I am trying out the new rope now and it might be my imagination but it feels like latency is worse now than it was before. The animations themselves look smoother but I noticed that I am falling a lot more than usual.

Hey skunk3, that might be three things together, each with its own influence:
1) Disable Vsync. It adds input latency by definition: the game waits until the next logic frame to process input. This is single handedly the most signifficant source of input lag and roping unresponsiveness.
2) Your 50FPS-conditioned timing needs adjustment. But it's very easy to pick up, once you relax and let your brain get used to the extra ms the game allows you to send input. After that, going back to 50 rendered frames per second will feel horrible, guaranteed.
3) If your monitor refresh rate is much higher than 60Hz, roping will feel not just smoother but also much more sensitive to input. Again, see 1).

Alternatively to 1): enable assisted vsync (if you're using the Direct3D renderer), and compare roping in it vs roping with No Vsync. No Vsync will let W:A use all CPU and GPU resources it can take, so be aware. Assisted vsync should strike a balance between both worlds but needs some tweaking to get right, by editing the registry. The readme has more information, but I'm willing to explain more if anyone wants to.

For BnG, I have a suggestion to come with a reasonable initial HP amount.

How many spot-on attacks are necessary to kill a worm? Let's suppose the most common damage a Bazooka does when hitting the worm directly is 44hp. Let's also suppose that a Grenade hitting a worm spot-on normally causes 43hp. (The damages are debatable, even provable, so this simplification is just to introduce my suggestion.)

I propose the initial BnG HP is equal to a combined sum of a multiple of the maximum non-fd damages you can achieve with a direct bazooka/grenade hit. For example: If you hit three perfect bazookas and two perfect grenades, you would cause 2 * 44hp + 2 * 43hp = 174hp of damage. If we use 174 as a starting HP for every worm, this would mean it would have to receive four perfect attacks in order to die.

You can come with different starting HP using different multiples. I.e. three bazooka hits instead of two would result in 218hp. Or if you change the damages, the result also changes.

TL;DR instead of arbitrarily sticking with 200 or 250, figure out how much damage grenades and bazookas usually do when landing a direct hit, and then multiply the damages by a number of required hits and add both results to get the starting HP.

Someone make a video quick! I cannot watch replays.

You called?

Cueshark and I are currently collaborating on a WSE 2012 video. I'm letting you guys know, in the hope other video makers haven't started an overlapping project. Not like they're not allowed to. Still, hands off!

Only promise we can make right now is that it won't be done soon 

*enjoys*

I admit I got driven to play in this one because of the shorter 30s turns, since the prospect of playing a full contest offline turn just puts me off, given the fact that you can retry as much as you want to.
But then, the more I roped the more I realized 30s is just not good enough. 60s is the way to go for me, and I definitely enjoy online ones more.

Also [rant]if I had known beforehand that fast map coverage was the key element to raise your score, I would have sent another turn.[/rant]
[morerant]Also the fact that you have less time to do stuff makes it end up with radically more different turns, so the reasonable thing is to allow for more replays to be submitted and actually cover for the variety that half a turn cuts down.[/morerant]

I told you already Dub, but once more, well done! And thanks franz for hosting this challenge.

It's probably late to be asking this, but is a turn where the worm falls at 29.9s worth less than the same turn but in full 30s? Because I have loads of turns like that