Speaking of that, Team17 has had the absolute worst customer relations / community management / communication lately. This is unrelated, but they gave WMD players a 'roadmap' of planned (and sorely-needed) additions to the game back in January and as of today like 80% of the planned updates have yet to see the light of day, and on top of that, Team17 is basically refusing to speak about it whatsoever. Anyway... that's another topic entirely. I just wanted to complain.

That right there is a great reason not to overpromise and underdeliver, wouldn't you agree? It just leaves your reputation as a game dev/maintainer in a worse place each time a deadline passes, and harms the game itself as well, leaving its community less excited and interested than it was to begin with. Even so, I think Deadcode and CyberShadow are reasonably willing to discuss the general plans for WA's future with anyone who contacts them about it. They just don't want to talk about specific features, I imagine primarily because it would ruin the surprise on patch day, but also because while things are still being worked on and tested, they just can't know that they won't hit a roadblock that'll mean a specific feature might get delayed for an update or two.

So, we've talked about this a bit with yanme and the approach I like best is basically a series of black/grey t-shirts or hoodies with the standard WA logo (attached below, but it's in everyone's User\Import folder) at the top of the back side, then a variety of more unique designs on the front. Maybe some clever short comics using upscaled, vectorised sprites from the game, maybe one that's basically just the main WA menu floating in the dark, maybe clan and community logos if we have people who would be able to come up with stylish looking ones.

A pretty big issue with this, as it has always been, is that WA sprites, terrain textures/objects and other assets are tiny, not really suitable for print unless you can first vectorise them neatly, so that they still look good when enlarged to sizes of a few thousand pixels × a few thousand pixels. I know StepS has done some work in this direction for his HD frontend module, but I'm not sure how well his approach would translate to things as tiny as for example worm sprites in various poses. On the other hand, we do have access to some of the sprites at larger sizes, and we might have more in the future (it's a thing Deadcode has been working toward for a long while).

The next issue is that from a legal standpoint, some of this is not totally okay, and Team17 would probably have to step in if anyone tried selling anything. But maybe just sharing the files in a thread here and having everyone order their stuff individually, on whatever website ships custom shirts to them, would be fine? It might be innocent enough, but obviously I don't know for sure.

Apart from that, it really just comes down to whether we have people in the community who can come up with clever ideas for this, and skilled artists who would be able to flesh those ideas out into art and logos that would look good enough to wear proudly. This thread gets the ball rolling on that, and if it happens, I can totally see myself ordering a shirt and a hoodie or whatever!

I reckon a program on the background is intervening, claiming priority where it shouldnt :/
Would that be the problem, and how can i see which one it is?

Have you noticed, is it a regular Command Prompt window that pops up and quickly disappears? I had that too, and apparently it's a known issue. Check out the "Most Helpful Reply" here:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_officeinsider-mso_win10/officebackgroundtaskhandlerregistration-flashes-a/2600497e-78e4-41a1-9040-461cd2c3ea13

It's always alive! As long as anyone has any thoughts on how to push competitive schemes to be more competitive or to simplify them so they're easier to get into competitively, I'm all ears and will be adding stuff to the posts at the top.

Hot seat time in Elite and Team17 is an interesting dilemma to me. On the one hand, it does feel nice to be able to see the wind and have a bit of time to plan your turn ahead right before it starts... but on the other, we've historically seen the top players at these schemes handle zero hot seat time very well, doing their planning during enemy turns or, in case of drastic changes to the map or to worm positions, as they're beginning their turn, usually while walking/jumping in the general direction of where they knew they wanted to go. So far, you guys have touched on the reasons why giving players 5s of hot seat time would make Elite more comfortable for players, but I do think it comes at the cost of slightly reducing the skill ceiling of the scheme. Sure, generally speaking, more thinking time probably results in more impressive turns on average, but the very best Elite turns of all time have been so impressive because we knew that all the thinking and planning had to have come either during the opponent's turn or while the turn was being taken. So, whatever impressiveness is gained by giving players more planning time is lost by the knowledge that they were given more time to think (i.e. essentially playing an easier variant of the scheme); the two pretty much cancel each other out and I feel like comfort is maybe not enough of a reason on its own to mess with a scheme setting that has survived for ~15 years in competitive play. It feels dangerous in the sense that perhaps someday in the future, when Elite is being played at a ridiculously high level, someone will suggest reducing turn time from 20 to 15 seconds to compensate for this and to again increase the skill ceiling of the scheme, and then we're all going to have to go through the cycle of getting used to new settings again, which is exactly the sort of thing a standardisation effort like this wants to keep from happening too often.

Another reason why I feel we should maybe stick with 0s of hot seat time in Elite is that this is something that's always served as a kind of separator between Elite and Intermediate. In Intermediate, the extra planning time you're given before each turn serves to push the scheme in an even more cerebral direction, where your physical skill and dexterity are secondary to your long term strategy and the careful decision making of when to risk it and when to play it safe. In Elite on the other hand, it's always been an intended part of the experience that being really fast to think and act, as well as really efficient with your walking/jumping/roping/attacking should give you so much of an advantage that huge comebacks always remain a possibility, as long as you're skilled enough to pull them off. By bringing the two schemes closer together in how much thinking time you're given in them, that line becomes a bit more blurred... but I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing? Still, I think in a league or other competition that supports both schemes at the same time, having them be more diverse is probably better than them being more similar. After all, it's this diversity of required skill sets that sets competitive WA apart from most other multiplayer games.

Hmmmm.

This was a fun thread to catch up with. Bye Rob! Hey Jim!

FlowingWater is franz now, by the way. Actually streams on Twitch quite a bit, as franz_TUS. Can't remember the last time I spoke to Marco or AlienElite, sadly, they were really fun folks as well. Hope they're not gone forever... but then apparently nobody is!

From a player's point of view, I don't get why someone would play a deck that results in quick games, win or lose. If you're so bored with a game that you just want it to be over quickly, why play at all? To compete within the real meta at rank 5 and higher? But the majority of those people got there playing the the same cancer decks you do, and why would they stop now?

Especially early on in a season, I actually find it very hard to justify spending time in ranked play, those decks just seem to exist with the purpose of ruining the fun of the people who would actually enjoy playing the game (preferably with decks of their own design), had it been balanced better. I mean I get the thrill of ranking up quickly, especially if it's your first time, but surely the enjoyment and pride that you get from it have to be lesser if you know you're essentially exploiting arguably broken hero/deck combinations that you didn't even discover on your own...