Foamy AP rant
There isn't one, 'myre, short of making raiding straight up impossible, for a very simple reason:
The best time to kill someone is when they're not around.
There
is no possible way to alter the game mechanics in order to change that
fact, short of ludicrous, broken things [like hey, lets make everyone
auto-die if they attack an offline player!]. Moreover, the admins have
stated -- repeatedly and emphatically -- that a fundamental design
principle behind TDZK is that There is no safety, except in newbie
turns. Between these two principles, raiding is and will always be an
extremely valuable tool for those alliances who can do it effectively.
Likewise, learning how to dock appropriately to avoid being hurt by
raids will always be a valuable skill.
These are unalterable and
undeniable facts of life, and have been so since the beginning of the
game. More people have died to being raided out than any other cause,
ever, with newbie and trader bashing probably coming in second. Group
fights third, solo warbird fights last.
The fact of the matter
is that winning is fun. You can have your fun in other means, if you
wish; if you want to run or participate in a solohunting alliance, or a
trading alliance, or a newbie-bashing alliance, more power to you. Go!
Have fun! I won't try to change the game to stop you.
So why do
people wish to change the game to stop us from playing it how we play?
Despite the example of luminaries such as Goca, it isn't because
they're stupid.
It's because they're lazy, and envious. And
possibly somewhat scared, as well. They know we have fun. They know
that we have our fun because we play to win, because we find winning
fun. Oh, certainly, other things are fun as well, but if you don't win,
it's a lot less fun than if you do win. And these other people see
FURY's success, see that they can't replicate it using their
strategies, and instead of either changing their strategies or not try
to compete with FURY, they complain that they can't compete. They're
afraid to try, afraid that if they do try, and fail, they'll have to
admit that they were wrong, wrong about FURY, wrong about how to play
the game, wrong about the importance of their own egos.
And
perhaps they're afraid of success, too. After all, if they succeed,
they might find out that, after all, we're right about how much fun it
is to fight another alliance and win. They'll find out how awesome it
is to know, to know that anything your alliance can dream, it can do.
Kill the admiral? Yes! Raid every station in the game before 48h have
gone? Yes! Fight SH three rounds running? Hell, why not? [Future plans
censored by order of Iccyh, High Poobah And Grand Censor of FURY AP
Posts].
Incidentally, am I the only one that recalls that as of 2.4, there were a lot of people complaining about the lack of wars?
Lets
see, what else? Oh yes, lack of ethical standards and rule loophole
exploitation. Ah, such lovely topics. I can hear Brahm's Lullaby, even
now--
No, wait. That's the opening bars of Beethoven's 5th.
Right then.
One,
just because something has always been done doesn't make it the best
way to do things [See also alliance caps]. Doing things
non-traditionally is by no means unethical, nor against the spirit of
the game. In fact, many of your posts seem to be arguing that the
untraditional specialist alliances now existing embody the true spirit
of the game, instead of the more conventional, rounded alliances that
are the heirs of the dominant alliances of 1.0.
And 2.0.
And 2.1.
And 2.2.
And 2.3.
And 2.4.
And 2.5.
Now,
I repudate that argument, but if you're so foolish as to accept it,
accept the corollaries; untraditional actions are not, in and of
themselves, bad or against the game's spirit [Whatever that vaguely
defined term happens to mean. I've never seen an agreed upon
definition, but based on close observational evidence of various posts
lately, I've come to the conclusion that it must mean 'moaning and
complaining when things go the wrong way'. If so, I'm proud not to be a
part of that 'spirit'].
There was a time, I remind you all, when
using aggies was 'untraditional' and 'against the spirit of the game'.
It didn't stop various alliances from using them en masse later,
though. I recall a time in 1.0, when, to avoid the stigma of using
aggies, K declared war on most of the game. Do you remember that, Z?
I
remember a time, not so very long ago to me, where louis was despised
and publically assailed by various self-righteous loudmouths for his
extremely effective, untraditional, nebula hunting. It was considered
unethical, immoral, wrong-- against the spirit of the game. The
continuous camps of Concentric and Magellan by 1.0 KAOS, potting n00b
after n00b after n00b was just fine, of course. But now? Speak a word
against the crew of newbie bashers that was Ronin of 2.5, and prepare
to have PL jump down your throat [and personally, I want no part of PL
down my throat]. It's all part of the game, he says. It's all in good
fun, he says. It's in the spirit of the game, he says!
I
remember the F5 targetlock, since closed, which many members of K and
ID and JWW used and defended, and which JaiMaster would like reinstated.
I
remember many things, yes I do. I remember ASx's maintenance raids,
which was the biggest cashwhoring exercise this game has ever seen.
Except for interest -- hi todd! -- and items and carlos, of course.
Untraditional? Sure. Against the spirit of the game? So some people
thought. Effective? Unquestionably.
I remember Planetary
Gardners--er, pardon. I meant Praetorian Guard, of course; the ones who
used planet-building XP to level their raiders to L50 quickly, easily,
and risk-free. Funnily, PG also had a nice list of former KAOS members.
I
remember Maelstrom. A superb group of hunters, and they pioneered
something new, something untraditional: The transparent tag! It was
brilliant, it was effective, and it was legal, that round. The rules
were changed to prevent it later, naturally, but there was nothing at
all ethically wrong with what Maelstrom did at the time.
The
point of all this is that because, as 'myre points out, the planetary
building system-- put in place to avoid certain abuses, and which it
succeeds at and which any replacement would also have to avoid-- has
created the absurd situation where it makes sense to recruit people for
the sole purpose of parking them on a planet to build stuff. It is, I
might add, mutually agreed to. Our planet builders get something out of
this as well. I'd prefer it not be necessary, but it is in order to get
the results we want, it's admin pre-approved, and that ought to be the
long and the short of it as far as anyone else is concerned, especially
given the... elastic nature... of what constitutes ethical behaviour in
this game. For myself, it's simple. I don't lie, I don't break the
rules, and I don't break my word.
As for myself, personally,
here's the sequence of events that various Goca appears to have such
trouble understanding. Since I'm just such a nice, generous, helpful
guy-- and because I have a low opinion of most of the rest of you,
too-- I'll give him a hand.
Okay, first off. I'm going away for
the Canadian long weekend and I'm not able to contribute much to FURY
as a Zallun because of my online times. I decide this would be an
opportune time to restart as a Tamaran, something I'd been considering
for a week or so, in order to trade, something I can do solo and
something which is critical to alliance success.
So, I dump my
turns planet building, and retire my pilot. I come back late Sunday,
create my Tammy so it can stock turns, and log off.
Then, the
next day, Monday, I log on midafternoon my time to find out that K is
attempting to raid one of our planets in Manchari. I do stress the
"attempting"; whomever designed their raiders for that ought to be
shot, as they were making what I would broadly call "no progress
whatsoever". That wouldn't happen to be you, Goca, by any chance?
Anyways, the point is, as we were chuckling in #fury over KAOS
incompetence, talk turned to ways of disrupting the raid.
If
memory serves, Rycio said he'd go and try to pirate them. And that's
when it all came together for me, sort of an inspirational flash, if
you will. I was one system away, in my starting frigate; as a Tammy, I
had a jumpdrive; and I had my starting newbie turns. It would be
possible for me to jump in, be protected from the dropped forces by
newbies, and, if the triggers weren't alert or were disdainful of the
threat, pirate a raider.
The reason I could do this to a planet
raid was because I could tell when they attacked. Therefore, I could
refresh stats&options until I got a red light, hit drop newbies,
hit current sector, hit examine, and hit attack&board. If all went
well, I'd get a pirate.
Well, initially, all didn't go well. The
K escorts were sharp guys; they got me five times. Rycio, in the
meantime, swung through and pirated the bottom raider on the list a
couple of times; my sitting IS in newbies with a frigate between shots
let me update FURY on whether the raiders were there, and what auras,
so we knew if they planned to continue or not.
In the meantime,
I also had a nice little chat with Mirage, who had some rather choice
words for me. And who also completely missed the point of what I was
doing; I corrected him.
Anyways, on the sixth try, when KAOS had
given up on the EMP planet and moved to another, and been the targets
of a [failed] Warrior jump, I succeeded. For whatever reason, the K
trigger had been a touch slow, and I got a pirate. I died [and here I'm
sorry to contradict Iccyh and 'myre, to whom I wasn't clear afterwards]
when I hit continue attack, attempting to make certain that I had the
pirate.
Up to this point, everything is perfectly possible and
perfectly legal. I was in frigates, therefore K was getting kill
points; I was attempting to do something other than die, which meant I
wasn't notice spamming; and I hadn't exploited any bugs or undocumented
code. I'd pushed the piracy without EMP damage to its logical extreme,
no more.
Except, as I found out later, there is a bug with
piracy, where it's possible to pirate someone, even if you die in the
combat where you hit A&B. I want to emphasis that I have no idea
whether or not that happened in this case; I didn't bother looking at
the combat report, and I wasn't able to, when other testers started
talking about this particular bug, go back and retrieve it. The fact
that player histories show that I died at L1 and got the pirate at L1,
but ended up as L4, indicate that I might have inadvertently ended up
triggering it. It could just have been typical lag stuff, but I want to
stress:
I did not know about the bug when I tried this, nor do I know if I did, in fact, trigger it.
After
I came down after the high of succeeding, and forcing K to stick around
even longer, at which point a successful Warriors jump occurred, I got
to thinking about just how utterly unstoppable and annoying what I had
done was. And I came to a conclusion. Fun as it was for me, it was
something that severely ruined other people's fun; it was a lose-lose
situation for anyone escorting a raid. Either they triggered me, and
hence lost turns, possibly ammo, and definitely reaction time in case
of a jump; or, they don't, and I kill a raider at no cost to myself
except turns. It was reward without risk for me, and it shouldn't have
been possible.
So I buttonholed Aelanna, told her what happened,
and told her why it was a bad idea to have things set up so that it
could be done. There was universal agreement from other testers, and
Helios' suggestion about not being able to drop newbies in space seemed
to me to be the cleanest, most elegant way to fix the problem, so it
was the one I presented to her.
In the meantime, I'd also found
out about the piracy bug, and so the testers brought that to her
attention as well; she had some time... and she fixed both issues.
And
that's when I brought up the combat report logs idea as well; because I
would have given, not my right arm, but possibly my left, to find out
if I had died on my pirating attempt. And, since Aelanna still had time
and since everyone liked the idea [and why not? It's been a good idea
ever since it was first proposed, years ago], that got added too.
Thats
how these things work. Testers aren't gods. We can't directly alter the
code. All we get is access to the admins to tell them about issues and
ideas that come to our minds, or that we've heard from other people and
think are good, and the tools to test changes that the admins have
implemented. We don't sit down, for example, at the beginning of every
round and say 'we want to make raiding the only win-condition in the
galaxy. How do we do that?'. We say, 'Hey, Ael [or, Hey, Squee], I ran
across something weird/overpowered/bugged/interesting today...'.
I'm
not perfect. I make mistakes; many of them, as anyone who knows me and
most people who don't can attest from experience. Should I have
realised how nasty what I was about to do was, held off, and quietly
had it changed instead? Perhaps, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty,
and it did not occur to me. It was as simple as, 'I can do this, it'll
help my alliance, there's no way they can stop me, and there's nothing
against the rules'. So I did it. And the example was dramatic enough to
convince everyone that the change was necessary, too; I don't think the
lack of discussion concerning the newbie change would have occured had
there not been the example to point to.
But turning away from me, and getting to alliance politics again, I remember.
I
remember the SH coalition of the north, whose size and power has never
been surpassed, before or since. I remember the demolition of KAOS by
four alliances, an asswhupping they still haven't recovered from, and
probably never will. I remember watching JaiMaster solo SH online-- and
get raided out offline. I remember Iccyh target-hunting SH traders, and
having to shift his docking point every few hours to avoid being
counterraided.
I drew the appropriate lesson. You can piddle
about in solo ships against a good raiding alliance all you want. You
might even have success at it, and you'll probably get more of them
than they will of you.
But they will get you. Again. And again.
And again. And, if you have allies, or alliancemates, they'll get them,
too. And a rounded alliance of sixty people is much more able to
sustain losses, and fight back, than a solohunter is. Or a specialist
alliance. If a solohunter kills six warbirds, then dies, he has still
lost.
Raiders and raids are the most important weapons in this
game, and have always been. With raids, you can force the pace. You can
make someone fight you. Running away is no longer possible. You can
project power and actually fight a war. Escort warbirds are necessary
to protect your raiders and to attack other people's. Traders are
necessary to fund the escorts, the raiders, and potentially the
planets, and the escorts and raiders keep other alliances from being
able to go after the traders.
Solohunting and newbie bashing
don't fit in this scheme anywhere. I've tried both, with mixed success.
It's fun, yes-- but it's detrimental to an alliance's overall success,
if you measure that success by an alliance's ability to fight and win
wars.
If you have fun solohunting, newbie bashing, or whatever,
as I've said before, more power to you. If you enjoy being in a small,
skilled, specialised, random alliance of some description [Jade Triad,
Zombies, Druuge], great. Awesome, I really mean it. But please, have
some grace about it. Don't complain if someone with more numbers can
beat you in a fight; don't complain if someone who can raid and group
fight can beat you in a war. I can't stop you if you decide to
complain, of course, but think it through; if you're following a path
that isn't as effective at winning wars, but is effective at giving you
want you seek from the game, what do you have to complain about? You're
having fun!
The problem here, I think, is that there are certain
people who want to have it all. They want to be able to win a war by
their solohunting skills; they don't want to have to put the time into
recruitment, or organisation, or planning, that is necessary to
actually win a war. They want to be able to solohunt, and fight another
alliance on occasion, if they feel like it, and happen to meet in space
while they're going after some poor trader. There's a disconnect
between expectation and result on the parts of some people; if they,
truly, didn't care about fighting wars or group fights or raids, they
wouldn't care that someone is that much better than they are at it.
In
2.5, FURY didn't give a good goddamn about RONIN's success at newbie
bashing. Why? Because we didn't care about newbie bashing. It isn't
relevant to our goals, we aren't in competition with them, and we let
them do their thing. We didn't say, 'oh gnoeszors, the smaller galaxy
has madezors nebula hunters teh invincibleeess!! We must make it
impossible to attack someone of a lower player level and make the
galaxy have eleventy-twelve systems!'.
The point of all this mass of wordage, however, for those of you with the attention spans of concussed ducklings, is as follows:
1. You can't stop us ingame.
2. You can't beat us ingame.
3. You're scared and jealous.
Oh, and:
4. You can all go straight to hell.
Thank you, and goodnight.