Ping

I don't understand. Are you trying to say that the overall skill level is much lower now and that even below mediocre players can be successful and so therefore it is not necessary to work hard in order to be a successful saberist? How do you conclude from that that poke is awful?

I agree with you that for a new player poke is a shortcut to increase the efficiency of one's swings and that it can easily lead to neglecting other important skills, which in turn can lead to stagnation later on. This is what I meant before by saying that poke on its own doesn't win games - and focusing too much on it, as you rightly claim, can be bad for you as a player. I think this is pretty clear.

And that is fair enough, but there seems to be a tension between the roleplaying aspects of the game, i.e. the master-padawan relationships in the context of teaching someone how to play, and the actual player improvement aspects, i.e. becoming a good player. I will make and defend the bold claim that nobody who has ever been trained or taught by anyone has become a good player solely by virtue of his training with that person or school. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that being taught is detrimental to your development as a player. The only benefit it can possibly have is indirect, i.e. through social support. So although the dynamic combat mechanics, the SW theme and the open-ended FFA gametype allow for schools and teaching to flourish, neither contribute directly to the development of the player and are therefore just make-believe. In short: Schools don't teach you how to play, they just involve you in unintended or intended roleplaying. But I agree that this vast array of roleplaying opportunities makes JKA a really good SW game, especially so because it's reasonable to think that attending ingame classes will make you a better player, where in reality ingame classes are just illusory make-believe like any other form of roleplaying.

Ah yes, the standard derogatory assumption that everyone who pokes doesn't know how to play the game properly and if you take away their poking they lose badly to even the worst of JA+ players. It discredits your conclusion. Again, I have not tried out the cvar so I will reserve judgement, but I am extremely sceptical given my experience with magical fix claims in general and also your claims in particular. You draw your conclusion that the cvar fixes poke based on "extensive testing" done in the context of your JA+ clan from 2004, which (probably) involved your own clanmates and also the "whirlybird fighters" that poked but you claim were terrible players (see above). If the testing was done with players that poked but were otherwise terrible, it makes me sceptical whether they even knew how to properly execute a poke given that they were otherwise terrible players. If the testing was done with JA+ clanners that abhorred poke, it is even less likely that they knew how to properly execute a poke (and even more likely that they were terrible players as well). In both cases I have reason to question your conclusion. EDIT: Tried the cvar on my own server. The setting was on 350 by default. Was getting easily one-shot by a friend of mine on both 100/25 and 100/100. Tried setting it to 500, 700, 1000 - made absolutely zero difference. Am I missing something? Does it only work on JA+ (which would make the entire discussion moot)? EDIT2: Moving on, @ makes the as of yet unmentioned but excellent point that poke is necessary for balance given the way staff works. So changing the way poke works would also have to change the way staff works, which means we'd be talking about a different game by that point - and this in turn runs against the problem with mods that I mentioned before.

You have no idea how many "easy fix" claims I have heard over the decade, none of which fixed a thing. I therefore highly doubt your solution. Our best options are mods, but even they come with a lot of problems (see previous post). Also, there is a contradiction between claiming that nobody uses the magical easy fix because they like exploiting the game and claiming that you found the old fix that "you had forgotten". At the very least people could have "forgotten" about it just like you did, but you prefer to think everyone loves "exploiting the broken game" too much to use it, which is maximally uncharitable towards them and only makes you sound bitter.

Not entirely sure, given how popular games with extremely high skill ceilings are nowadays: e.g. Starcraft 2, Dota 2, CS:GO and the rest. Is it necessary to master the mechanics in those games to be able to enjoy playing them? Absolutely not, but the same goes even more so for JKA. You can be playing JKA on an extremely low level and still have a great time (cf. "social" clans), but there are a lot of opportunities for those kinds of people that strive to be the best and that is because of the high skill ceiling. If we agree that poke increases the skill ceiling, then poke is good for competitive play. The point of bringing up strafe jumping was an argument from analogy. In Quake3 (DM), strafe jumping significantly contributes to your effectiveness as a player because over there, map control is extremely important for winning a match (even if it doesn't win the match on its own) and strafe jumping is extremely important for map control. But strafe jumping is an exploit, yet the community embraced it as part of the game mechanics. Similarly, poking significantly contributes to your effectiveness as a player in JKA because making the best out of your swings, i.e. using swings as efficiently as possible (not just in terms of damage but also in terms of timing, swing choice, combos etc) is extremely important for winning a match (even if the efficiency of your swings doesn't win you the match on its own - you still have to hit people with them!) and poking is important for making your swings efficient (amongst other factors like timing; similarly, strafing is not the only thing there is to map control in q3). Both mechanics are exploits, but just like with strafe, poking has been embraced by the competitive community and removing it from the game now is unimaginable. I agree completely, but since (as I said in my previous post) we cannot all agree on what this better method should be, we should make the best of what we have. And what we have is a game where poking is viable and widespread.

Laming, roleplay-ffa and wiggle have existed for almost as long as JKA has. And with very good reason, because the ESL wants to give players a platform to figure out who the best player in jka is, not who the best player on a variation of jka is. Regardless of how good the proposed changes are, mods will never be the solution because they are just that: changes to the game applied externally. Since we cannot all agree on what changes are appropriate, we cannot all agree on how jka should be, so therefore we have to take and deal with jka as it is.

He means CTF. It has none of those problems. Having said that, I agree with all of your complaints, except for maybe #5. As for #1 and #2, one of the reasons jka is so popular is exactly because it can be used as a virtual chatroom so very well. I don't see this as a flaw if there is enough variety to cater to everyone's tastes, i.e. if not ALL servers are just chatrooms etc.

The Japanese really like their Christian mythology though.

At first I misread "jenova" as "jehova"...

Can you guys elaborate a bit? I thought Chewie was very ineffective in the movie.

Well to be fair, if I had just discovered JKA, I'd be VERY IMPATIENT too because JKA is so awesome. But then again, my eagerness to play the game would have driven me to do my own research. Anyways: You don't need any mods. For anything else, google openjk.

So why did you post the article at all and why did you answer the question I asked about the article with statements that have nothing to do with the article? And why did you pick a thread title that has nothing to do with the article either? I mean, you cannot get anymore incoherent than that.

Can you please quote the part from the article, even from just the abstract, where it says that anything they've done has cured any form of cancer? Have you even read the article at all? There is not a mention of wasps, it's plant based collections they discuss. It's even in the title. Have you just copy pasted some misquoted study from a blog or something and put a sensationalist headline on it?

So are we discussing the headline of this thread or the article here? To OP: I don't see where it says that cancer is cured. Please tell me how you drew the conclusion by reading the article that anyone found a cure for cancer. The first part of your sentence is exactly right: They've had this for years, even decades. To be very exact, they've had this for 15 years because the article is from June 2000. As for the second part of your sentence: Basic science is not done for profit.

Very short replies to the points you make here: You can indeed be exceptional at one thing or mediocre at many, but you can also be mediocre at one thing and exceptional at many. Branching out (which was the initial goal to begin with) could be bad, but it could also be good. There is nothing that rules out doing a variety of things as bad on principle. No clans are doing that which we are looking to do and no clans will do it because it cannot be done from within a clan. JKHub is ideal because it's clan-neutral ground and has a lot of potential because of its far reach. Also, there are no (known to me) clan websites of clans that focus on competition, so we're not trying to compete with any other place except for the ESL. Given the difference between international competitive tournaments open to all and internal tournaments held by some ja+ clan, and given that the ESL is in a very rough shape right now, JKHub has the great opportunity to fill the gap here and stay true to what it initially invisioned itself to be, namely the central hub for all things JKA, not just for all things modding.

It is currently about modding and file hosting, but it shouldn't be and we are trying to change that. Given JKHub's original vision of being a central hub for the entire community and not just modders, it makes more sense to feature important information about the competitive stuff on the front page. The ladders and tournaments are forthcoming, or at least are on the list of changes for JKHub 2.0. Manual editing might be a bit of a hassle though... maybe we can fix that somehow.

I like the 3 column grid. Replace the featured and latest files sections with ladder and tournament related info, e.g. top3 players in the 1v1 ladder and top3 finishers in the latest tournament, and put the latest/featured files somewhere further down below, either on the left or right side, and this layout has potential.

Came here expecting an endorsment of Nvidia products....

I don't see why a sabering system has to be realistic to be good...

Never cared for battlefront. Nothing changed.

Yeah, there's a lot of potential to get people's attention through SP related stuff, especially given the let's play community, which can spread the word very quickly. Building upon that, JKHub and clans can foster interest into the MP side of things.

An SP campaign. Such a project would utilize all the various skills that each one of the modders here can bring to the table: textures, skins, new models, maps, cutscenes, voice acting, narration, whatever.

So make time to invest into it!

Then get the skills.