> Only newbies (and addison) play sturgeon. Even if Bill's server became ten
> times more popular than it was when it was on the metaserver, experience
> has shown that people tire of sturgeon about the same time as they learn
> how to properly play the game.
>
Wasn't/isn't just all newbies, there's a fair share of twinks and
semiclues :).  Which is about all that's left in netrek these days.

> I believe you're comparing apples and oranges here. To become a good
> hockey player you need to know how to play bronco. You might say that you
> can't play hockey until you've put down hundreds of hours on bronco
> servers and once you've done that you probably like bronco and will
> continue to play for as long as you think that netrek in general (bronco
> and hockey) is fun.
>
Hockey has always attracted a different crowd then bronco, at least half
of hockey clue were never regular bronco players, so I don't think they
are as interconnected.  Sturgeon and bronco are much closer in playstyle
and skillset than hockey and bronco.  Sturgeon, at its most basic, does
not have galaxy class ships, or modified AS's with more hulls or faster
scouts..those are local mods on warped.  Sturgeon is in fact highly
configurable via sysdef as to just how crazy you want the modifications to
get.  The number of upgrades is controllable, as is how fast they are lost
on death.  As is the ability for planet takes to generate free upgrades,
or extra kill credit based on number of upgrades the person has when you
kill them.  I'll probably put in an option to turn off special weapon
types (mines, nukes) too.  At it's minimal level, sturgeon is nearly
identical to bronco.  I however do not run at the minimal level.  While
bronco is clearly defined in many people's eyes, it's because the servers
have generally used the same settings...but it doesn't have to be this
way.  A bronco server could have 2v2 tmode, modified ship stats (bigbang
BB mods anyone?), variable pop rates, ping pong plasma (guiness server
anyone?), twarp on/off, different starting army counts, restrictions on
ship ranks (DD, SB), different 3rd space bombing rules.  I could go on.
In short, there are enough sysdef settings to make a pretty far out bronco
server, and I don't think saying sturgeon is totally different from bronco
is an argument that works on any level, seeing as bronco can have a
similar range of mods.

Bill