From what I can see, the devs are focusing more on 'game changing' patches, like Intrusion, Walls, PBS etc, and the quality of life improvements (that would make a big difference to a lot of people) go completely un-noticed.

Issues like:

Map Crash Bug,
Teleport / Enter Terminal Crash Bug.
Unpredictable latency changes

Improvements like:
More variety in spawns,
An assignment system that works. (can I dock at your base to do a mission? no. ok thanks.)
Some PvE content.
Some solo content.

A lot of this stuff would take a lot less developer time and effort to do than 'new cool features' like Scarabs or Decorational Plant Incubators.

However badly the assigment system is implemented behind-the-sceens, it can not be that hard to make some more assigments, be a bit creative with the challanges, invent some that actually benefit from doing as a group, make some challenges where a bunch of mechs/ewar/support bots would need to work together etc etc etc.

As a programmer myself I can see a lot of time going into things that would be fun to code, but the hard work of re-factoring and bug fixing that is needed to keep the game running seems lacking.

I remember crashing from time to time when teleporting during Beta, and thinking 'Well it is only beta, I am sure it is probably something that they missed in internal testing and they will patch it soon enough'. Well a year later and it is still as bad as ever, even a complete re-write of the teleport / enter building code would not be that hard if they really can't find the bugs, but I get the feeling it is simply not a priority and as a small team they end up prioritising other features over it again and again.

With the wall changes I guess building an arena will have to wait until PBS and Gamma are in, and then you will be able to build a well defended area to fight in to your exact specifications, something I am sure plenty of people will be interested in helping out with

I personally think that most of the emo over pvp is due to imbalanced team sizes and having some official events with rules will allow people to sort out who is good and who isn't, what creative fits are amazing and what fits are just a bit over the top

First off, great post Lemon, I think for the first time in a long time a logical well thought out post has been made, and I agree

There are a few uses of the walls you did not include - writing you name in the sand, trolling enemies by blocking their roads; creating a path to access an area to attack it and then blocking the path as you leave to cover your escape, but in general I think you covered it very well.

We put a fair amount of effort and thought into the walls we had. They were never a substitute for pvp, the best we could ever hope for from them was to (a) alert us to incoming forces and (b) slow those forces down a little to give us time to respond.

For many of the veterans they have a slew of bots ready to go with good fits worked out long in advance, for many of our players they are busy putting some EP into some extension to allow them to fit what it is they are trying to equip, so it can take quite some time to muster a force to defend and the walls allowed us to do that.

Some people suggest using gate scouts instead of walls/probes, and yes we do when we are doing certain operations, but TOG policy is against using trial accounts for anything other than trailing a game, so it comes down to asking someone to cover a certain point for a certain period, rather than just making up another 3 email addresses and turning up the sound on a spare PC. Likewise to those who suggest the Alsbale population is not interested in pvp, we deliberately split TOG into two to allow those who did not want to pvp to live on alpha without feeling obliged to come over and fight, so everyone left in TOG is by definition interested in PvP.

<snip off topic>

I personally think that the walls were great, they were easily (but not trivially) counter able, and if people put together a well thought out defensive position the attackers would have to think through their attack and plan a little, as it should be.

The ability to just randomly build walls wherever you wanted (within reason) and also blow them up was a true sandbox feature, a bold move by the devs and really helped revitalise the Beta island population.

The walls-only-around-the-outpost-but-not-too-close-and-also-not-near-any-SAPs are more or less irrelevant and do not bring with them any of the control that the nearly-unlimited walling had, and also remove probes as any kind of early warning system, forcing people to afk at gates or spam trial accounts once again.

No-one is claiming everything is perfectly balanced, obviously some fits are better than others, some better in certain situations than others.

Clearly EP has a big impact too, but with the low and high brackets, that is at least mitigated.

But part of the tournament is to show what the best you can do is. If the top 4 or whatever are all running the same mechs with the same fits and similar EP, then we still get to see who is the best pilot, which is the point of the competition.

The point of the thread is to decide on what formats should be available, and in enough time for everyone to get their set-ups ready.

The T1 fit bracket is the most accessible and will discourage the least players, and anyone wanting to participate in a more open bracket should be able to bring a T1 mech along as well, so would be able to play in both.

As to what the more expensive brackets should be I like the point system the most. It removes the fear of running into an insanely expensive fit that has so much more spent on it that the competition comes down to who has the most resources to risk and not the best skills.

However I do think the open bracket will have a much smaller signup than the T1 so it is probably better to ask those that actually sign up which rules you will go with.

I was also thinking that some 2v2 in the light category could be quite interesting with a lot more variation and possibilities for fits.

The other problem with changing it is when you are running low on the type of ammo you are using.

At the moment if you have 4*100 slots guns using chemo, but only 100 chemo rounds left, then the first gun will be full of chemo, the other 3 with thermal or whatever. Using the 'sharing' system all 4 guns would end up reloaded with 25 rounds of chemo, hardly ideal.

I thought the point of the lockout mechanic was to stop you accessing things in there, making access an important concept.

Equally all the people asking for a bigger world so that trading becomes more viable will not be happy with the ability to sit at the centre of your empire and trade all over the world.

+0 as I am not massively bothered either way.

I think some people had a lot of success with the maverick "Mechwarrior MMO" search term, clearly 'infringing' on some other copyright, but since you are all individuals you are free to do what you want, and if microsoft wants to buy the term all they have to do is offer Google more money for it (oh the irony).

I am tempted to bring the news of the attacks to as many gamer news sites as possible, that way the attacks will fuel publicity for the game and get even more people playing

Eventually there will be so many people playing that the bandwidth of the attacks will be swamped by the sheer numbers of people running round blowing up mechs

EDIT: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/107 … st15237705

Thinly disguised enough?

"I played eve for over 6 years and only left when CCP fail to understand their own game.  What drove me to continue playing eve was the mystery and large projects such as TITAN or Supercarrier build. Owning 0.0 space with moon mining. SOv etc etc."

Well if you want to work on building a Gropho Mk2 see how that takes you for a large project. The mysteries are all round the corner (they are currently experimenting with player built structures, bombs, walls, proximity probes etc etc) and I can't imagine owning 0.0 and moon mining to be that different to owning some beta islands and epi mining.

For 'solo' goals you are pretty limited, as either you have to do something badly due to a lack of EP to dedicate to it or you are doing something solo (taking on a commando beacon) which other people would do much more easily in a group (or at least solo with support bots), so to find a solo-endgame you are really looking at the mid-game for group activities, doing tough assignments, clearing roaming spawns, taking down an observer etc.

Finally joining a corp does not mean you become a slave to their demands, many corps are very flexible about what you can do, and only specify some 'rules' if you are working together to do something. These common goals are a lot more motivating (and bigger in scale) than anything you can attempt solo so I would definetly give corp life a try before deciding on if you like the 'end game'.

Just c+p an idea I was kicking round on the TOG forums:

My 2c: A registration app. It runs and connects to one of 50 different IP addresses (using a shared algo to choose which one), it then authenticates with this mini server and adds your IP address to an upstream IP filter hosted by the ISP. This then allows you to login and not have your IP address blocked by the ISP.

In order to attack the game or login server the botnet would need to have all it's IPs registered and so reveal all the compromised computers, or all its traffic would be blocked by the ISP whitelist filter. It also prevents the randomised IP address commonly used in these types of attacks. If the attacker instead targets the mini authentication server, then the attack will only prevent people with a new IP address from registering, and only for the brief period of time that the login app is using that IP. Once it changes to a different server IP (remember it rotates around 50 different addresses) the registration will work again. The only effective attack is to block all 50 addresses, at which point you simply update the registration app with a different 50 IP addresses.

This would stop the attack from affecting anyone at home (ISP already known), and anyone already online (registration server is not the game server). The only people that could still be affected would be people with a new IP address which need to get it registered. In order to take down the registration servers would need 50 to 100* the size of the network of bots to achieve the same effect, and load on the registration server would have no impact on the actual game server/connections anyway.