Free Allegiance Forums

Dorjan wrote:QUOTE (Dorjan @ Oct 29 2008, 12:12 PM) When I joined I played the newbie server for ages, 4 vs 4 games. None of them hurt my stats since they didn't count. I commanded a few times to realise how much there was too do.

I was one of the few n00bs that set the game to med / med every game.

I think the newbie games should be locked into being med / med with sy off and back up to 8

which is all well and good, as it may reduce some of the silly settings games, but I can't remember the last time I logged into Allegiance and Noticed a Newbie game was running at all. I know when I joined about 6 mths ago there was rarely a newbie game running, now the situation seems worse.


Perhaps when we see a number of total noobs (2 or more) on the main server when there are larger games in progress, we need to encourage them to create a newbie game as they will enjoy it more than the constant podding/confusion they might get in the main game.......

Unfortunately I think many newbies are logging on, getting 10 fps and uninstalling. Fix the nVidia bug and we can get back to promoting and growing the community.

How many people does this bug actually affect? I mean, if this affects only people who upgraded very, very recently, wouldn't there be very few of them?

Anyway, I, too, noticed that there is NO-ONE on the newbie server 99% of the time. And yeah, it's a bad sign.

The problem right now is NOT that we have too many clueless noobs doing silly things. The problem is that we have too *few.*

The Allegiance community is pretty demanding, and I remember when I was a noob (I mean, more so than I am now) I got very turned off from "real" games because everyone was always yelling, talking about things I didn't understand (what the heck is a "nan-op-con-mid-high?" don't these people speak English?) and generally seemed to be, well, angry. I imagine it is easy for this to discourage some.

But then I went back to the newbie servers, and had fun. Because I had fun doing stupid things like playing with cap ships and flying for clueless and therefore non-demanding commanders, I got hooked on the game, and stuck with it. So I eventually tried out enough things, and understood the basics enough, that going to the non-newbie servers didn't seem as scary. And I even started to understand why people were so frustrated sometimes, and then figured it was worth it, and stuck with the game for good.

Fact is, games that are fun for experienced players are fun once you already know how Allegiance works and what all the different strategies are. They are not necessarily fun for new players who want to try new things and want to know what all the cap-ships do and so on. And there are many things we take for granted that a newb simply would not understand, or have a reason to understand. And it's one thing to read the cadet stuff over once, it's quite another to *remember* and know how to *apply* it. That only comes with experience.

And experience only comes if you have enough fun with the game, get hooked, and want to stick with it.

And fun and getting hooked does not come if you have no idea what is going on, and if people are yelling at you all the time. So you quit.

Anyway. Basically, be friendlier to noobs, and encourage Newbie Server games, I think these are great ideas. Advertising to get more new players in the first place is also good.

I think for the newbie server, one idea would be to have some experienced players "exempt" from the newbs-only policy, and have them sit on that server once in a while. I mean, if that server is empty to begin with, newbs won't join it. Why would they? They want to play, not sit on empty servers. If it has even two people on it already, then they might join, and have fun, and get hooked on the game. Maybe have a number of more experienced allegiance players volunteer sit on that server so that it's not empty. They can give noobs general pointers sometimes, but only as long as they are not too strict or harsh, and basically let the new players do silly things and have fun.

Heck, I regularly see reasonably experienced players do silly things like run RPS DM games with ridiculous money settings. I am sure some would be happy to play on the newbie server to get the silly out of their system. Probably not too often, but every minute that server is not empty is an improvement.

Just make them agree not to be harsh on the newbs, and not to "whore" or show off their 1337 skills, and once they agree to that, give them a noob account, or something, and let them at it.

The bug is frustrating.

One fine day, the IHVs of the world decide the older games aren't worth supporting anymore. Who cares if the DX spec calls for backwards compatibility? It's just a bunch of old games that nobody cares about. In their hurry to support the disaster that is Vista and DX10, they've ruined DX7 calls.

The good news is that the dev team are making progress with it. The bad news is that its just one guy who works on it. He has a life. It'll be done when it's done. If anyone with experience in DX9 graphics in C++ can help out, all the better.

ImmortalZ wrote:QUOTE (ImmortalZ @ Oct 30 2008, 03:49 PM) The bug is frustrating.

One fine day, the IHVs of the world decide the older games aren't worth supporting anymore. Who cares if the DX spec calls for backwards compatibility? It's just a bunch of old games that nobody cares about. In their hurry to support the disaster that is Vista and DX10, they've ruined DX7 calls.

Sure came as a shock to me. I was a satisfied nVidia customer previously, but this broke it.

ATI is not better, same problem exists on ATI cards.

Grimmwolf_GB wrote:QUOTE (Grimmwolf_GB @ Oct 30 2008, 04:39 PM) ATI is not better, same problem exists on ATI cards.

Oh? I got a new Radeon card to avoid the problem... and indeed never had any as soon as I found working drivers for the damn thing (drivers that worked with anything, that is).

I have an HP Pavilion laptop 1011ea (ImmZ knows the stuff) with a 9600M GT and I have absolutely no framerate problems whatsoever.

Edit: Without any sort of tampering or fix to my knowledge.

My 8600M GT works just fine for my Dell laptop. What is this 'nvidia' bug?

It's the one where the latest drivers give your horrendous framerate and screen flickering when games do work, and then half the other old games don't work.

I stuck with my earlier drivers for my 8800GT, which occasionally slows down to like 3fps but which is easily fixed by Esc-D-S every five minutes or so.