On Feb 23, 2008, at 12:53 AM, Bill Balcerski wrote: > * lame refit > Historically ships have been allowed to refit either on their > homeworld or > while docked to their base with the following criteria: shields >= > 75%, > fuel >= 75%, damage <= 75%. I do not believe that this was the > original > authors intent, as damage is the only of the three critera that > increases > on a scale of good to bad; I believe the original intent was damage > <= 25%. > I know that it's a SYSDEF option, so no servers are forced to change > refitting. But I don't think that the argument that "the original > server developers made a mistake" holds any merit. Changing game > design because you don't like the way it is, and saying it was a > mistake to ever be that way, is highly presumptious. I would strongly > urge community review of this patch and would like to know the > opinions of the Bronco server operators as to whether they support > this change to refit. On a minor note, clients with a repair/refit > timer will be broken if there is a server configurable refit time > without a feature packet to tell the client about the refit criteria, > as refit conditions are hard coded into some clients. It's a non-default SYSDEF option, so I don't see the problem with adding it to the codebase. That said, I have enabled it for bases only on pickled, and not for other ships. The reason for doing this is the proliferation of bases that sit on their homeworld, take heavy damage, and just refit before the next wave. Invulnerable bases sitting on their homeworld on a cored team are no good for the game in my opinion. Nobody has been opposed to this, of the dozen or so people I have polled. (And I do generally poll a cross-section of both clued players and not-so-clued players before making game-modifying decisions like this.) What clients have a refit condition coded into them? The refit TIMER is not modified, simply the requirements to refit. I am fairly certain that no clients will break simply based on the criteria for refitting being changed. Honestly, I would have to ask the same questions about XP 2006 having un-featurepacketed one-key no-lock-requirement twarp (surely the game designers intended you to actually have to lock onto a base before twarping to it), un-featurepacketed zoom, and possibly other "borg" features that don't come to mind at the moment. I would urge community review of these as well, since they are activated by default without having to be enabled by the server. I would have no problems with these changes if they were featurepacketed. I appreciate the other improvements you have made in the client, but really do wish that game- altering behavior was not simply dropped in by default with no external review. It would be nice if the current key maintainer would review the features being added to clients instead of simply blindly issuing keys, as well. (No offense intended, Carlos; I know you don't really have too much extra time to spend on Netrek, but we DO need reviews of things like this before issuing keys.)