town sparring center needs major work
 

i've been trying to get this message across to the staff of UN for quite some time (since malinko was manager) and it seems that my PM's reach blind eyes. i don't know why UN seems to care very little for it's sparring community, especially given that it's the only classic server that has sparring on it anymore, what with the UC projects of npulse and classic. while i don't expect this thread to have any impact onto the priorities of UN staff (as it's never been given priority except when wikkid was manager, and even then...) i want it to serve as a a placement for the various bugs/problems that arise within TCspar, and hopefully one day UN staff will take a look at it and maybe fix one problem out of many

these are in no particular order:

1. using "/fix me" changes the tiles inside the spar from black to blue
2. various glitches and bugs arise from the useless gravity/fire/ice/shadow spars rooms, and no one even uses them
3. useless spar token shop that i doubt will even be used again: why not get rid of it?
4. the "main" room at the top of the spar isn't even the main room: it's obsolete in terms of scripting and useless in terms of people only venture up there for the 3v3 and 4v4 spar rooms: it could be used to host spur-of-the-moment spar tournaments, or the current sparring league going on
5. allowing various NPCs to be used inside the spar (the particle mist around players for example) can easily lag down players, and the ability to run in and glitch various weapon NPCs can ruin a spar for someone (the snow ball gun used to stun players inside the spar and allow people to get hit twice very quickly, for example)
6. spar mod powers could be scripted in a different way as to make it easier to do their job: having to exit the spar to make the powers work is inadequete, the fact that banning a player requires that player to be online is useless in most cases, and most importantly, the current spar mods don't even know what their job is supposed to be: the current spar chief expects spar mods to sit on tag and watch spars as if they're tag will scare people into sparring better: it doesn't, it makes the mod job more authoritative than it needs to be, instead of enforcing the rules when they are broken
7. spar mods could be made into more of an events team to host various sparring events held inside tcspar instead of being sub-GPs only
8. the text used to indicate which doors go where gets in the way of players chatting: it could be scripted to be less evasive onto actual player chatting than it currently does

this is just off the top of my head: there are other problems that arise but they are more subtle and i cannot say that they are really "problems" more than just inadequacies. the fact of the matter is this: UN is sparring central for the whole of graal at the moment, and UN's focus is so far away from sparring (or seemingly far away) that sparring on graal is becoming much more tight-nit, and harder to get into if you're a new player. the emphasis on sparring on classic servers is diminishing because of UN's lack of focus on it, and it's sad. TCspar could be used much more efficiently than it currently is, and sparring on UN is, in my opinion, over 50% of the current activity and player count on the server: if UN stopped having sparring, a lot of people simply wouldn't play UN at all

I will review these with some scripters later this week.

I don't know if I'll do anything with the event hosting request, though. The other things I can concur with.

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Interesting

indeed

so has any progress been made as to where these changes could be produced?

Pretty sure there's some free scripters in the GDT section, so utilize them. :P

elaborate when you say GDT section, because I can't find a section about/for GDT anywhere.

thanks, thought you were talking about a forum by itself.

I have not forgotten about this, and it will get done. We will most likely not need to rely on GDT.

If it comes to it, though, I won't hesitate. :)

still nothing has been done to TCspar and it's been over a month since the creation of this thread. even the smallest problems have not been addressed, like the doors or constant leak of NPCs into the spar

should we all just stop making suggestions? would it have more weight if i posted this on the in-game forums? i mean seriously, what's it going to take to get this management to care even a little bit about the sparring on UN?

major work takes major time

it's not even that much

Dont get why he didnt ask the GDT after a month.

i wouldnt mind editing the level, a lot of useless junk that could be moved and stuff

!pissed!

Thats cute how you excepted anything to be done about it lol.

We have started on this list, and added our own modifications to try and add some security to the spar (anti-laming system of some sort)

Script wise:
This is being investigated.

This is being investigated.

Also the door things will be fixed up, and the spar log viewer will be fixed. Once we get this stuff done I'll continue to dig through the topics you guys posted.

Level wise:

I'll be removing the spar token shop entirely.

I'm also considering rearranging the main room. I will perhaps move all of the element spars (for lack of a better term) to the northern room; replace/add doors in their location to things like the spar viewers, etc.

I liked when Neo added the old Town Spar behind the scroll in the top right corner. You should re-add it, wouldn't hurt anything. You said something like "/tcspar" to get in. I used to spar there for nostalgic purposes.

can you add some nice curtains and light effects? and maybe some of those ikea shelves that look like everything is going to fall off the shelf but really it's perfectly straight?

Don't make TC Spar to fancy (light effects etc)to avoid lags.

- Uh, fix up the "I call winner" thing.
Some players get in the spar arena, but because of lag, the player next in the queue somehow gets in and boots the other player out! What the flip!
- Players still manage to use NPCs in the spar arena, they use that magic thing that lets off explosions all over the level, etc.
- You should automatically be healed to 13hearts after you die. It gets annoying running all the way back to the hp, than calling winner again.

datz ma l1st bra!