On Tue, 8 May 2001, Trent Piepho wrote: > There seems to be a much larger queue on continuum lately. Maybe it would be > a good idea to bring back the newbie server. People seem to not want to play > on pickled or other servers that don't have games most of the time. The > newbie server where you always get an 8vs8 game and the skill level is lower > is more fun for newbies. > > I'm not talking about the stupid versions like everyone is an admiral or > limited numbers of bots that were done to get people to leave because newbie > was too popular. But the original version that attracted lots of new players. You mean the original version that pulled everyone off continuum so they could scum rank with skewed stats caused by bots playing? This WAS an "everyone is an Admiral" version just as much as the others, since any random twink could just sit there scumming 10+ stats. If I were to bring it back myself, I'd bring back the latest version with the tutorial (see http://tutorial.psychosis.net/), and I'd probably also add in the autoejecter I was thinking about (eject anyone with > 1.0 offense or something like that, to keep non-newbies out). Of course anyone could bring it back as it was with the newbie code from the Vanilla server, but I think many people would hate to see that happen, as it arguably caused significant damage to the Netrek community last time. Brief history for those who are confused: Jeff Nowakowski made the original newbie server and had it running on my machine, and while it was quite good for newbies to play on, it got excessively popular and pulled people from the "real" pickup games; Jeff made some changes such as 4x4 humans max to try to fix the problem, but it didn't help too much; Jeff got busy and handed the newbie server over to me completely; I added in a tutorial mode as described above, and then I finally shut down the newbie server since it seemed to still be significantly detracting from other pickup games. It was a very good idea, but seemed to turn out poorly. Anyways, is anyone interested in me bringing back the tutorial version with an anti-clue autoeject? Maybe it would only turn on if there wasn't a queue on some other pickup server or something like that...