> Newbies get a downgraded ship. No matter what ship type they choose, > they end up in a CA. This CA will have det own disabled, and if you > are > 2/3 CA phaser distance from the nearest enemy, your torps will > linearly go down in speed to a minimum of 67% until you reach 4/3 of > CA distance from an enemy ship, at which point they will not slow > further. > I don't like this..it means they are learning a different mechanics of how their ship works to how it will eventually work. Plus it will screw up DFing for anyone around them. > I think the first change will not be noticed by newbies, and the > second change will help encourage them to play more aggressively, > rather than the plinkage-from-afar that we see nowadays. Also > important, the combination of changes will make a clued player not > want to ever play the "newbie ship." > How about we just let CA and SC be the only 2 ships they can play until they get to goal X. Whether that be rank or something else. > As compensation for the above, these players will get to see full > damage on friendly/enemy ships, will see army counts on all planets > (perhaps with a "Bomb Me!" message or similar), and will have some > additional form of beeplite enabled to highlight "dangerous" enemy > ships. Again, not enough to make a clued player use that ship. > No way on the damage thing. You send that info to client and it will be used for borgs. Hell I'd be tempted to write a private borg client to show enemy damage, that's a huge advantage :). As for highlighting dangerous enemy ships, how do you determine that? As for army counts on all planets, if you think it's a helpful feature to newbies, then how about just give it to everyone? > To implement this, upon client launch a dialog stating something like > "This client is in newbie mode, which will allow you to see extra > information on ships and planets to help learn the game. Some > advanced features will be disabled in newbie mode." should be > displayed. There should be an "I am an experienced player, use > default ships" checkbox that permanently disables that message and > disables newbie mode, caching the value for future launches. The > client will then send a packet to the server that causes that slot to > be flagged as a newbie, and ANY ship selection will result in a CA > modified as above. > I still like the idea of rank being used towards this. To allow clues to play as guest, have a per IP database server side to recognize them as clue as long as they have a character of rank X or higher that they have played from that IP address. > Once a player in newbie mode hits Lt. Cmdr., the client should > automatically disable newbie mode as above. (Possibly a DI level > between Lt. Cmdr and Commander as guest, since for guests Lt. Cmdr. > seems too low and Commander seems too high.) > Server side. > Thoughts? I'm especially open to ideas on things other than det own > that can be removed from newbies' ships without hurting their > learning, but which would frustrate experienced players enough to not > play with (and thus abuse the info capabilities of newbie mode.) > Sending new info to the client, trusting client authors not to abuse it and give that information to anyone using the client....no I don't think that's the way to go. Bill