I was just saying on IRC, this may be the luckiest I've ever been in a round of Worms Armageddon. Counted something like 13 separate instances of either something positive going my way, or something negative going against Dibz. Some minor and some major, but the crate sheep at 6:20 was the cherry on top.

Life is good when you're on a hot streak!

I'd be up for making TRL season 30 island maps only.

Mainly because it simplifies things like playoffs, where for season 29, we'll now have to figure out what maps to play on before each match... but it also just makes it easier to compare ratings and other statistics between players, without first having to figure out what % of their rounds were not played on islands.

More personally though, I just don't think cavern T17 is anywhere near as interesting or varied as complex island map T17, making it both a worse representation of general skill at the whole of Worms, but also kinda boring and repetitive. I fear that if I had to play 1 island, 1 cave against all of my opponents, I'd lose most of the motivation to take part in a single scheme ladder (where half the time, I risk being stuck in a situation where I just want the round to be over asap, even though that's bad tactically). In an all-around league that supports 10+ different schemes however, I wouldn't mind playing it on cavern maps if that's what my opponent wanted to pick. Variety there would come from all the other schemes we could pick!

Oh yeah also, very happy with the sheep drop at 3:10 in this one. It's coming back to me!

This is actually incredible. I'm upset.

That's well said, though I think the main hassle was still following written, and attempting to follow unwritten, rules. That's historically been the main, and possibly only real problem that BnG has faced as a competitive way of playing WA. Whether fixing the rules would save BnG without even attempting to address (real or imagined) anti-notcher sentiment in the community remains to be seen, though. I don't think an honest, carefully considered and implemented effort has so far happened in that direction, so we just don't know.

Komo, the difference between what Intermediate players do (count the steps from the edge of a worm's head to align their mine/dyna drops) and placing your thumb on the screen is that one really is just paying attention to visual cues from the game, while the other is more than that, and requires physical access to and contact with a part of hardware that (unlike the keyboard and mouse) might not actually be physically accessible in an environment such as a live LAN tournament or other event. While I don't personally think thumbing is a form of cheating anywhere near comparable to using physical rulers and such, I do think live events would very likely prohibit both. And if they had any sense in them, they almost certainly wouldn't prohibit walking on top of a worm's head one half-pixel at a time, or the BnG equivalent of it, so notching (without visual aids). Would you roughly agree with that, or do you feel thumbing doesn't look ridiculous enough that in-person events would want to keep spectators from having to endure watching it?

On the more immediately relevant issue of the new "anti-lock aim" extended scheme option for BnG, I am actually in agreement with your sentiment that, in a perfect world at least, manual reaiming is a better solution than having the game reaim for us, because a slight bit of the scheme's nuance is actually lost this way. Namely, there are some very complex bounce shots out there that likely wouldn't even make sense to go for anymore if you couldn't somewhat reliably bypass the spirit of the reaim rule by using visual cues such as edges of terrain or the terrain texture (but not thumbs!) to get back to your crosshair position from your previous attempt at that shot. Instead, if doing this meant having to rely on thumbing or coming up with some other even more cheaty solution to (sometimes) finding your previous angle again, I think these already risky and difficult to justify bounce shots would likely completely disappear from the repertoire of competitive BnG players, in favour of just rolling near-sitters into easy hides. And that would be a shame, even if currently nobody playing TUS BnG would ever even consider going for these shots anyway... which is probably why the simple solution of just reaiming for people automatically was the chosen preference, when Senator was discussing this with us on IRC/Discord.

Thanks for hosting it, Senator. It was loads of fun!

I did actually want to play it out HHC, yeah. But you're in luck, Run destroyed me in the semis for the both of you; what an ouch that game was.

Yeah actually, I think having Mortar and Cluster Bomb both at 3 star power in Team17 is my second preference, personally. I recognise that the scheme is in concept and practice different enough from league variants of Intermediate that it should be able to sustain those weapons at their standard values, even if you're then still stuck with the weird disparity between getting a single Mortar and three Cluster Bombs from a crate.

So, I'd be pretty happy about doing it this way myself (as you may be able to guess from previous discussions, I am a bit of a standardisation nutter), but I know there have been more than a few players over the years who just straight up hated these cluster weapons being able to do 80+ damage, to target worms who often didn't get the chance to try and hide from it, or simply couldn't justify it over doing something else. Similarly to how introducing Kamikaze to the Team17 scheme would mess with players' late game expectations, powerful Cluster Bombs (Mortars to a lesser extent, I know) feel like they would mess with their notion of what is and isn't a good hide throughout the game, especially since for whatever reason, both T17 and Elite schemes have historically had Cluster Bomb nerfed all the way down to 1 star power. Having them at 2 stars is then a) already a buff compared to what the majority of players are used to and b) actually just quite strong in real terms, not much worse than 3 star power would be.

But yeah anyway, for this one tournament where Senator specifically wants to be testing some of the proposed changes out, I don't think it matters either way. He'll know best what he is and isn't interested in trying out, and we can continue the discussion about the scheme in general elsewhere, as we have been.