Not sure who Mae is, did I get the right guy?

I just wanted to start a discussion about what sort of input devices, keyboards, gamepads, etc. are acceptable for worms, in terms of hardware as well as software. There's clearly been an evolution in what we deem permissible over the years. A decade ago, people would have scoffed at any form of external program, even the key remapping programs that a chunk of WN now uses. But there was a failure to codify that community consensus in any concrete way, so it's hardly surprising that the definition of cheating didn't remain static. If we want to cement our views on what is/isn't acceptable in WA, it helps to have an explicit set of rules that we can point to for future wormers.

I think we need to establish common ground in regards to the goal of this endeavor; the purpose of defining cheating is simply to make the community a better place. If rules are too lax, current players might leave, and a lot of future players might be deterred from coming to WA. I know that the prevalence of cheating has deterred me from several online games over the years. If the rules are too strict, and we decided that only one kind of keyboard was acceptable or something like that, well, no one would even pay attention to such a rule, and it might create unnecessary blame.

I think there are a number of facets of input devices that we have no reason to care about restricting.
-Sensitivity of buttons, for example, is something that varies from kb to kb; WA started out in a position of not caring about this. And if we were to establish restrictions on response time of keys, there still wouldn't be any easy way for a player to determine how sensitive his/her kb actually is.
-Placement of keys also seems like a trivial matter. If someone wanted to restrict where keys can and can't be placed, it would require quite a few arbitrary rules, like specifying the minimum distance between the spacebar and the f-keys. This would be an unnecessary complication, and we wouldn't be able to find common ground to begin with.
-Plurality of keys, though contested by some, should also be considered irrelevant as long as sensitivity is considered irrelevant. Finger rolling on a perfectly sensitive spacebar yields almost exactly the same results as finger rolling with two spaces, because you can't have the second space register while you're holding down the first. Moreover, allowing this seems to attract people to the game while hardly deterring anyone from leaving, it's hard to argue that it's not beneficial for the community. It's quite possible that some people are more capable of learning to rope this way, and would never have been able to get into roping with just one finger, since a number of people have made this claim.

And next, the things we should, and pretty thoroughly do, care about restricting:
-External programs that don't simply remap keys. I don't think anyone can point to a single external program that we really deem acceptable outside of key remapping. I'm guessing we're mostly in agreement on this. And if CS/DC decided to make remapping part of the game, we could just cleanly say that all external programs are forbidden.
-Single motions/presses that result in multiple inputs sent to WA. Anything external or internal that is a macro, or is macro-like in its consequences, clearly reduces skill in this game.

I'll just propose three rules to cover everything we generally consider unacceptable.
1. No playing with hardware that isn't button-based in nature. There needs to be some form of human pressing for every input you send to the game, except when it comes to cursor movement.
2. Any button you press must result in no more than one input into the game.
3. No using any programs that affect WA, except for key remappers.

Rule 1 could be seen as unnecessary, it's really just there in case someone invents a weird way of tapping that requires too little effort, like using a mouse wheel. Does anyone have any objections to these rules, or any features that should be added?

This discussion has happened before, but I'm not sure why there's still no rule about it. We should add a rule allowing teams to judge times in RR by fractions of a second whenever they wish. It's not a huge problem when you tie by the whole second in 1v1 RRs, since whoever really won is just going to get a tie instead.

But in 2v2 rrs, the team that really won has a chance of turning into the losing team. If one side got times of 31.1 and 30.1 and the other side got times of 30.9 and 30.9, the times would look like 61 versus 60, when it was really 61.2 versus 61.8.

"Times are measured by the whole second you finish on. However, if one team requests it (within 5 minutes of the game being finished), times must be judged exactly, by checking the replay."

Does anybody have any problem with just adding this in?

Really important mistake I made: battle axe doesn't hit if you're standing on the lowest point of the worm, if the worm hasn't moved since teleporting. Though if it has, you can be fairly certain it'll hit if you're anywhere on the worm.

It's good for these things to happen though, the only way to internalize details like these is to have painful memories of them.

109009, 109011, and 109012 have Statik, but they need to have Shyguy instead, sorry >_o

I think I just clicked on the first S name I saw

Double report, please delete this

eS reported this TTRR as a win, not sure why. They lost, can someone change it to a win please? Thanks.

It's been a while since our last one, but the X-Worms Style Contest returns, on Dec. 28th, 20 GMT. Warmer has been in a state of decline for a long time now, but I know there must be some people out there who want in on this.

If anybody doesn't know what this is, check out the explanation: http://wormolympics.com/t645. This tourney is a remnant of WN's past, the early years when wormers were mostly judged on warming ability. Come enter and have a chance to join the prestigious list of style contest winners: me, Flex, Fudo, Ownless, Ryan, Anubis, Knight, Dulek, Dark, and Ropa!

If used with notching, people can gain a bit of an advantage in BnG (and other schemes) by placing markings on/under their monitors, I even did it for a little while myself, and a number of people seem to currently do this. It's especially helpful for 4 second full power shots, petrol, etc, so you can know exactly where they'll land.

This subject is iffy, but I think we shouldn't allow any kind of visual aids for the game, no matter how small or inconspicuous they might be. It's just one of those things that would look very amateur in a live setting, and to me, playing as if someone else is watching is the standard we should adhere to.

Lack of enforceablility doesn't matter much to me; unlike notching, this is at least something we could enforce in a live setting.

I've just finished something of a tutorial to teach people (including myself) about the exact causes for animal jumping; animals being sheep, skunks, moles, cows, old ladies, and salvation armies. It's pretty in-depth, and if there's one thing you should remember from it, it's definitely the height of that ceiling in the Narrow Area Behavior section.

http://worms2d.info/Animal_Jumping

Reading this will save people serious pain when it comes to animals. You'll be able to more clearly see beforehand what kind of routes are possible/impossible for an animal to take, and where the animal is most likely to go. There is also an amazing replay at the end, brought to you by Deadcode.

I'm extremely grateful to Deadcode, who helped me get many of the facts right that I couldn't possibly observe just through testing, and Cybershadow helped me a bit earlier on too. There may still be some minor inaccuracies, but I'll mention when anything changes.

Dario shows us that special weapons don't matter, he might as well have had mole ;0

The nice part about these games is that we continually turn the advantage around on each other. My SD playing was weak, but aside from that it's pretty good stuff.

TEL game needs to be removed; I guess I forgot to report in the right order, Dario needed to report 1 game then I needed to report 3.

I did these both today, not amazing but cool enough:

Zippo reported a tus classic league match we never played, and he even commented on it, though he apparently left me to make the complaint. Presumably trying to get people's attention that he beat me at TEL ;0

Daina wanted this, here it is:

BarmaN.zip

Double report on this hysteria, sorry