I've been playing this game now on and off for over 10 years and in the 10 years I have seen some great ideas come and go, some great products be developed, an entire new programming language and compiler developed for this game but all-in-all the game itself has changed very little from the begging. In some ways this speaks of the power of TW2002 but in some ways this has limited the growth of the game and in an even more terrible way has created a spin-off of the game that in my opinion shares none of the qualities this game holds. With that in mind what is the future of this game? I have seen traders, sysops, and now even JP come and go and I am curious with the addicting power this game has why haven't we expanded the game? Created new abilities in the game (i.e. users to create, own, develop, and profit of class 0 ports) so what I would like to do is create a list of ways we can expand the game but stay true to the original nature of the game and yell at JP about dusting off the keyboard and going back to work! What would you guys have JP and EIS change about the original game? Personally:

-Allow users to create and profit off ports including class 0 ports
-Allow users to customize ships in game to allow for longer more developed games
-Allow for bigger universe sizes to cope with the obvious fallout from the first two points
-Allow for more holds
-Allow for more fighters
-Allow for more customization of planets and cits
-Allow for users to select different races that have special charctericts
-Allow multiple syops to "connect" universes to expand the players in a game
-Have the ability to have Ferrengi vs Federation situations
-Allow for a Ferrengi space much like Fed Space for red players
Just some thoughts, I know that with the minds and knowledge out there with JP's help we can expand the game and attract new users and those who may have retired for different reasons. Forget about Trade wars Tournament or whatever it is, don't reinvent the wheel, upgrade the motor of the car!

Ender

I like this point. I don't know if you played BRE (Baren Realms Elite) on a BBS before, but it was great playing Inter-BRE, where it was one BBS group against another. So the players on our BBS were on one team and you were against the team of players on another BBS. It would be cool if we could do the same thing. Have it where players on our TWGS could access a point (sector) where they could "jump" to the universe on NavHaz or Toyland, etc.

Cheers

All excellent pionts. JP wont be going back to the keyboard without monetary renumeration. Such is the nature of such things. How do you allow for ad based revenue with TW? I wont be paying $19.95 a month a la "WeeW" or is it "Wow".

Most other free games that have been consuming my time as of late are supported in a few different ways, first and most importantly AdSense from Google would not only allow JP to get a steady stream of revenue, but also allow him to attract new players. Secondly we could design some type of ad based system for the site and possibly for the game, more importantly becuase JP is the mastermind behind the code I have no doubt he could incorporate ads in the game some how, this would create a steady stream of revenue to attract a new audience. By using Facebook and Myspace you can attract new users with TradeWars pages, Facebook has already started to bring in new and veteran players alike, you could take it one step further and sign up for both Facebook and Myspace development which ACTUALLY allows you to design a site and allow people to add it to there pages. If you didnt know this is free and you can script in any HTML browser language, I have seen a browser based version that connects to the bbs for Tradewars so I know its already possible.

If JP is still around please send me a pm or e-mail I want to speak with you!

I'm in contact with him daily. I've sent him this link and hopefully he contacts you.

Cheers

Thrawn alerted me to this thread. Interesting stuff. First, I want to point out that I've never taken the attitude that I won't work on classic TW unless I can make X dollars. It's just always a question of priorities. My work on TradeWars has always been a bit of a hobby, but with the hope that some day it would turn into something more. But that doesn't have to mean that the old game itself has to start bringing in revenue. I am still motivated to work on the old game, even though I don't expect anything I do at this point to increase revenue generated from it. Maybe it would, but I don't expect it.

My primary goal is just to preserve the game, for those who still play it, for those who come looking for it out of nostalgia, as well as for historical purposes. Unfortunately, those goals sometimes contradict. Doing nothing, the game has evolved away from what it was "back in the day". So part of me wants to work on restoring the game to the way it was for the hundreds of thousands of players who played it back in the early 90s. But doing that would of course take the game away from the direction that the hard core players have taken it in recent years, and I don't feel good about that either. And then there's just the fact that the game is stagnant, with no new features in a decade. I can address both of those other goals, and the game would still be stagnant. I absolutely have ideas of things I'd like to do to improve on the game, but that has to be the lowest on my list of priorities. There are just too many factors at play when it comes to devoting time to writing a new version, adding new features, etc. It's probably the thing that most appeals to me, but the thing I can least justify.

I'm in a sort of limbo with the game right now, where I can't do anything that will benefit you players and gameops (at the moment, anyway), but at the same time, I'm not comfortable with turning the game over to the community, under whatever open source license would be suitable, to allow you to carry it forward. That is, of course, an option I keep in the back of my mind. It's just, right now, that's not a viable option.

Just to throw a teaser out there, last year I took a couple of weeks and started work on porting the game to a modern game engine, Torque Game Builder, using Torque Script for all of the high level game code. I got Bigbang functional, and finished about 40% of TEDIT, so I'm probably about 4-5 months solid work away from actually having it done, but the foundation is in place. A solid, cross-platform game engine, SQL data processing, a single app running all players in a game, the ability to allow others to extend the game using the same scripting language (that right there would cover most of the wish list in Ender's post). It really opens the game up, and will make it easier to turn over to the community if/when that time comes. Any excuse I can get, I'll work on that. It's not unheard of for me to get a six month stretch where I can work on a project. Just depends on what's going on with my "day job". And I've made a commitment for the moment to spend one day per week working on classic TradeWars, which is far more than I have done since about 2004. That'll allow me to make some progress, but nothing too ambitious.

The bottom line is, most of my effort right now is going into bringing TradeWars back in new ways. But that doesn't mean that I don't value the old game. I'm very committed to it. No matter what happens with TradeWars, I want to keep the old classic game alive, and even growing, for as long as there are players who are still passionate about it.

Oh, in closing, all I can say about TradeWars Rising is, sorry about that.

As for "hard core players" ... I wouldn't worry too much. The few remaining are such a small group, that anything done to expand the player base would only help. There are a few settings that could accomplish this very task, such as a pwarp and tpad warp delay, and a "fig decay rate" that causes fighter amounts to decay over time. Grid and grid defense would be very hard to sustain under those circumstances. Another addition would be to add a frequent steal bust, if you steal from the same port more than X times in a day, you start fake busting. That would prevent a lot of automated cashing in turns games. Another would be the ability to turn off mega robs, outside of MBBS compatibility. Perhaps even a "move limit" outside of turn limit, that would restrict the number of times a player could actually move.

All of those things could be done as options, so that "hard core players" would be happy and the old style of the game could be preserved for those that want it. Or at least a lot closer to the old style of game.

As for adding new features, that would be great. As long as they're optional, I doubt anyone will complain.



That all sounds very promising. My only question... is there anything that can be done to cut down on the amount of time people need to invest in the game? Right now, once you have a group of high keytime players, pretty much everyone else either has to match it or they can't compete. This makes keytime of much higher importance than anything else, skill included. While I generally have a high degree of keytime, it's the number 1 cause of burnout. You can only stand 18 hours a day at the computer for so long before you freak out. And when people start getting trampled because of this, they tend to leave.

I'm not really worried about the community getting control. I'm reminded a bit of the Linux community. While there are contributors, the overall direction of the code is controlled by one person. That prevents a lot of infighting, and we don't need to see TW forked a thousand times over... the player base is already too fragmented as is. There's a definite downside to unmanaged community development.

One of the problems with change is that for some it will be gladly looked for and others it will be viewed as destroying the game.

One thing I would like to see is a graphical helper that would give the "eye candy" crowd something appealing. I know the graphics would probably slow them down compared to a SWATH/ZOC/ATTAC TWX combination. I am not a programmer so writing this is beyond my abilities. I see the graphical helper bridging the current text version without having to change TW's code.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

i played a lot of travian, which is a browser based 24/7 game- and what ends up happening is the top players run an account jointly- an aussie, a brit, and an american all play on the same account so there is 24/7 coverage. if you dont have that you dont rank- so a travian board with 10k accounts actually has someting like 15-16k users. keytime always > skill- thats one of the things i like about mombot, you can theoretically have 24-7 coverage from a remote location...

an ad based revenue stream would be excellent. It seens that the Telnet porting is a problem with player expansion. Perhaps a Browser wrapper is possible.

Kill a few birds with one photon! A good majorty of us use the ZOC/TWX combo, we use ZOC becuase its fast, becuase you can customize, and becuase this is not the only game you can use with ZOC, all ZOC is is a Telnet emulator...SO!

Create the offical TradeWars Emulator. An TradeWars created, developed, maintained emulator would allow for more graphical customization, it would allow for advertisements (no intrustive ofcourse) you could allow for built in buttons, macros, etc. This would allow users who are just getting started something to get a very firm foot in the game, allow TradeWars to get the hooks in so to speak. I developed a Telnet emulator in Visual Basic some time back with as much success as needed at the time... any emulator would allow things to advance quickly, widely, and make it profitable!

I would be happy to work on a beta product JP with something that could be keen for Ansi development... what do you guys think?

pay money get credits- pay money get "special" ships or planets, you could even have a pay money and gain 2 points of off or def bonus on your ships for a day...

I like it Ender.

Cheers

so the rich kids get all the goodies huh ?

and the poor kid (who is 10x as skilled) quits cause bobby payed $20 to make 200 million in the first 5 mins of the game?

or something not like this example?

it works on travian, and they have over a million players...