Heretic , you don't mod. You don't have the skillset for it honestly, and all your 'mods' are stock downloads someone else wrote and posted on the site. What you do is not modding. You aren't playing with settings and tweaking them for balance, or testing a new eye-candy, or testing a new ship you designed yourself. You are simply downloading someone else's work, and holding it up as an example of your 1337 skillz.
You are taking the easy road to becoming powerful in the game, without having to develop the skills the respectable deulers have developed. In essence, that describes cheating rather neatly. The admin playing with mods is truly modding, as he adjusts his own craft and tests it on his own server. There is a substantial difference between the two. Just wanted to clear that up.
Cheaters share 2 common traits:
(A) They don't make their own mods. This requires work, and 'work' generally defeats the purpose of cheating. There are exceptions to this, but I haven't seen many of them, if any.
(
Their skills at dueling are usually abysmal. They never had the need to develop these skills, and can barely hit an AI piloted ship, let alone a player on a consistent basis. These are the people who played the game the first time, complained that it was too hard, and went on the net searching for a quick fix that would make them able to defeat those devilishly hard to hit bloodhounds.
This profile is 99% accurate to what you will find when facing a cheater on a server. I think most players would agree. Except, of course, for the cheaters.
Personally, I had a little fun the other night killing a cheater who had downloaded powerful weapons, but had not installed a super-shield. He couldn't hit me enough, hence he was killed repeatably. It was fun for a short period of time. This player was in a kind of balance however. His limited skills compensated for his powerful craft. The fun was over, however, when another one showed up with infinite shields and one-shot-one-kill guns. Not even fun. When I fired that 'slayer' at him head-on, saw it explode and his shields didn't even budge, I knew the fun was over. Am I a great dueler? Hardly. But I do like to better my skills, and shooting at a Death-star camoflauged as a Starflier wasn't going to do that.
In any case, I love 'mods' in the truest sense. I cannot wait for the rebalance mod to become a polished work, and suitable for balanced server play. It is certainly getting closer every patch. Allowing players to 'make their own mods' however, is an eventual recipe for disaster. It doesn't take very long for the general public to find out where the 'clean servers' are, and in time those will be the servers primarily visited. I have switched from Calgary24/7 to Brownclops recently, and am glad that I did.
There is a very simple logical reason for why 'cheat-allowing servers' will fail in time, given an alternative in the form of 'clean servers'.
1: Cheaters do not like to duel or play vs other cheaters. It robs them of their power. When the immovable object comes in contact with the irresistable force you end up with either a stalemate, hence boredom, or you end up with an instant destruction, hence frustration. Rather, cheaters like to play vs standard players.
2: Legitimate players do not like to play vs cheaters. I don't need to explain this I don't think; it is simply so.
3: Over time, legitimate players will migrate to an environment that favors them, leaving the cheaters alone together. This leaves the cheaters in situation #1 described above, with the occasional visit from a visiting noob. At this point, even the cheaters will lose intrest in the server. Yes, even you Heretic. You can hardly impress people with your uber-machine of destruction, when you can't even penetrate their shields in a millenium of dogfighting. Where then, remains the fun of cheating?
There is significant inertia involved in an established server. People look for the server with the most players, and try that one first. Inertia, however, can be overcome. It doesn't require alot of force, merely a product of force and time. In time, cheat-enabled servers will fail.
When I compare the Calgary 24/7 server with it's low ping, 40 players, but constant lag issues, and prevalent cheat-whores who hang around manhattan killing new players as they come out of the docks, to Brownclops' server, with it's higher ping, but oddly lag-free play (an example of bandwidth vs latency), T1 connection, 30 players, absence of cheaters, fun system-wide events (like the rabit-chase where you stop players heading from one system to another for prize money - or the ironman events where a player takes a starflier all the way to primus for 1mil cash) there is not even a contest. I'd like to see a few more duelers on brownclops, but in time I'm sure they will come, having gotten tired of the constant inequity of trying to shoot a starflier pilot with 100k shield-regen and guns that do 10k damage per hit.
Tue Jun 17, 2003 12:43 am 
Heretic