Zach wrote: > It is common now in pickup > to see stacking. Team A has 2 or 3 elite players, team B has none. A > quick geno ensues. Newbies are getting tooled. You can argue either > way this is good or bad. ... I think the idea of automatic balancing > has been put forward in the past. To balance numerically would be > fairly trivial but balancing based on clue would not be as straight > forward. This is where persistent status would help. > This may be the feeling of it - but the sample size is quite small these days, and drawing conclusions based upon this sample size is probably invalid. Experienced people don't like playing with people who don't read their messages, who obviously have no "clue" what they are doing. Enforcing experienced people to put up with an inexperienced team might appear to be appealing in the short term, but long term, it's reducing the game to a level that can be enjoyed by newbies, and experienced people will leave. There is no evidence that such measures would increase the number of players who would play netrek, or increase the skill level of those few who do. People have peaves against the current and past players of Netrek, and would love to see things changed. As far as I am concerned, however, the problem that Netrek faces, is that it always targeted a very specific demographic, and this demographic has grown responsibilities. The new generation doesn't want a game like Netrek when hundreds of more visually appealing and entertaining games exist on the market. Even 10 years ago, I had to twist the arms of friends to play, and they never really picked it up. It's no surprise at all that fewer and fewer people play. For certain, enforced team balancing throughout the game (as would be required - because the people in a game change over long games, and the "stack" moves back and forth, which would requiring re-balancing, forcing experienced people who worked hard to win one side, to suddenly switch to become a defender on the losing side???) certainly won't make me put in Netrek hours. Cheers, mark -- Mark Mielke <mark at mielke.cc>