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I'm baffled about the purpose of this. I suppose it was meant to keep people who have been playing for a while away from the newbie server? I don't think it serves any useful purpose, and should be discontinued.

MrC would agree with you. The problem is, some people who are decent players but tend to lose (TomBombadil is a good example) take a long time to reach 5. Tom was a 3 or 4 for a couple of months even though he could whore a lot of vets into submission if needed. If people like that have access to the newbie server, it may create newbie stomping issues that are difficult to resolve.

I dont know if it's possible to have a non-displayed flag or something that kicks off once you hit a certain number of hours, and that is used to prevent access to the newbie server, but it may work better.

Agreed we need to find a better solution - the current implementation has implications for team balance - as a number of people the system ranks as 0-4 in reality will be counted towards a teams AS score as a 5 - which means they will be overrated in terms of balancing teams....

A flag somewhere would be sensible but would presumably require code changes in several places.

it was changed because of firepox playing for months on only the newbie server, so he accumulated no rank and would have been able to play indefinably on the newbie server if we didnt change it.

I thought that AS being accurate and all, the phenomenon of "a good player who always loses" should be quite rare. Sure, everyone has a run of bad luck now and then, but bad luck has to end sometime, or maybe (depsite your whoring skills) you don't actually contribute to winning games.

As for firepox, what harm is it to us if he plays on the newbie server until the end of time? If that's how he gets his jollies then so be it, I don't care that he's not "learning the game as its meant to be played". If he starts playing on the main server he'll rank up eventually anyways.

As far as I can tell, AS is an extremely accurate and predictive measure of how well you pick and join winning teams. That's pretty much all it CAN measure. There are a very small handful of players that have enough knowledge and respect in the community to actually change games (there are many more that have the knowledge but nobody listens to them), and they are for the most part the top ranked players.

The reason firepox is an issue is people like that drive away noobs. They see someone like them, with a low rank, on their server, completely owning them and feel that they are idiots and terrible at the game and give up since this other noob is so much better than they are.

I might be stomped for this, but instead of creating ways to go around certain problems created by the newbie server, why don't we just shut down newbie servers?


Even in the Academy it's stated that newbie servers SHOULD only serve as a way to test a few controls and features of the game. But that's pretty much doable in individually created custom games as well. I'm all in for telling newbies how to play and providing them a place but right now the newbie server does more harm than good in my opinion, as any newbie automatically goes and STAYS there instead of learning the game among the regulars/vets.

I have the rank problem. I have lost significantly more games than I have won. As my mu decreases, it will be much more difficult to rank up. I tend to just join a team quickly so I can play and ignore stacks and things. I have fluctuated between a 5 and 6 for months now, never touched a 7.

uberkill wrote:QUOTE (uberkill @ Aug 28 2009, 10:48 AM) I have the rank problem. I have lost significantly more games than I have won. As my mu decreases, it will be much more difficult to rank up. I tend to just join a team quickly so I can play and ignore stacks and things. I have fluctuated between a 5 and 6 for months now, never touched a 7.

learn to stack then?

Hermit wrote:QUOTE (Hermit @ Aug 28 2009, 09:33 PM) Why don't we just shut down newbie servers?

Especially as @help goes live and those with it are about to be allowed into Newbie games, this looks reasonable to me.