People play how they choose to play. If not a lot of people are sparring, it doesn't necessarily mean that sparring needs to be insanely incentivised. Perhaps it just means people are off doing other things.

Yes they do but If you look at unstick you will see majority of the player count is not doing anything. I'll give my opinion on that, they are waiting for something to happen. I use to be one of them. Unfortunately nothing ever does happen but you keep coming back hoping that something does. Vicious circle.

If you look at the spar complex, when was the last time anything was updated? exactly. There is your answer.

They gave up trying to get better and attain skill when it was made so skill wasn't required, only a lame weapon was needed to put yourself on-par. And they keep pressing the horizon with those ridiculous gang guns.

When there was few guns, and Uzi/Ak reigned supreme, every second that wasn't spent on raids was spent blocking the spar door trying to get your shot to test your skills. Being that the playing field was fairly even, and the only advantage players could attain was their own ability.

Now there are players, or even entire guilds that refuse to raid against certain odds (whenever Mercenary has 3 people online) or simply cannot raid without ec items/armor/various advantages.

I've noticed, and been contacted (shrimps is getting rich af), that PyroTech and Armor Surpluses at GP/AM have been emptied consistently. The only thing required anymore (to at least pretend you're good) is money.

I dig that but wheres your suggestion to solve that?

.1 freeze
minimum

Won't happen. As much as you're right, they won't do it. It kind of annoys me because they know nothing about guns/stats and act like they do.

Most managements of Era don't know anything about guns/stats but that's purely because everybody has different opinions of what it will be and how loud those people argue matters. Let's say this or next management implemented every "good" stat Supaman suggested. You'll always have people like bloodykiller or someone else out there who will loudly voice that it is a terrible stat set and offer their ideas. Implement those, well you get the idea. Vicious circle continues. Nobody wins, ever, nor will they. Also, because of that, there will never be a "balanced contentment" for base stats either.

Most managements of era don't or never have pked. So how does there opinion matter? It only matters because they are in management but it doesn't mean they're right. Would you let a doctor do surgery on you? No you wouldn't because that's a surgeons job. Would you ask a surgeon about a medical condition? No, that's a doctors job. Basically what i am saying is, why let somebody touch something they have no knowledge about. I know these guys and I've played this game for years to know they don't know how guns work therefore they should not be touching them.

If you do decide to touch them then make your mind up and stick with your decision don't keep changing the stats etc. If you logged on era recently you will see that everybody is calling for zaos head because the guns were changed yet again.

I don't know if it's sad or not, but I haven't had to log in to hear that and I have heard that. :p

Either way, you're right about that part. Management should listen to the people more regarding this issue and if they are, they're obviously listening to the least agreeable ideals those they are listening to and filling in the blanks.

I've had my 2 cents worth though. Nothing I can do but agree that things have been better and managements that come and go tend to try to make their mark in Era by having things their way in every system possible. I hope some sense comes in the future.

In terms of gun balance, damage, firing rate and freeze are the only stats that matter. And because the latter two stats need to be multiples of 0.05, and because players have determined that the only acceptable range for those stats are 0.05-0.1 for freeze and 0.05-0.2 for firing rate the number of variations is extremely limited, and the combinations before you end up with 0.5/0.5 guns is equally as limited.

Reload speed is totally ignored as a stat, and because of that the clip size of guns is also a completely irrelevant stat, because players can reload whenever they want with essentially no penalty. Which sucks because these stats could be used a lot better and could completely reshape PKing.

I always planned to make guns have meaningful reload times, so that it was impossible for players to wall. The idea was to let players move while reloading, but to increase the time of reloading to 1-2 seconds for rifles, 0.5-1 second for handguns and for shotguns to reload a single shell at the time (had shotguns working like that for a while and I really enjoyed it). The other part of the plan was to release 3 hotkey slots, so that players could switch out weapons to finish somebody off instead of getting stuck reloading, which should have placated most of the complainers. In the end I guess the hotkeys were eventually released but the reload changes never happened.

Outside of guns, health and speed are the next most important stats.
Speed was approached completely wrong, because there are so many ways to circumvent the item space limit that it's barely worth having. Caps and workers potions just exacerbate the issue even more.
Players should not suffer a walk speed penalty for having 100 hats on them, which provide absolutely no benefit at all. And on the other side of the same coin, a player shouldnt be able to walk around with 5 guns, body armor, 100 grenades, 30 claymores and 20 super elixirs at full speed.
My planned solution was to eventually expand the hotkey system into a "create a class" system, whereby only the items that the player had hotkeyed counted towards their weight and affected their walking speed.
Most of this stuff was about whole game balance though, and not just gun balance.

The only other "gun balance" idea I could think of was adding a damage range to weapons. So the Ak-47 might be 15-24 damage, M16 might be 17-22 damage and M4 might be 20-22 damage. Hard to balance though, and sort of eats away at the skill aspect of the game.

p.s. nobody cares about sparring theyd rather play era habbo hotel.

Maybe if you didn't have a life you could come back and finish these things off

we gotta catch 'em all!!!!

I actually did this at one point without telling anyone. Guns like the mp5 still "showed" 0.5 freeze in the stats, so few people realized...but a few people complained and my change was reverted :\

So it looks like they added the 1v2, 2v2 etc in the spar complex.. Haven't had much time to check it out, who done it and what do you think of it?

Looks awesome but from what i can see you can't decide who is in your team??

I made it, and it's set-up to accept a limit of three players for each team. I will be doing a challenge mode so you can pick who is on your team. Then the team creator will be able to challenge other registered teams.

Good stuff. Not sure about the location, maybe put it where large spar is since that's never used anyway.

Would also be nice if we could have a classic spar room where only Aks,Uzis & HG's are allowed. :D

Prepare to rack up some losses gents.

Spars like these will revitalize era. Nice job, Tim.
We need to get competition back into era. The significance of how good you are, or your crew, or your gang was what drove era in its golden age. Without that, it can only ever amount to a shell of its former self.

They will indeed and I've been saying it all along, Tim's the only one whos ever listened. Sad.

I'd almost like to see a system where a battle is initiated when some type of damage is received and sent within 5 seconds. And obviously if you win; you win. But let's say I involve a distance system to check how far you are from one another. Could be neat to lock each other in a box that can move with you through a level as you both move. If one player decides to run though, you're not gonna get very far.. Thoughts?

Terrible idea, It will never work, trust me... haha, sounds like a good way to fix the 'running' aspect but running is only a problem 1 on 1, when I was pking in a base doing 1v7 and still winning I was having the best time on Era, that won't work with your idea put in place.

You would have to consider other people jumping in and causing the distance between the original 2 combatants increasing. Or the possibility that when their "box" is close enough to a door to another level, it will break line-of-sight.

It doesn't matter what incentives or punishments you place on people to deter running. If people want to run, they're going to run. Nothing is going to stop them or persuade them to stay in combat. You cannot script anything reasonable (No 'lol you ran, so you get a scripted death anyway' deal) to make someone think "I wanna run, but staying would be better".

I think this administration has done a pretty good job to mitigate running. If era lagged less, not much of my prey would be able to flee. I do think they need to reconsider the water though. Sharks should be returned and give the last person that hit you the kill, or gang kill when you run.

Other than that, people gon' run but these things make it easier for people like myself to catch them and kill them.

Yeah... I really liked the sharks. I'm sad they're gone. Obviously someone got pissed off that they got eaten by a shark while they were running and disabled them.

P.S. ****ing hate winter on Era because of the ice. It's really lame. (Lame in the sense that it's not cool, not in the sense that it's OP or cheap. Although, that too.)

The ice is so annoying. People run for light years on it. They need to create a polar bear that functions like the shark.

Or the ice could just crack and you fall through and die. Easy. Also makes sense.

I'm disappointed someone disabled it, didn't even realise. :cry:
But it wouldn't really make sense re-enabling (winter).

Edit:
Yes @ polar bear

era is so anti-noob its rediculous no wonder this game is dead

What I'm confused about is why there's even snow or ice to begin with. What the **** happened to global warming?? Also, I'm gonna see what I can do about making it so players fall in the ice.

So what about this update on the rank spar system? (/Sparstats). I'll say it again... It needs it badly.

I still have yet to see snow, Era is the only place I've seen snow. Well TV and other games too, but yeah still There's no snow here!