Abandon 0.75, Update to 0.76

[Lostmotel]

As some of you might have noticed, the 0.76 servers are mostly empty even though a majority of the veteran players consider this version to be superior to 0.75. Therefore I'd suggest removing the 0.75 server list and making 0.76 the only playable and downloadable version of Ace of Spades.
The master server list shouldn't be updated immediately; there should be a countdown of a few weeks so server hosters would be able to prepare for the update.


What I dislike about the current state:

- Obviously, 0.76 is the better version. Why would we support an old and inferior version of this game when there is an overall
better version available?
- Currently the players in 0.76 are either pros who practice for the league or just enjoy playing in 0.76 or total noobs who
downloaded the latest version of this game and have no idea how this game works. Now imagine: You are one of these
noobs, you download the game, join your first server and play against members of Lines, SPQR and FF on goonassault...
I honestly don't think anyone would like to continue playing this game after getting raped like that.
- There are already some endangered gamemodes in 0.75 like infiltration. Right now there is only one infiltration server
which is mostly full during the time from 17:00 to 23:00. Now if there was a migration towards 0.76 there would be less
people playing 0.75 obviously. Gamemodes like infliltration require +20 players to be fun, but this won't be possible anymore
if we have 300 players in 0.76 and 300 players in 0.75 instead of 600 in 0.75. The infiltration player base would split up and
eventually die. Ctf/tdm servers with maps like hallway won't have this problem because there is only a small amount of
players required to get some good, fast-paced gameplay. I really don't hate maps like hallway but it certainly isn't what the
common gameplay of Ace of spades should be like.
- It is simply annoying that you have to switch between these two Versions. I can't play in 0.76 because there are no players so
I play in 0.75 instead. But as events and league matches take place in 0.76, I have to switch to 0.76 again. I am not sure if
anyone else feels like this, but I just can't handle the recoil in 0.76 after playing for weeks in 0.75. Also the interval
between shots with the rifle feels unusual and even the spade range seems to be different.


Some reasons to move on to 0.76:

- Better weapon balance, better graphics, etc.
- There are no hacks available in public for 0.76 and I don't think there are many players left who would be able to update
the hacks from 0.75 / willing to release them.
- We would get rid of completely unmoderated servers like nitrado.net or jestservers for some time. Servers like minit, shams
or aloha would gain more popularity as there won't be as many “noob servers” which only have hallway and anticbridge in
their rotation in the first few weeks.
- All the scripts which exist for 0.75 also work for 0.76 or will work with some minor changes, so there won't lose anything we've worked on in 0,75
- I am sure that more than 75% of the players never tried 0.76. An “update” to 0.76 would make the game more interesting
for them and may even attract new players.

This is a topic for discussion, so I'd like to hear everyone's opinion!
(sorry for my bad english >.<)

[Xtra]

Agreed!
0.76 FTW!

[CommieBuffalo]

I agree, partially, although I don't think a 100% change to .76 is necessary. Some people might just like .75 more. Make the .76 download and server list the recommended ones and make .75 harder to find. Other than that, 100% support, the only reason I don't play .76 is the lack of players.
PS: We should use the opportunity and try and ressurect TC and TOW too, IMO.

[Lelue]

K i welcome your idea, BUT .76 is ALWAYS a bit laggy for me and other german players, as far as I know, THIS NEED TO BE fixed...maybe it is because of windows 8 but okay. And I have a please to scripters : could you make pyspades be able for running on windows8 ?

[CommieBuffalo]

K i welcome your idea, BUT .76 is ALWAYS a bit laggy for me and other german players, as far as I know, THIS NEED TO BE fixed...maybe it is because of windows 8 but okay. And I have a please to scripters : could you make pyspades be able for running on windows8 ?

This is true. I get some pretty wild drops in FPS sometimes in .76. It is a minor annoyance most of the times but it has gotten me killed quite a couple of times.

[Lostmotel]

This is true. I get some pretty wild drops in FPS sometimes in .76. It is a minor annoyance most of the times but it has gotten me killed quite a couple of times.

That's strange. I'm also having some weird fps drops lately, not only in 0.76, but also in 0.75.
0.76 seems to work better for me though as I usually have 5 - 10 higher fps there.

[Jdrew]

Why can't we just have both?

[Gingerninjaperson]

^
I really enjoy playing on 0.75. I'm used to the graphics, and actually prefer them over 0.76. However, I think making 0.76 the recommended and making 0.75 harder to find, like Buffalo said is a great idea. Those who enjoy 75 can still play, while 76 gains a huge boost.

[GreaseMonkey]

Why can't we just have both?

Because 0.75 is fucking awful. The weapon balance sucks, it's full of BRs, full of skids who you couldn't even teach how to do a dot product let alone a cross product, you can't hit a fucking thing, it still has that dreadful font renderer I slammed the shit out of during 0.61's testing (that's a fuckup that can be directly attributed to Jagex)

How much dick do I have to suck to get you to move to something that isn't fucking 0.75? (previous commit is also necessary to get this to work, note that only spectator mode works sanely at the moment)

We've been using 0.75 as the main version for nearly one and a half years, and I'm sick to death of having to clean all the shit out of every fucking server I administrate, and having to deal with lazy bastard admins (e.g. jestservers and also just about every server that isn't Aloha / HOMO / Minit / Sham's / Stormwind - ESPECIALLY FUCKING ANIMUS COME ON GUYS YOU'RE A GREAT CLAN JUST WATCH YOUR FUCKING SERVER AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR) who think that you can sanely run a 0.75 server without banning aimbots and griefers every fucking half hour. When 0.75 was released, you could get away with not having to ban aimbots for the first, ooh, week? Then they started flooding in.

0.76 doesn't have an aimbot problem yet.
It also has a notably better weapon balance.
It also has a notably better frame rate.

I say for 0.75 we make a stub server as a part of pysnip, telling people to upgrade to 0.76.

Here's a good stub map:

Code: Select all

ulen = 512*512*2*4
cdata = zlib.compress("\x00\x3E\x3E\x00"*(ulen//4))
clen = len(cdata)

The result is 2059 bytes. If we make it all 0x00 bytes, the result is then 2055 bytes, so it's negligible.

The problem with this is it can wreck the playerbase if we're not careful about it. But I believe we should show the 0.76 server list by default, recommend the 0.76 download, set 0.76 to be the default Pysnip fork, and get all the top server admins to start moving their servers over to 0.76.

I can't say it's about time we deprecate 0.75. No. It was about time around November 2012. We are so fucking late and we need to catch up.

[Sonarpulse]

Oh shit, guess we might not need HaSnip at all then.

[cow]

What grease said, mostly.
We could indeed risk destroying the playerbase and killing the community altogether, as if it's in a good shape right now. .76 is acting more like a refuge today from the retards that flood .75, if we do successfully manage to bring the community to .76, we'd probably face the same problem regarding stupidity.

[USABxBOOYO]

I can't say it's about time we deprecate 0.75. No. It was about time around November 2012. We are so fucking late and we need to catch up.

This. It should have been done in August 2012, right after 0.76 RC 10 was released. 0.75 is a shit version that's been out there for way too long and 0.76 is significantly more enjoyable.

[MrHaaax]

In short: 0.76 as recommended, slowly make 0.76 main as soon as almost of the playerbase moving into it. Start off with famous servers like Aloha, Minit, Sw, and serveral others. Also, make a giant ass sign at portal page/serverlist that said: MOVE TO 0.76 of sorts.
And what all the other guys said above.

[Sonarpulse]

If Iceball can support one, it can support both. I say we do this

1. Support both 0.75 and 0.76 in Iceball. People can then switch to Iceball WITHOUT worrying having no servers to play on.
2. Get everbody to fucking download Iceball (make it main download on site, have servers constantly spam "switch to Iceball client"
3. Give Iceball a server browser that displays 0.76, 0.75, and native servers together (game ver is just a column). OR make BnS's do the same thing. Advantage of ingame server browser is that we will have much less technical difficulties.
4. LEMMA: Any noob with Iceball will just pick the biggest servers regardless of game version.
5. Slowly faze out 0.75 servers. Hell we could go straight to native Iceball and ditch 0.76 at that point. As long as most of the player base uses the Iceball client at that point, we will not run into issues due to the lemma.

In case anybody missed it, the basic trick is it's pretty easy to switch clients or protocols alone without maiming the player base. The really hard---and totally avoidable---step is switching client and protocol at the same time.

[Defaulter]

Our problem arises when trying to migrate the player base to 0.76, much as Jagex had the same kind of issue trying to migrate users to 1.0, although admittedly they are two very different scenario's.

What we must consider is that at this time the vast majority of the community is actively choosing to play 0.75, suggesting that they prefer it. And though many veterans (myself included) consider 0.76 to be superior, this does not give reasonable justification in my opinion to overrule the general wants/needs of the overall community and force them to play on a version that they clearly do not prefer.

A friend TB also made a valid point "[17:45] <@TB_> I think they just go where the servers at" before trying to phase out 0.75, support for 0.76 would have to be increased exponentially.