[conquest] conquest etiquette part 1 - the VAX game of the past

[Jon Trulson]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Almighty Tallest Cataboligne wrote:

> sheesh, I hate spelling that word.
>
> Also this is more of a history lesson - you might find it boring, the
> second part has my suggestions.
>
> Well, we have all been in some fun games so far...this indeed brings
> back many memories from my college days.
>

 	Indeed... Couple of really good battles.

> The following were different in VAX conquest: there was no vacancy -
> if you closed the program your ship got wasted...you could only cloak

 	Actually there was - it just happened by accident.  I was able to 
go vacant on a modem just by hanging up the connection, or on a LAT 
terminal by detaching.  Of course it wasn't called vacant.  Was very 
common for highkill ships that wanted to stick around after leaving the 
game.  We did it all the time.

> around a class M planet - anything else and your fuel would run out
> and you would uncloak...

 	Cloaking was completely useless in original conquest.  Don;t know 
why they even bothered to add it.  Nobody ever used it because to do so 
(especially in the presence of enemy ships) was just plain suicide.

>generally there was only 1 ship allowed per
> user account - and most users only had one account.
>

 	True.  Ships were allowed multiples (built into conquest), but you 
needed access to multiple terminals to do so.  When we had our big games, 
noone ever did this as it was hard enough managing one ship.

> Even before it was known that (some) players had access to conqoper,
> there were many accusations in heated games about players having
> autopilot.  You need to understand that back in that day, the robot
> was considered well nigh undefeatable by one opponent.  Things like
> kill count effeciency improvement and sudden turn torp blasts, and
> detonating a bots own torps on top of it with your own were not yet
> discovered.
>

 	Hmm.. deting a robots torps on top of it doesn't affect the robot 
since a ship cannot be damaged by it's own torps..

> If a player had auto and could turn it on at the right moment in a
> battle, it was devastating.  Especially during high lag sessions.  And
> any time there were over 10 - 12 players or a lot of students using
> the system high lag abounded.
>

 	I don't believe we ever had anybody try this on the games we had, 
though only the SM had oper access.  I don't see it as being too useful 
anyways... The few times we tried it here about 5 years ago, it was always 
a crapshoot as to wether you would survive.  None of the users on the main 
public server have autopilot cap.

[...]

> If an oper was changing the U, expermenting etc. the game should be
> closed - and when if was re-opened things should be the way they were,
> or in an initial state.

 	On my public server (1701), no changes are ever made to the 
universe.  That's what the exp server is for (1702). The public server is 
never tweaked or otherwise adjusted.

> An oper/player should not have a second term session with oper open
> while they were playing live.  Slimy things like changing owning

 	Yeah, that's just plain cheating.  A game is no phun if you have 
to cheat to win.  Though it usually would not help you too much anyway. 
You can see which users have oper privs by looking for the '+' next to 
their names.  Currently only myself and two others have this priv.  Since 
I moved the servers to a different machine, I am currently the only one 
who can run conqoper at this time, though we are considering a new remote 
oper protocol for the future (after the 8.1 release of course).

 	Of course I play conquest for fun, the battles can really get the 
heart pounding :)  Nobody want's to play on a server where the oper cheats 
- I've played a variety of online games where this happened, and I just 
don't play on those systems.  No one has ever cheated on my server that 
I'm aware of, certainly I haven't.

> teams, un-genociding races, reseting the U prior to a conquer,
> targeting certain planets with the eater and others were strict
> no-nos.  If an oper was caught doing any of that they lost oper access
> permanently.

 	Wow, that sucks.  Never had these issues with our college games 
(or presently).

>
> Now there is a new era of conquest, and I feel it important to point a
> few things out along the same lines - to be published in part 2, so
> everyone doesnt have to wade through all this.

 	I hope so, I really enjoy the game.  Doom3 is for cowards that 
can't handle conquest :)


-- 
Jon Trulson    mailto:jon at radscan.com
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