't a case of which is strongest, it is a case of which is less weak. If competitive empires has a future it is going to need to be something other than just beating EPIC. Active players need to scrim each other in smaller more regular games for fun. There are plenty of pubbers that put clan members to shame nightly and decent un-established players willing to listen that are just going to come and go if they don't get some kind of community inclusion. I don't know that there is a solution, but I imagine something less formal, more frequent and more inclusive than a bi-annual willy waving contest would probably be much more fun. Sorry to offend all you purists, but lets be honest - the writing is on the wall for competitive play without a feeder class and no-one is doing dick for that. To my mind the real measure of a decent empires player is their interaction. IMO headshots count for less than getting an entire team to tank together effectively. I'm not saying kick all in-actives(though it is more or less par-for-the-course in every other game). But I really think that the current situation is too ridged given our player count, not enough games are played and when they are played they are definitive, gg, no re. I have a few ideas how this could be achieved without interfering with the status quo - but the status quo needs a shake up or its gonna die lonely. Drunker Edit: That's Right, I called all you hoes.
cant help but think our steamchat had somethin to do with this hah. But yeah, game has been declining since 2.12...yes you can OB blame all you want but bottom line is, its less fun. The game has gotten slower, tanks are harder to kill, bases are a bitch to take out...and the cv is damn well invincible till you get rushed and by that point you've probly already lost. Bring back the dynamic shit of 2.12, losing team? k go 9 mine, go APC rush, do something. Now days its nothing but a slow grind towards the end, one team wins the chokepoint battle and the other team slowly grinds out their defeat with jackshit to do about it. At least in the old days you could attempt to ninja after ninja, it gave you somethin to do when you were losing...that or sploit inside the map and troll noobs. Also cant say I enjoy the overhaul of the armor/engine system when it was fine to begin with...every armor/engine had a niche up until the fission backwards exploit but thats an entirely different beast. All in all, the game has died down which is expected with an old mod, regardless turning it into a grind fest and removing the things that kept every player coming back is just slamming nails in the coffin. +1 me, prolly the most logical drunk post i've made in a while
Whooooaaaa.. I just made a massive post that I bothered spell checking, whilst drunk? And you just swoop in here and talk about some 9 mine shit from like 2 years ago ?????? 3 fingers, Go.
Naw son I called Opie out earlier in the post. Bro takes the title for best Bootanker. Also yeah, Hotel squad wrecked pretty much everyone's shit. I had some fun times when you guys let me play with you in pub games. This all started with me saying that, in my opinion, which is based off my experience playing in probably more scrims and pugs than anyone else, not to mention pubbing a lot, I felt that Sonecha was my favourite, and in my opinion best Empires player during a specific time period in which I played the most Empires I ever have done. People shat on that, and I felt they were wrong. You probably did have a period where you were the best, or at least the most effective. I think a lot of the top-end vets (of which I am not one) have all had periods where they were the most effective player in every pub game. I'm just saying that during the period in which Sonecha did that, I felt like he was the best. I do kind of want to point out that at the time, he wasn't clanned, and he wasn't really with my clan that long, he spend more time in Ghost & JPL than he did with us. He was just a player that I really looked up to in terms of trying to get better at the game. I'm not going to sidestep all of the blame it by any means, but please understand a few things. Infantry weapons are how they are because they're still based on the 2.2 overhaul, which if you remember, slowed down things a lot. No-one, myself included, has had the time to rewrite everything from scratch. It's something I want to do and will try to do, but you're talking insane amounts of work. I've tried to make the best of what we have. On the other hand, you need to stop this "age of the rifleman" bullshit. The Grenadier right now is more powerful than he has ever been. His mortar can 1 hit kill someone with HP upgrade, he has higher resists to damage than he has ever had, not to mention that the splash and resist of other classes to the motar have all moved in the Gren's favour. You talk about going back to when the game was fast paced, do you even remember that time? I loved it, no doubt, but if there was ever an "age of the rifleman", that was it. The Grenadier back then could not compete with the Grenadier of today, yet the rifles back then could easily mow down entire squads. A lot of today's "pro grens" only even started playing Grenadier as the class became more playable once combat slowed down. If you remember, I threw a pug last year on 2.12. I can't remember if you attended, but most people were in agreement that Grenadier was NEVER as good as you're insinuating. Grenadier has been a bit better than it is now sure, because rifles have been pulled up. But most riflemen would argue that the Grenadier is overpowered now. I'll never satisfy both camps. After speaking to Communism over Steam, he did kind of point out that maybe that's the problem, trying to do that. My aim has always been to try and balance the bitching between Grens and Rifles, new players and old players, FPS players and RTS players, and try to make everyone happy. That's not really going to happen. It is time I start maybe accepting that. For the record, some of the shit in your post either never changed or is just technically impossible. Vehicles are difficult for me to push much further or they start spinning out, courtesy of Orangebox's different way of handling vehicles. If someone had the technical ability to rewrite the handling scripts (don't need to be a coder), they could maybe fix that. I don't have that ability. But I believe the strategy of the game should be fine-edged, but the gameplay should be more arcadestyled. The problem is that to make things like that, a lot of things need rewriting. I can't just dump pre-orangebox scripts in, as much as I'd love to, it simply doesn't work. I've been trying to get to that type of gameplay but I'm hitting the limits of what can be done without redoing things. My biggest problem, as I said to Commie over steam, was what happened when I tried a lot of these things. I tried making CV weaker, vehicles a lot weaker, etc. It totally ruined the game for 1-2 months because I just can't force the current playerbase to adapt. They were happy to just sit there watching their CV get rushed, round after round. I don't know what to do about that. I've tried with the current system to try and improve the skill of your general vehicle user, so that I can start weakening vehicles again (with the aim that most vehicle users will be better equipped to deal with more powerful grens), but a lot of people just can't adapt. We don't have a lot of players now, and I really don't want to shit on the ones that are left. I think this is probably the most important point anyone has really put across. I don't joke when I say that 95% of scrims that have happened in the past 5 years or so have had EPIC on one of the sides. That's a really unhealthy situation. And a lot of that has really been me trying to push clans into scrimming us. So what's the solution? Well we tried the summer league a couple of years ago. Every clan was divided up into 4 groups and split across all 4 teams. But we had no leaders, as you said earlier in your post. The only 2 people who wanted to lead a team were myself and WalMartGreeter. Out of the other teams, Communism formed the team but wasn't around much, so Deadpool had to take over (and I know that really sucked for him), and one of the ponyfags took the other team. I'm happy to try that again this year during my time off, but we need 4 leaders who are actually willing to put the time and effort in to do it properly, otherwise it just results in a stomp, just like it did last time. That summer league was fucking terrible. The old Empires pugs in which half the community went BE, half went NF, and played a single round each week did work out pretty well, but I think it's just too limited for what we want.
I still think you shouldn't balance around how bad the pubbers now are compared to how good they used to be. Pubs used to be better because you HAD to be better, you had to know which cheese tactics to watch out for and defend against and normally when you did stop them... You would hold the edge to leading the map since you didn't sink so many resources into an all or nothing cheese.
I'm a bit curious about this. I've been under the impression that vehicle handling could only be fixed by numerous man-hours of coding because it's an issue with the underlying framework and not the scripts.
