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sorry poor planning on my part. should have made it just Saturday
also missed the “6pm Eastern” mark by about an hour here
I’m down. I’ll aim for 6pm Eastern Friday & Saturday night. I’ll try to let it run for a couple of hours depending how many people show up / want to participate.
haha what?
lol nice Bill quote… Who is supposed to be Portia here? And which one of us is Shylock (guessing me)?
Hey man sorry for the uh, cryptic announcement. I probably could have explained a little better what’s going on.
Here’s the short version:
Life happened. I can’t develop the game any longer, so I called for backup. I didn’t want to hand over a half-finished project, so I rewound the maps and ship balance to about 1997. There was no clean (fair) way to carry the old scoreboard over, so I killed all the ships.
The long version:
A work situation recently came up and at least for a while, I won’t be able to fully support the day-to-day running of mtrek.com. I scrambled for a replacement and Mark was gracious enough to pick up my slack. Being an old player from the 90s, and because he’s familiar with our server’s infrastructure, he’s a shoe-in. In fact, he’s the one who first helped me get everything up and running here back in 2012.
Still- I didn’t want to dump an unfinished mess into our savior’s lap, so I simplified everything and turned the dial back to the mid-1990s. The balance (and misbalance) of CLP’s ship selection will be the most agreeable for the greatest number of people.
I’ve saved a complete copy of “version 6”, because I think there are a lot of cool things there, but I have to admit, v6 was still in rough form after 8 months of development. 2 of which were open beta testing, plus 3 months of production status… Balancing 38+ ship classes, while weighing nearly as many differing opinions, was -a nightmare-
There was also the half-finished “delta expansion” project and some ongoing player disputes to reconcile… I think the new guy deserves a clean slate, and I’d hate to hand over any more headaches than I absolutely have to.
Don’t get me wrong- I love all you guys and I think it’s awesome that so many people are so passionate about this game. I’m not stepping back as a result of any of burden or stress. To the contrary, I think things have actually been going quite well.
I’d like to keep the momentum going from our recent ad campaigns and the huge spike in player activity. You all deserve the best game we can give you, and I think for most of us, that’s the game we fell in love with in the 80s and 90s…or at least as close as we can get.
SUMMARY OF CHANGES:
Ships, quads, and devices have all been returned to Classic MTrek-style.
All of the ships in the database were killed, but not deleted. This means that you can still see them in the website boneyard, and that “Player Ranks” have been preserved.
Note: this is NOT the “Version 7” we were conceptualizing elsewhere in the forums and in the in-game chats. There are no upgrades, no “Easter eggs”.
The player’s guide has been updated to reflect these changes. Please let us know if you find any discrepancies.
SUMMARY OF NOT-CHANGES
We still have player accounts and fleet pages in the scoreboards
The ship ranks (Crewman Basic thru FLEET ADMIRAL *X*) are still “2016 MTrek”
esc-? still shows a list of commands
esc-@ still shows an in-game roster
We still have bots (~14 of them)
The bots still reduce spawning as more players log in, and then resume spawning when players log out
There are still various bug-fixes and non-game mechanics improvements in place, but I can’t think of them all right now
FINALLY
When I said I was going into “retirement” that wasn’t entirely accurate. In fact, when I get home this evening (and throughout this weekend) I plan to binge heavily on MTrek and beer. I’m going to be playing- (not adminning) but feel free to hit me up with questions if you see me on. From Monday, I won’t be online very often but when I do get the opportunity, I will set aside some time to enjoy MTrek and to answer emails etc. Sadly, that won’t be as often as I would like… But thankfully, all of this silly “work” stuff should prove to be a positive change for me and for my family. 🙂
Side note- in the SV-1, xwarp “braking” is pretty easy because hitting [ will slow you down to a manageable warp 16…vs warp 17/18/19 in sphere/xl/DY600.
Even better:
hit D first and then x when you have 13 seconds remaining. That way the “xwarp timer” is counting down in real-time.
Awesome because you’re explosion and ship debris will land right on target.
In the picture, we are intercepting a target ship with the same Z elevation as us. We want to get above that ship so we can rain plasma straight down at it. Incoming plasma from below or above can be harder to dodge than plasma originating at the same Z elevation.
So we intercept and then modify our course to have a +45* nose-up condition. Once we have gained enough Z elevation above the target, we intercept again but then adjust our nose to be completely level (0* pitch). Note that we have about a 30* relative position to our target at this point, which is why we level out the nose- so we don’t lose our elevation.
As we move forward, our distance won’t change much, but our relative Pitch will drive towards 90*. When it hits 88*-90*, we are “above” our target and will intercept again, possibly with a plasma-firing macro.
This is the plane we will make our attack from. Hopefully our target ship intercepts us at some point while we’re directly above, which will render their azimuth-only (left/right swing) plasma dodge macros ineffective.
From this angle, we will attack normally with phasers/mines/plasma and unless the target has wised up and started using my plasma dodge macro, we will probably do some serious damage.
These macros intercept what you’re scanning and then point your nose up, down, or flat (0 deg pitch).
When you understand how the heading system works and what these macros are doing, you can use them to position yourself directly above or below a target (think 3-D space). A lot of people don’t know to move perpendicular to the z axis when they dodge plasma from above/below.
Yeah that’s what I meant. Certain kinds of ships like the ones without cloak or xwarp can all run off the same set of macros
Heheh I’m regretting the original post now. To reiterate my position on Version 7…
I want to let Version 6 to fully run its course.
90 days in, and the game is running well. We have more active players on mtrek.com now than we’ve had on any JavaTrek-based server since the mid-2000s, and for the most part things are good.
We’re ironing out our most recent ship balance patch right now, and then we’ll let things settle down for another 90 days or so. This will give us time to collect data and decide and see if any more adjustments might be needed.
And then this year of course, we’ll have the “Borg Invasion!” (don’t laugh- still working on the name) expansion into an all new Delta Quadrant.
All of this, plus periodic “leaked” eastereggs, weekend PvP events, and other miscellaneous promotions… should take us well into next year before we really begin to look at another major update like V7.
Many of you can already attest that your ideas can, and often will make it into the game. The first step is offering that feedback so we can chew it over and figure out what works.
The original post here was just a way to spark up some discussion for future updates and to gauge player response to the idea of a more “classic” type server. That idea sort of evolved into a blended approach of having a Classic game on the surface, but with some outwardly subtle features that add depth, like the upgrade system from version 4.x or the ability to purchase improved weapons systems, cloaks, etc for your “vanilla” ships.
Again, it looks like we’re still a looong way from any kind of version 7 though.
