Ping

I'm madly in love with you @@ent.

Consider using a keyboard and mouse, it's vastly superior in every regard when it comes to JKA.

People have all the tools available to them now to make something truly extraordinary. I wish I was that lucky back when I was still doing videos in 2006.

Google translate is especially ineffective when it comes to slavic languages.

Ja pamientam dni, gdzie polska scena JKA byla jedna z najwienkszych i najlepszych scen w grze; gdzie polacy mieli takom reputacjie, ze jak grales przeciw nimi na ESL, to wiedziales ze to bendzie dobry i cienszki mecz. A teraz? Opadliscie tak bardzo, ze lepiej wam grac RP nisz walczyc o mistszostwo przeciw wegrzom. Gdzie jest chwala polskiego staffu teraz? Gdzie wielkosc waszej zdolnosci? Chowa sie nowa generacia polskich graczow za stronach jak twoich! Lepiej do mieczu, a nie tam na RP. PS: Sorry for the spelling.

Oh this is definitely the right place to post it, make no mistake about it, and I'm glad you did. Here's some feedback: The frags were for the most part really excellent; some were better than others though, and given the exorbitant length of the video, you could have just kept it to the very best frags you had available. But I really like that you tried something new: JAMME has great potential and it takes some effort to get oneself beyond the things commonly used for videos like these, so I applaud your choice and think it was definitely a great thing that you used the mod. The level shots during the slow parts of the music were pretty good as well and I also didn't mind the staged conversations at the end between you two - it was fresh and original, although maybe not quite what I'd expect in a fragmovie, which is not a bad thing at all. The real issue I had was that you basically recorded frags, put them together into one video and played a soundtrack ontop of that. Given the good quality of your material, this is rather unfortunate, since it misses the thing that can make fragvideos so amazing: It's the way the visuals work together with the audio to create something of artistic value. You've done this by showing level shots when the music slowed down, but this is not enough. You need to -at the very least- synchronize the frags with the music. This is the most basic thing you just have to work with in order to make a good video. This is also where choice of music comes in and the way you adjust your angles and speed to what's happening in the music etc. It opens up a whole variety of creative possibilities that you then can exploit. I didn't think the camera was too fast at times, although there were some scenes that made me a bit dizzy, I rather felt that the problem was the way you swayed to the left and right. In fact, almost all of the camera movement was just that: sway one side, then a bit to the other and then back, sometimes repeatedly so. It became a very predictable pattern, especially so given the length of the video. There were some well executed moments where you caught a good frag in a nice and novel way, but those were the exception to an otherwise thoroughly established pattern. The outro was cute and I liked the in-jokes; the intro was a bit too simple for me, and yeah, there were no real transitions. But really, I'd focus a lot more on synchronizing the video with the audio, since that is the main problem I had. Good work though!

Spawn point placement is mostly irrelevant to TFFA. Making them symmetrical in any way, with one team only ever spawning on the one side of the map and the other team on the other, would be actually bad.

I think adding a barebones, more sandbox-y option is an excellent choice that I believe most people are going to play, at the very least once they've finished the main campaign. Blizzard realized this was a good idea waaay too late, but even they have now implemented an open world option, i.e. d3 minus the story. I think this is important and just goes to show what the game is really all about and where its appeal actually lies. If you're not already too invested in the christian myth surrounding the core of your narrative, why not go for something completely and utterly different? Something absolutely radical that was never done before? It would raise significant eyebrows and give you a lot of exposure, even if it's just because of the wildness of your story or setting. For example, you could have the entire narrative revolve around philosophy: The great menace of bad relativism has won over the world with terrible arguments and now every shmuck is walking around spouting awkward arguments for relativism in all spheres of existence without knowing what they're talking about; so enemies would be modelled as relativists of various kinds, relativists about art, global relativists about knowledge, partial relativists about knowledge, historical relativists, framework relativists, cultural relativists, moral relativists, there's plenty to go around. The selectable characters would be a handful of would-be philosophers that specialize in certain branches: So we get the scientific realist here, the kantian deontologist there, the metaethical naturalist, the aesthetic formalist, hell you could even add a relativist in there who finds the pseudo-philosophical crap that everyone else is spouting to be nonesense and vows to take down all the terrible arguments offered by everyone else and dethrone the champions of relativism with his own better thought out arguments. The bosses would go from other no-name would-be philosophers to either historically or philosophically significant personas. Armor would be clothes of various kinds, depending on which character you pick: The deontologist would get to wear 18th century extravagant robes, the scientific realist would get conservative modern stuff, the formalist something extravagantly modern and so on. Skills would be modelled after arguments, weapons would be books, scientific or philosophical papers, art objects, thought experiments scribbed on some paper or everyday objects that inspire certain arguments. The real challenge would lie in intellectualizing the combat though, since this is an ARPG: You could for example claim that yes, some of the people are out to do physical violence to you and you disable them with argument, and they don't die but rather just fall over lost in thought, rethinking their lives. You'd hit them with books or papers ingame (and they'd certainly return the favour, dropping their stuff in the process), but it would be implied that you're actually convincing them with arguments inspired by your items (that modify or increased the power of your skills); spells are more suited for this for obvious reasons and there's plenty of room for creativity here in the design of the combat. Anyways, nevermind me.

I guess you could explain skills through talents or dispositions: Mages are more disposed towards this whole soul business and are thus more receptive to whatever energy they can draw from that, whereas warriors are just people who are talented at fighting with swords; that way, you kinda start out with people who are quite excellent as they are, which would also explain why they are so good at killing hordes of ARPG enemies even though they are level 0 at the start of the game and thus quite pathetic, but still vastly more capable than your random flavour-text villager. They are talented people in their own right and someone who is a pretty skilled swordsman, probably due to talent, interest, environment etc, is not all of a sudden going to turn mage for the sake of it, especially not in the face of somesort of immanent threat to his existence: "oh let's pick up magic now that hordes of demons have invaded earth and want to kill me instead of using my abilities that i have gained through years of hard training." So they're pretty good from the start and they just get better with experience. For the mages, you could have them (gameplay-wise) unlock the skills after a certain amount of levels and claim that they, through experience, have somehow grown spiritually in such a way that they can now conceive of things outside of what they were capable of before, i.e. that they can either imagine more or understand something better, got deeper insight etc and are thus able to use the very same thing (magic, rune) in a completely different way. You could still use runes with bonuses as drops to increase your power and could explain that by saying that they are basically the same runes (about the same stuff), just more powerful (syphon more demonic energy at once or affect your mind somehow that you can concentrate more or whatever). That way you can have mages start out with a basic rune (just as a warrior starts out with a basic sword), something that the mage found a few years back and acquired the skill to cast a basic spell by prolonged use from a time before the gameplay began. But really, this is supposed to be an ARPG, so the narrative matters very little if at all. People don't play Diablo3 for its narrative integrity, but rather for the phat lewt, as they do with Torchlight 2 and pretty much all the other games in that genre. Diablo3's skill and rune progression was given zero story explanation at all, so if you just say that mages find different runes that allow them to use different skills, but gameplay-wise you just have them unlock certain runes/skills after a fixed amount of levels, people won't hate your face for that.

Holy smokes, now here's someone I never thought I'd see on this website. The world is so small!

The Europeans have the ESL, but America never had its own formal league system that was not significantly skewed or biased against them (like the ESL was back in the days, although it had its tolerant days as well, I guess). The closest that they had was maybe 'Week of War', which was really quite awful in many ways if you remember that one. BWN and Sabermetrix were excellent for competitive play, but they failed as formal systems due to their flaws. So by 'dead' I mean exactly that: No participation in any formal leagues and no formal competitive structure of its own; once Sabermetrix was gone, they didn't even have a league that people could play in. Are there even clans at all anymore that play official clan matches not held on JA+? I think GoD tried to claim that they were one of those, but the last time I checked their forums, they only had 3 matches played, all of which were against minor JA+ clanners. People like Crimelord and Water used to play on the ESL's 1v1 ladder, but besides that? Some of these guys signed up an official US national team for the JNC back in August 2013, but they never played any matches. So at this point, anything would be a big help, no doubt about it. Do you have the skills and resources to start a mod project like that? I strongly believe you should get in touch with the guys in charge of compJA, since I believe it was them that wanted to do something similar: https://github.com/Razish/CompJA

The American competitive scene has been dead for god knows how long now, while the ESL has experienced quite a strong spike in activity as of late (although, to be fair, it does seem to have calmed down a bit again - guess spring break is over or something). I'm all for doing something to revitalize the american side and I think a mod like that would certainly help. I believe that someone somewhere has had an idea about something similar to this though; think it might have been openjk related, but not sure. Also, you link to the old TJA wiki - I like that. We should be friends.

Blocking is a very messy topic, probably best answered by the coders here who actually know the digital guts responsible for it. But to a very large extent it seems to depend on all kinds of factors that should not influence the gameplay whatsoever - like the OS that the server is running on, general server box workload etc. You can have two base servers running the very same cfg that nonetheless differ radically in their block rates for whatever reason. This is very messy territory though because it neatly falls into the "lol you're just imagining things / are probably blaming crap for losing" category, for which I agree that a general rule of thumb should be to discount any experiences that contradict the code, but things like these sometimes make you question your own sanity. But randomness (and also ping issues) aside: Range matters, but swing timing and saber placement does as well. You can block most attacks if you know how to time your swings right (except for the special attacks of course), but it's much more difficult against faster stances. Trying to do either is not very viable competitively though, except as a last resort: Lots of players, when they are cornered and have no means of escape without getting hit, tend to just crouch in red stance, look on the ground, move the mouse really fast and hope for a block - which they can then turn into a parry and, to the frustration of the attacker, turn around a most disadvantageous situation into one where they are capable of inflicting severe damage on the opponent. That's probably the extent to which blocking can be willingly used to your advantage in a duel or TFFA.

Ok, I'll contribute with some input; mostly critical for now, but the overall goal is to increase the value of the entire thing, so here we go: You should note that as with anything, only the basics can be taught to any meaningful extent (or advanced basics, or whatever - point is, nobody is going to become a good player by reading a guide or even following a guide to the letter.) I would remove this entirely. Just because a stance is in the game doesn't follow that it is useful; the game could be imbalanced (which it is), making certain stances useless - like blue. In fact, the only times blue was ever used in a competitive setting was to humiliate the opponent, since everyone is pretty much aware how much blue sucks; it's akin to beating someone with one hand or blindfolded in a mere show of dominance. This needs to be far more specific because it is rather useless as it stands there. There can be two kinds of gaps between swings in a combo: ones that you get by not releasing the attack button and ones that you get by releasing the attack button for a short time after one swing finishes, so that the next swing is still going to be part of the combo (and will therefore have all the characteristics of a swing that is part of a combo, like different and shorter swing animation etc) but will come later than usual. You have to specify which gap and which combo you mean for this tip to be useful. But I'd remove it entirely. This is too obvious, but should at least read 'by jumping backwards' to be more correct. This raises the question as to how basic you want your tips to be. It's pretty self-explanatory as to why I would vehemently object to this and recommend its removal. I don't think it needs an argument. If you want to say that people on casual modded ffa servers don't like poke, then you can do that in a separate section on etiquette (which I'll talk about further down). This again raises the question of how basic you want this to be. Talking about how to deal with playing on servers that give you a high latency is a pretty good idea, but I'm not sure if merely saying you should anticipate them is a good tip, seeing as it should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever played with a high ping anywhere. You could complement that by saying that one should play a defensive style, reduce risks as much as possible, use sweeping attacks that don't leave you open for long or lay "traps" that can either go your way or leave both players unhurt. This is not a tip and should be removed. It has no value in making someone a better player. You would have to say why changing the fov matters at all for sabering, and I really don't think it does. It might help to use the max fov allowed by pure servers when you're in a TFFA setting, since that makes it easier to see what's going on around you, but in duels it seems pretty irrelevant unless you pick an extremely small value. You should probably want to rename section 4A from "General Saber Tactics" to something like "General Tips for Sabering" or "General Sabering Tips", since that would fit the generality of this section more than the word 'tactics'. I'm not even sure if general 'tactics' for all stances and sabers even exist. If at all, I guess you could point to the distinction between aggressive play and passive play. Section 5 leaves me a bit confused. Why is it there and what is it supposed to include? You have "Angel's Rules of Engagement" and something about a saber-switching glitch. Who is Angel and why should we care about his 'rules of engagement'? I'd recommend turning this into a general etiquette section where you keep some of the lines (but define 'gf' and 'gg') and maybe add a line about not killing people when their chat bubble is up or when they're lagging out. If you want to keep this odd thing about the saber-switching glitch, make sure to add on what mod this is supposed to work, although I'd remove it entirely. Section 6 should be removed because it serves no purpose outside of making your clan look mysterious or cool by saying that only members of it have access to certain information. Since you've mostly compiled the info yourself and this is pretty much your guide, you are perfectly fine in advertising your clan, but I think you've already done that by calling this guide the oFc Tome of Knowledge, with a huge oFc splattered at the very top of it all. So I think it would be a good idea to just stick with that and remove section 6 entirely (at least for the public version). It really doesn't look good and has very limited value.

Awesome to see so many Spaniards playing the game, although I must admit that I find the name of your clan somewhat amusing.

As is base, but you can't even download that. I call shenanigans.

@@Hugo: You write so much. I think it's great though because the practice you got that way clearly helped you make significant progress in your command of written English - there are still some minor grammatical errors that you'd have to take care of, but your text reads very nicely and has a good flow to it. Well done! Conceptually, I feel like you make a lot of interesting points, but I think you could have tied your entire post to the topic at hand a bit better: Maybe add a very simple inference from "JKA is dying" to "thus we need a new game" to the very top of your post to dodge the admittedly somewhat profane charge of being completely off topic. Other than that, I'm in no position to comment and would prefer to invite the graceful inner council of our most knowledgable and motivated JKHub members to do so in my stead.

I came here for a full conversion mod with candyland maps, candy cones instead of lightsabers and chocolate bears as models...

Wow, how did I miss this thread? I guess I thought people would stay on topic and not argue for 'lol if you want other people than modders here then just contribute yourself' again, which is as naive of a position as me thinking people would stay on topic.

@@therfiles: My priority would be getting more people interested in JKHub and joining this place, so I'd use the server to do exactly that, since a server is particularly well suited for such a task (at least when it comes to appealing to people from the competitive community). But I get what you're trying to do with the rotating gametypes, mods and maplists etc., I just don't think having everyone get what they want is in that case necessarily better for the community as a whole, given the alternatives. But then again, maybe not being particularly inviting towards players who play the game competitively is a good thing for this community after all - I am definitely open to admitting that. It depends on what JKHub wants to be, maybe.

@@RancorSNP: Not for everyday dueling, but for tournament/league usage you definitely need a good and active admin team that can adjust settings, handle requests and make sure everything is fair. Neutral (and good) servers are pretty rare nowadays, and with the recent general activity spike in JKA there is certainly demand for them. This would provide an excellent opportunity for JKHub to reach out to the other side of the community.

I think adding the 8SEBracket template would be pretty cool.

Yes, a well-run and well-admin'd JKHub base duel server would be a great start get people other than modders interested in this place.

No it's not.

Yes, very recently. For example, there has been quite a lot of drama on the ESL as of late because some pretty widely known player has been found using a third party hack that unlocks cvars and was banned for that. Just one instance of many.