Sergeant Kelly's Weapon Pack V9

[ShadowStep]

Hey Azrael, i wan wondering when Sergeant Kelly's Weapon Pack V9 is released would you be able to put it on the Ballistic Jailbreak server?

[Azarael]

I'll take the weapons which add something to the game and balance them. The rest of the weapons, along with all the pointless camouflage, weapons that don't work correctly online and all of the other bullshit Kelly likes to shove into his packs, will be deleted from the packages.

That pack has been due for so long - Kelly needs to stop releasing beta after beta after beta and get the fucking thing done, but since he thinks he's always right there's very little you can say to such a closed-minded idiot.

[Azarael]

Hi Sewer Rat,

--------------------
Real big of you Azarael. Hide behind a different name, post on a site with less moderation so you can get away with your inflammatory posts.

You just can't be satisfied, can you? Not only did Sgt. Kelly resolve that copy right infringement issue for you, he cracked down on grammar like you demanded, we even incorporated suggestions you made to our mod.
Even still you've insulted the members of RuneStorm, you've insulted the staff of RuneStorm, you've insulted the work of all modders and developers of Ballistic Weapons.

I've tried reasoning with you. I tried making compromises. Hell, I fought for your side of things against all the other moderators until the bitter end, despite your tendency to insult others on the forum the very next day and make me look like an idiot for thinking you might be something more than an arrogant, selfish little brat.

You think your opinion is the only one that matters, because no one else has the patience, time,
or familiarity with English to write a lengthy response to back up their opinion, since, according to you, democracy must mean nothing.

Despite all this, we still didn't ban you. I can't fathom why. Probably something I said in your defense...

Sergeant Kelly, Simon, Blade, and I no longer allow you use of our IP. If you even value deceny at all, I would recommend removing it from your balance pack.

Apparently this is what you get for trying to help. I have no intention of complying.

[CaptainXavious]

I'm sorry to be an inconvenience to anyone else on this forum I may disrupt, I seek only to make both sides of this debate known.

My PM was in response to this comment on ModDB:

Steorra, on ModDB, who I can only imagine is also known as Azarael since he made the above post:
-------

I hope "finishing up" means that weapons will have the same functionality both online and offline, because otherwise I will have to laugh when the guy who's branded a community effort under his own name despite having the leadership, charisma and management skills of the average sewer rat can't even code properly.

Which is apparently what Azarael considers help.

And for the record, I did not address him as Sewer Rat, "Sewer Rat" was simply the title of the PM, in reference to his comment.

And thanks for backing us up Azarael. We got the IP infringement you wanted cleared up handled for you, glad to see you have full respect of our requests when we make them.

[Azarael]

Convenient that you fail to mention that the reason we've come to the point of such insults is because your home forums are run as a "tyranny of the majority." Do not confuse democracy with that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

The phrase "tyranny of the majority" (or "tyranny of the masses"), used in discussing systems of democracy and majority rule, is a criticism of the scenario in which decisions made by a majority under that system would place that majority's interests so far above a dissenting individual's interest that the individual would be actively oppressed, just like the oppression by tyrants and despots.[1]

In this case, your oppression is against the minority, as it exists on your boards, who want a balanced game for multiplayer play. We haven't been given a fair hearing - we've essentially been told to get lost because the majority of your forum userbase don't want a fair and balanced game, but fail to provide any argument for why the game should not be balanced. Given that they are mostly unskilled offline players with no deeper understanding of the game, it is easy to see why they are doing this. It's a textbook example of tyranny of the majority and this is why I will not honour any of your requests to cease using your intellectual property - you were perfectly content oppressing me while allowing your moderators and members free reign to attack, and now it's your turn to feel powerless while someone violates decency - in your case, your refusal to allow open and fair intellectual discussion and your double standards in moderating, and in my case, my use of your IP against your wishes.

In the form you have provided your pack, it is unusable to us because of poor balance, role overlap, massive texture bloat and ImpactEffect crashes in the LS14, CYLO MK2, XMB-500 and AH-104. Similarly, the default versions of Ballistic are unusable to us because of poor default balance. I will continue to balance these weapons regardless of the wishes of anyone else for one simple reason: If I don't, the server won't exist anymore, and I will not allow you to once again ruin the enjoyment of those who are playing the game the way it was intended to be played - online - over players who primarily play the game offline, in a non-competitive manner. Competitive balance comes first to every developer in the world except you it seems. StarCraft is ancient and it's still played today for one reason: it's almost perfectly balanced. BW is one of the best mods, if not the best, in terms of coding and graphics, for this game - and the community for it now consists of singleplayer tinkerers and G5 whores (ABA) because both you and RuneStorm failed to make standardised balance.

I feel my comment about Kelly is perfectly valid. The first time he joined the server, I had players using our private chat (ClanManager) to express some dislike about the "pompous twit" who had joined the server. I find him obstinate, uncharismatic and devoid of proper leadership and management ability - he cannot argue properly against a dissenting opinion as evidenced by his outright block of the unofficial patch if it balanced the game via a threat of veto because he didn't want to balance his weapons, he is incapable of moderating properly (logs of our discussion about Sarge's trolling will be posted on request), he continues to brand your community effort as "Sergeant Kelly's Bonus Pack" and the pack final STILL isn't out - however I note that there is a large package full of prototypes when ProcessEvent crashes and the Bulldog / CYLO online functionality remain unfixed. The latter is a definite example of poor management ability, and outrageous unprofessionality - differing functionality when playing offline and online is a pathetic copout for lack of effort or skill.

You said my account wasn't banned by the way - it is. It's deactivated, so it can't be logged into. I note, however, that it still exists along with its posts, and from reading your boards I also see that Kelly called for backup and there are unmoderated insults against me in there too. Once again, double standards - you accused me of only tolerating you when you agreed with my opinions, but you and your moderators are once again showing exactly the same behaviour you accuse me of.

Additionally, those with an interest in the BW server have already been kept up to date with all of the proceedings in this little scuffle. Given that when I added your pack to the server without balancing it, they were extremely upset because the gameplay and balance had been ruined and were literally begging me to remove the guns, you will not find much sympathy from them.

Feel free to continue to post, however, and bring as many people from your camp as you wish. I will demonstrate to you how, when a moderator involves himself in a discussion, he does not then use his moderator powers against his adversaries to suppress anything he doesn't like. You WILL get free speech here, even if you could not show me the same courtesy - provided there is a discussion ongoing and points are addressed. We can consider it the opposite of your forum. Unfortunately, by this point, I fear you have nothing to say.

[CaptainXavious]

In this case, your oppression is against the minority, as it exists on your boards, who want a balanced game for multiplayer play. We haven't been given a fair hearing - we've essentially been told to get lost because the majority of your forum userbase don't want a fair and balanced game, but fail to provide any argument for why the game should not be balanced. Given that they are mostly unskilled offline players with no deeper understanding of the game, it is easy to see why they are doing this.

Do you only see what you want to see? In no way do we say that balanced gameplay is out of the question. In fact we fully encourage balance packs, since there is no one way to balance weapons perfectly, among 3 or 4 balance centric RuneStorm players, all of them had differing opinions on what is balanced and we don't want to deny them their right to play the game as they see fit, which happens to be different from the rest on the forums.

Image of Sgt. Kelly approving your usage of our content earlier:
http://dc383.4shared.com/img/GDLWvIdC/s ... nt_One.jpg

It's a textbook example of tyranny of the majority and this is why I will not honour any of your requests to cease using your intellectual property - you were perfectly content oppressing me while allowing your moderators and members free reign to attack, and now it's your turn to feel powerless while someone violates decency - in your case, your refusal to allow open and fair intellectual discussion and your double standards in moderating, and in my case, my use of your IP against your wishes.

How petty. We moderate all sides of the problems when you deny anyone else their right to opinion and criticize them for having such an opinion so different from yours, and we're the ones at fault. You troll and you get flamed. We try our best to keep this under control, but unfortunately we have lapses of judgement or overlook things. Sorry for being human.

In the form you have provided your pack, it is unusable to us because of poor balance, role overlap, massive texture bloat and ImpactEffect crashes in the LS14, CYLO MK2, XMB-500 and AH-104. Similarly, the default versions of Ballistic are unusable to us because of poor default balance.

I fail to see how you have to use our weapon pack, not that we didn't give you the opportunity to change things as you see fit in your own pack, before you couldn't stop insulting the primary developer of the pack at least.

I will continue to balance these weapons regardless of the wishes of anyone else for one simple reason: If I don't, the server won't exist anymore, and I will not allow you to once again ruin the enjoyment of those who are playing the game the way it was intended to be played - online - over players who primarily play the game offline, in a non-competitive manner. Competitive balance comes first to every developer in the world except you it seems.

So our "overlapping, unbalanced weapons" specifically are necessary to your server? Ironic, but I don't think you understand what we are asking. We aren't asking to drop all things Ballistic Weapons, feel free to mod the hell out of that, unless the original creators (ShadowBlade and DarkCarnovour) say differently. We just don't want you to specifically use content from Sgt. Kelly's Ballistic Recolors.

And cut the elitest bullshit. Our mod was never intended to be played competitively, and I don't think the original BW was either. Don't be confusing our work with someone else's.

StarCraft is ancient and it's still played today for one reason: it's almost perfectly balanced. BW is one of the best mods, if not the best, in terms of coding and graphics, for this game - and the community for it now consists of singleplayer tinkerers and G5 whores (ABA) because both you and RuneStorm failed to make standardised balance.

Wait... so you say StarCraft is still played because it is perfectly balanced, but BW is one of the best despite not being balanced (not your words, google it)? When people on different sites play the mod, I don't hear much about the terrible balance, I hear about everything else that makes it great. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for balance, would love to see a nicely balanced BW (provided the weapons retain their basic feel), but there can be more reasons why a person enjoys a game other than perfect balance. I really don't think ultra-competitive, balance-centric online players make up a large percentage of gamers, but I still respect their desire for balanced game play. I don't have to insult them for disagreeing. I don't think I ever have.

I feel my comment about Kelly is perfectly valid. The first time he joined the server, I had players using our private chat (ClanManager) to express some dislike about the "pompous twit" who had joined the server. I find him obstinate, uncharismatic and devoid of proper leadership and management ability - he cannot argue properly against a dissenting opinion as evidenced by his outright block of the unofficial patch if it balanced the game via a threat of veto because he didn't want to balance his weapons, he is incapable of moderating properly (logs of our discussion about Sarge's trolling will be posted on request),

I don't care for arguing this, its all a matter of personal opinion and interpretation. All I know is those same things were said of you too.

Plus justifying one insult for another gets you nowhere.

he continues to brand your community effort as "Sergeant Kelly's Bonus Pack" and the pack final STILL isn't out - however I note that there is a large package full of prototypes when ProcessEvent crashes and the Bulldog / CYLO online functionality remain unfixed. The latter is a definite example of poor management ability, and outrageous unprofessionality - differing functionality when playing offline and online is a pathetic copout for lack of effort or skill.

Guess what? This is his pack. This is not my community effort. He started it, he contributed the most to it, he manages it. Everyone else just chipped in to help, but this is Sgt. Kelly's work. No one else is complaining about this name. And we clearly couldn't call it a community pack anyways, since the whole community doesn't agree with it, nor does the majority help with it.

Another thing. We aren't professionals, we never claimed to be professionals. This is something we are doing to learn and have fun. I can point you to a hell of a lot more mods not nearly as finished or professional as ours, lacking complete online functionality. But I don't think it'll prove anything other than that we clearly aren't as good as we are striving to be.

And no one is being forced to use this anyways. You don't like it, you don't use it. That's really all there is to it.

You said my account wasn't banned by the way - it is. It's deactivated, so it can't be logged into. I note, however, that it still exists along with its posts, and from reading your boards I also see that Kelly called for backup and there are unmoderated insults against me in there too. Once again, double standards - you accused me of only tolerating you when you agreed with my opinions, but you and your moderators are once again showing exactly the same behaviour you accuse me of.

I didn't think it was. My mistake. Isn't it terrible how us lesser humans can make those?

And Sgt. Kelly didn't call for backup, he did his best to keep the rumors from going wild. We tolerated you when you didn't break our rules involving members to not Troll, which you frequently broke. Double standards is demanding us to help you with your own IP problems, us complying, and then you doing exactly the opposite of what you sought to correct. Maybe the word I'm looking for is hypocrisy.

Additionally, those with an interest in the BW server have already been kept up to date with all of the proceedings in this little scuffle. Given that when I added your pack to the server without balancing it, they were extremely upset because the gameplay and balance had been ruined and were literally begging me to remove the guns, you will not find much sympathy from them.

I seek no sympathy. All I ask is that you do what they asked for originally and remove our guns. This is another example of you using something without having to.

Feel free to continue to post, however, and bring as many people from your camp as you wish. I will demonstrate to you how, when a moderator involves himself in a discussion, he does not then use his moderator powers against his adversaries to suppress anything he doesn't like. You WILL get free speech here, even if you could not show me the same courtesy - provided there is a discussion ongoing and points are addressed. We can consider it the opposite of your forum. Unfortunately, by this point, I fear you have nothing to say.

I don't want anyone else in this discussion but me, you, and any others you want that will contribute to this debate. As long as you don't result to insults like usual to get your point across, we should be fully capable of keeping this civil. I promise I won't have to insult you.

[Azarael]

So much omnislashing. This is going to be fun, as I'm forced to counter in the same way.

Do you only see what you want to see? In no way do we say that balanced gameplay is out of the question. In fact we fully encourage balance packs, since there is no one way to balance weapons perfectly, among 3 or 4 balance centric RuneStorm players, all of them had differing opinions on what is balanced and we don't want to deny them their right to play the game as they see fit, which happens to be different from the rest on the forums.

I don't know if I've mentioned this or not, but the reason I want BW proper to be balanced is because that's what people see when they download the mod. When a user downloads the Ballistic Weapons mod, it's not BallisticPro, Kaboodles' Pack, OCAdam's pack etc that they see - it's the default version. A mod is already difficult to publicise and a mod of a mod goes nowhere. If a player were to go onto a Ballistic Weapons server in the past (or present, w/r/t ABA) and see that it's unbalanced and has poor gameplay, do you think they're going to mosey on over to the RuneStorm forums and pick up a balance pack that they can play on their own offline? Are they hell.

When trying to make a mod popular online (which does matter, because good multiplayer spreads the existence of a mod like wildfire, look at CarBall and Team ArenaMaster) standardised balance and gameplay is everything. If offline players want something unbalanced, then it is their prerogative to mod the mod, as then it doesn't matter that they've created a mod of a mod with little chance of becoming popular, because it will be only them playing it offline.

It's a textbook example of tyranny of the majority and this is why I will not honour any of your requests to cease using your intellectual property - you were perfectly content oppressing me while allowing your moderators and members free reign to attack, and now it's your turn to feel powerless while someone violates decency - in your case, your refusal to allow open and fair intellectual discussion and your double standards in moderating, and in my case, my use of your IP against your wishes.

How petty. We moderate all sides of the problems when you deny anyone else their right to opinion and criticize them for having such an opinion so different from yours, and we're the ones at fault. You troll and you get flamed. We try our best to keep this under control, but unfortunately we have lapses of judgement or overlook things. Sorry for being human.

I criticise people, as well you know because it was the entire basis of our discussion on MSN before, because they post an unsupported opinion in a discussion.

Say we have Poster A and Poster B. Each of them makes posts on the G5.

Poster A: The G5 is fine.

Poster B: The G5 is unbalanced because the rocket's splash radius is e too large, the rocket's turn rate in conjunction with the laser is too fast and the damage is too high. The G5 is an incredibly popular weapon in play because of these issues.

Poster A completely failed to support his opinion: He simply posted his opinion that the G5 is fine. This contributes nothing to a discussion, because the reasons for his opinion are not given and thus nobody can attack it.

Poster B posted a supported opinion: He gave the reasons for what he believes. Now if anyone wishes to contribute to the discussion, and prove Poster B wrong, they have 4 avenues of attack on his opinion:

- Splash radius
- Damage
- Turn rate
- Laser

Poster B can then either go into more detail, counter in kind or marshall up video and numeric evidence to further his point.

Under your system, which you label democracy, which is a respected system of government of countries, not of forums, both posters' posts are equally counted, despite Poster A contributing nothing to the discussion or to support his argument. If I have to tell you why it is wrong to conduct a forum as a form of vote, then I will be very, very disappointed. There is a reason we can type text into these boxes - to DISCUSS things, not to VOTE upon them. Such is the core of debate.

Next.

I fail to see how you have to use our weapon pack, not that we didn't give you the opportunity to change things as you see fit in your own pack, before you couldn't stop insulting the primary developer of the pack at least.

Already countered in my first point. My aim was to create standardised balance for the mod, because the mod and not mods of the mod are what people will play. Having an unbalanced mod and balanced sub-mods gives people who don't want balance somewhere to run to. If I had been a member of RuneStorm, and V2.5 had come out balanced, even if it wasn't how BWPro was balanced, I guarantee that *everyone* on your boards would still be playing the mod. That's what annoys me. There's complaint and complaint and complaint about balance, but I know full well that if RuneStorm had balanced the mod, everyone would have just sucked it up and got on with it, and maybe come out feeling better about the mod now that all the weapons were equally strong and had their own niches.

I don't have to use your weapon pack. I simply won't stop using it because of your reluctance to balance it, or because of your hatred of me (I'm told the BWC forums are getting pretty interesting right now) which is borne from my attempts to speak the truth: Namely, the mod should be balanced, you cannot moderate properly, discussions aren't votes, Kelly is obstinate and low-skilled / offline players have no right to comment on balance if all they want the mod for is to blow the shit out of bots or Invasion monsters with superweapons and mines. They live in a different world, and if they want to blow the shit out of bots in a balanced game that's what the Damage Scale slider is there for in a balanced game

So our "overlapping, unbalanced weapons" specifically are necessary to your server? Ironic, but I don't think you understand what we are asking. We aren't asking to drop all things Ballistic Weapons, feel free to mod the hell out of that, unless the original creators (ShadowBlade and DarkCarnovour) say differently. We just don't want you to specifically use content from Sgt. Kelly's Ballistic Recolors.

And cut the elitist bullshit. Our mod was never intended to be played competitively, and I don't think the original BW was either. Don't be confusing our work with someone else's.

Strawman - you've selectively ignored certain things. I mentioned in my first post in this thread that I would cut out the weapons that overlap roles. This means that on my server right now, we run the following weapons:

CYLO MK1 and MK2
LS-14 Laser Carbine
A49 Skrith Blaster
G28 Grenade
XM84 Flashbang

Weapons we would run if they worked the same online as they did offline:

NEX Plas-Edge
Bulldog Assault Cannon

Weapons yet to balance:
SKAS-12

8 weapons out of however many in your pack, cause we're not interested one bit in superweapons, that add something to the game via role uniqueness. The rest are simply designed to obscure existing weapons while having more functionality or being significantly more powerful. I dunno about you, but I'd be sad that I'd been so blind, and this is yet another of Kelly's failings. He doesn't appear think about what his weapons are going to add to the game, or how they're going to fit. If he finds a weapon is going to overlap (AH-104 is an absolutely stellar example of this) it seems he will simply buff it to be completely outrageous. When I uploaded this pack, the AH-104 was hitting people for 95 damage. That's atrocious, unforgivable balance. It was better than weapons in classes that are supposed to majorly outpower sidearms!

And yes, I understand perfectly what you're asking. See previous point. Ultimately, me removing the weapons relies upon my good will, and even if in some way I should be forced to, it won't really be me that suffers - it'll be my clients who won't be able to use the guns because of this vendetta. I spend more time these days playing Bloodline Champions simply because I am, at this point, very tired of these problems, and it's killing my motivation to work on the #3 server or play it because of how associated BW is for me now with these issues.

As for "elitist" bullshit... I'm not sure what exactly you mean here. Would you call Relic Entertainment elitist? Blizzard Entertainment? Electronic Arts? Stunlock Studios? All of these companies recruit high-level players of their games in order to balance them, because lower tier players cannot play the game to the extent that they understand what is balanced and what isn't. Is it elitist that I cannot walk into the Houses of Parliament and make a speech on the floor, because I am not an elected Member of Parliament or have other authority to be there? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. One thing is for sure - I am not going to lose any sleep over it, nor am I going to insult anyone, because I understand perfectly well that I am not qualified to be there making speeches and legislation. The same would go for you and your members - bandying around accusations of elitism every time there's something you can't do isn't the way forward.

While you may not want to balance your mod, you have provided no satisfactory reasons for why not. Again, I say. Everyone else is aiming for a balanced game, and I was even prepared to help and do all the groundwork myself. I did spend a significant amount of my time balancing BallisticPro. Why should you be any different? You, and RuneStorm as well, could have gained so much more recognition had you done so in the first place.

Wait... so you say StarCraft is still played because it is perfectly balanced, but BW is one of the best despite not being balanced (not your words, google it)? When people on different sites play the mod, I don't hear much about the terrible balance, I hear about everything else that makes it great. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for balance, would love to see a nicely balanced BW (provided the weapons retain their basic feel), but there can be more reasons why a person enjoys a game other than perfect balance. I really don't think ultra-competitive, balance-centric online players make up a large percentage of gamers, but I still respect their desire for balanced game play. I don't have to insult them for disagreeing. I don't think I ever have.

BW is one of the best mods for UT2004. Crap balance plagues all UT2004 mods except CarBall, which I note has a dedicated online community playing it. ChaosUT is a particularly good example of terrible balance - the MUG, Crossbow and Chaos Sniper Rifle are inherently useless, and the ERDW and Proxy Mines absolutely destroy opponents. The shame, and the real reason I've taken this so far, is because BW's art and coding are absolutely leagues above everything else in the UT2004 mod scene - there is no finished mod that really compares to BW - and yet there are two or three played servers for it because gameplay, design and balance were ignored. It's a crying shame, it really is. It's like making a really beautiful car, and putting in a shitty engine. Sure, you will find people who will still drive it for how good it looks, and some personal appeal to them... but everyone else will go find a car which looks good and drives nicely as well, and that's exactly what they did. It didn't have to be this way...

I don't care for arguing this, its all a matter of personal opinion and interpretation. All I know is those same things were said of you too.

Plus justifying one insult for another gets you nowhere.

We're in agreement here. Things like this cannot be concretely argued and thus there is no point pressing this either way beyond this point.

Please note that I am reading through your message as I reply to it, because of its structure.

Guess what? This is his pack. This is not my community effort. He started it, he contributed the most to it, he manages it. Everyone else just chipped in to help, but this is Sgt. Kelly's work. No one else is complaining about this name. And we clearly couldn't call it a community pack anyways, since the whole community doesn't agree with it, nor does the majority help with it.

Another thing. We aren't professionals, we never claimed to be professionals. This is something we are doing to learn and have fun. I can point you to a hell of a lot more mods not nearly as finished or professional as ours, lacking complete online functionality. But I don't think it'll prove anything other than that we clearly aren't as good as we are striving to be.

And no one is being forced to use this anyways. You don't like it, you don't use it. That's really all there is to it.

Regardless of the originator or the person contributing the most work, I believe a team is a team. For example, in the Assault gametype, there are a lot of poor maps. Over the time we've been rebalancing this server and recreating maps from scratch or almost from scratch in order to improve crippling gameplay problems. A lot of this is mostly my work, but if anyone subsequently improves it or adds to it, they get shared author credit. Hell, on many of these maps, I didn't even leave credit in the LevelInfo to myself. Anyone who has the will to contribute work for nothing gets equal credit. I'm not the only one who finds it quite vain that the pack is branded as Sergeant Kelly's.

Yes. I agree that there are a lot of mods worse than yours. I wouldn't have bothered pressing so hard for improvement and balance if I did not think that in some areas you possessed skills. However, I do not think it would have been a major pain to balance the mod, and I also think that expressing my concern that coding time was being used upon prototype weapons with no art which weren't going to be included in the V9 pack instead of fixing problems with V9 online compatibility is a completely legitimate grievance. It wasn't effective time management, especially when you had stated to your members that a release would be coming out soon. Valve Time is for when things go wrong, not for covering for making side-projects instead of concentrating upon the impending release.

Rest assured - if BW wasn't moddable, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Default BW is unplayable.

I didn't think it was. My mistake. Isn't it terrible how us lesser humans can make those?

And Sgt. Kelly didn't call for backup, he did his best to keep the rumors from going wild. We tolerated you when you didn't break our rules involving members to not Troll, which you frequently broke. Double standards is demanding us to help you with your own IP problems, us complying, and then you doing exactly the opposite of what you sought to correct. Maybe the word I'm looking for is hypocrisy.

I am not infallible nor did I ever claim to be. The people of these boards have learned that the hard way more than once.

"You can even argue with Azarael / Steorra, who has happily decided to troll there as well." Verbatim. This is calling for backup.

I would enjoy seeing how I was trolling. I'll provide a definition for you:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory[citation needed], extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[3]

Given that my entire grievance with you was that there were too many emotional responses and a lack of discussion, I think I shot down your accusation completely simply by stating that the aim of a troll is to provoke an emotional response and to derail discussion. A troll has no interest whatsoever in the subject matter of the board or topic, seeking simply to cause annoyance and disruption, and if I were a troll, I wouldn't even be talking to you now.

I seek no sympathy. All I ask is that you do what they asked for originally and remove our guns. This is another example of you using something without having to.

I still have no reason to respect their wishes. I won't ask you necessarily to convince me though. If you can convince three of our members here that it should be done, or convince me directly, I will honour your request - just as when in an organised debate, it is not the opponent who must be convinced that his position is wrong - it is the neutral audience who must be convinced that your position is correct. Be assured that people here are far more diverse than on BWC - nobody here has ever sided with me for any reason other than the points I have made.

I don't want anyone else in this discussion but me, you, and any others you want that will contribute to this debate. As long as you don't result to insults like usual to get your point across, we should be fully capable of keeping this civil. I promise I won't have to insult you.

Ironically, your penultimate sentence here was an insult. But as you wish. Let's just say that a lot of people here are lurkers, who will be reading the discussion but may not necessarily post. If they should contact me in game and express agreement with you, I will add it here.

[CaptainXavious]

So much omnislashing. This is going to be fun, as I'm forced to counter in the same way.

Take it how you want it, but my intent honestly isn't to take things out of context, not that I necessarily think you'd believe me anyways.

I hope you don't mind if I trim the paragraphs of yours down for the sake of keeping this readable. If I take something out of context again, by all means point it out to me. My point isn't to twist your words into something that they aren't.

I don't know if I've mentioned this or not, but the reason I want BW proper to be balanced is because that's what people see when they download the mod. ... If a player were to go onto a Ballistic Weapons server in the past (or present, w/r/t ABA) and see that it's unbalanced and has poor gameplay, do you think they're going to mosey on over to the RuneStorm forums and pick up a balance pack that they can play on their own offline? Are they hell.

You never mentioned this, as far as I know. While I admit its a noble cause to try and further the mod, it isn't your cross to bear. The problem is almost exactly what you stated; no one seems to come onto RuneStorm, and actually say anything about balance, save for 3 or 4 people, you included (if they came for a balance pack it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume they would comment on balance). Sure, this all goes back to your point of democracy on a forum, but there is no actual group that really seems interested in balance from our point of view, only a few individuals and some number they can throw at us of their regular players (who rarely show up to support their server managers). I could use the argument and reasons against balance is the lack of time, effort, lack of dedicated testers, and again lack of testers truly interested and versed in competitive balance. When you take into account that there is over 40 weapons, this is by no means an easy thing to accomplish.

I do applaud those for trying, as it is not an easy thing to accomplish with this sheer volume of weapons.

When trying to make a mod popular online (which does matter, because good multiplayer spreads the existence of a mod like wildfire, look at CarBall and Team ArenaMaster) standardised balance and gameplay is everything. If offline players want something unbalanced, then it is their prerogative to mod the mod, as then it doesn't matter that they've created a mod of a mod with little chance of becoming popular, because it will be only them playing it offline.

I can't speak for RuneStorm, the original developers of BW, but our prerogative is not to make the mod popular online, nor is it necessarily to spread the existence of our mod. We just like BW for what it is, and we make this mod to give those who feel the same about it to have more of what they love, in addition to learning the various skills required in making a mod (this is personally my first proper public mod, and my first real attempt at making something I'm not ashamed of showing off).

It's a textbook example of tyranny of the majority and this is why I will not honour any of your requests to cease using your intellectual property - you were perfectly content oppressing me while allowing your moderators and members free reign to attack, and now it's your turn to feel powerless while someone violates decency - in your case, your refusal to allow open and fair intellectual discussion and your double standards in moderating, and in my case, my use of your IP against your wishes.

The only reason you were 'oppressed' by Sergeant Kelly is because you were the only one on the forums causing trouble. None of the other users attacked or belittled each other. It's a moderator's job in our forums to keep the peace, and the only one disrupting the peace was you. All of your posts that were deleted and modified were reported by the community.

I criticise people, as well you know because it was the entire basis of our discussion on MSN before, because they post an unsupported opinion in a discussion.

... Example ...

Under your system, which you label democracy, which is a respected system of government of countries, not of forums, both posters' posts are equally counted, despite Poster A contributing nothing to the discussion or to support his argument. If I have to tell you why it is wrong to conduct a forum as a form of vote, then I will be very, very disappointed. There is a reason we can type text into these boxes - to DISCUSS things, not to VOTE upon them. Such is the core of debate.

I'm not saying our system is perfect. Ideally everyone would support their opinions, but that is not the case. Not everyone has the time and patience to support their opinion, instead they may agree on points someone else has brought up.

Ultimately its a vote anyways, because the other side could bring up their own reasons why they think the turn radius, splash radius, etc. is fine how it is. Then what? You will give specific reasons for people to read and think about, maybe help them make a more informed choice, but you can't prove what someone believes is wrong, its still an opinion. Either reword this or explain how an opinion can be proven.

Already countered in my first point. My aim was to create standardised balance for the mod, because the mod and not mods of the mod are what people will play. Having an unbalanced mod and balanced sub-mods gives people who don't want balance somewhere to run to. If I had been a member of RuneStorm, and V2.5 had come out balanced, even if it wasn't how BWPro was balanced, I guarantee that *everyone* on your boards would still be playing the mod. That's what annoys me. There's complaint and complaint and complaint about balance, but I know full well that if RuneStorm had balanced the mod, everyone would have just sucked it up and got on with it, and maybe come out feeling better about the mod now that all the weapons were equally strong and had their own niches.

Again, I can't speak for RuneStorm, and I am sure that people would still play it if it was balanced, but as I stated earlier, this is still an incredible undertaking given the amount of weapons and apparent lack of individuals concerned with balance to help figure out what is balanced and what isn't.

There's complaint and complaint and complaint about balance

Please elaborate on this, because I honestly don't know who brought up these complaints besides you, Kaboodles, Baklajan, and maybe a couple others that I am not sure about. I'm not saying they don't exist, but I personally haven't seen much.

I don't have to use your weapon pack. I simply won't stop using it because of your reluctance to balance it, or because of your hatred of me (I'm told the BWC forums are getting pretty interesting right now) which is borne from my attempts to speak the truth: Namely, the mod should be balanced, you cannot moderate properly, discussions aren't votes, Kelly is obstinate and low-skilled / offline players have no right to comment on balance if all they want the mod for is to blow the shit out of bots or Invasion monsters with superweapons and mines. They live in a different world, and if they want to blow the shit out of bots in a balanced game that's what the Damage Scale slider is there for in a balanced game

Yes, I am reluctant to balance my own weapons, for a number of reasons. I have no way to play them online, making it irrelevant to me that my own weapons aren't balanced (not a reason, merely an excuse) for online competitive play, and making it hard to learn what exactly we would have to do to make things balanced.

Secondly, I want my weapons to feel consistent with whats already established in BW, and balanced in the sense that not all weapons are equal, some are weak, some are super weapons. Er, maybe that isn't balanced. Call it variety and tiered weapons perhaps. As an offline player, I am pretty thoroughly offended that you suggest I have no say in balance. I like to have a progression of weapons available to me for SP gaming, just like how many SP games have weapons that get progressively better. Granted, my views of balance are vastly different than those of a competitive online player, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

But in all honesty, I don't think I actually did have any aversion to seeing my own weapons balanced. I think I got several PMs to you expressing my excitement in seeing them rebalanced in your pack. I can post pics if you want, but I don't think its necessary.

And personally, I don't hate you. I still even have respect for you, but things like this:

offline players have no right to comment on balance if all they want the mod for is to blow the shit out of bots or Invasion monsters with superweapons and mines.

Is what keeps me from having full respect for you, since you obviously have no respect for offline players.

Strawman - you've selectively ignored certain things. I mentioned in my first post in this thread that I would cut out the weapons that overlap roles.

I ignored what? This is what you said:

In the form you have provided your pack, it is unusable to us because of poor balance, role overlap, massive texture bloat and ImpactEffect crashes in the LS14, CYLO MK2, XMB-500 and AH-104. Similarly, the default versions of Ballistic are unusable to us because of poor default balance. I will continue to balance these weapons regardless of the wishes of anyone else for one simple reason: If I don't, the server won't exist anymore, and I will not allow you to once again ruin the enjoyment of those who are playing the game the way it was intended to be played - online - over players who primarily play the game offline, in a non-competitive manner. Competitive balance comes first to every developer in the world except you it seems. StarCraft is ancient and it's still played today for one reason: it's almost perfectly balanced. BW is one of the best mods, if not the best, in terms of coding and graphics, for this game - and the community for it now consists of singleplayer tinkerers and G5 whores (ABA) because both you and RuneStorm failed to make standardised balance.

You stated that it is unusable to you. Yet you say failure to balance it will cause your server to will no longer exist. So how is our pack required for your server to exist? Removing 8 weapons can hardly cause a server to loose popularity when it has 40 something other weapons available.

This means that on my server right now, we run the following weapons:

... Weapons ...

8 weapons out of however many in your pack, cause we're not interested one bit in superweapons, that add something to the game via role uniqueness. The rest are simply designed to obscure existing weapons while having more functionality or being significantly more powerful. I dunno about you, but I'd be sad that I'd been so blind, and this is yet another of Kelly's failings. He doesn't appear think about what his weapons are going to add to the game, or how they're going to fit. If he finds a weapon is going to overlap (AH-104 is an absolutely stellar example of this) it seems he will simply buff it to be completely outrageous. When I uploaded this pack, the AH-104 was hitting people for 95 damage. That's atrocious, unforgivable balance. It was better than weapons in classes that are supposed to majorly outpower sidearms!

The rest are not simply designed to obscure existing weapons. These assumptions are what's getting on Kelly's and my nerves. We honestly don't care what they add to the game, we are making them because we want to. There is no further meaning than that. We don't care how it upsets the cosmic balance of power, we don't care if they are similar to other weapons, we make them because we think they are fun. I think the author of a weapon pack has that luxury. And again this is why I say you don't have to use these weapons, they weren't created specifically for anyone but ourselves. We simply release them because others happen to like what we like. Personally I don't care much for the AH-104, but I have no problem with it being in the pack, I just don't use it.

And yes, I understand perfectly what you're asking. See previous point. Ultimately, me removing the weapons relies upon my good will, and even if in some way I should be forced to, it won't really be me that suffers - it'll be my clients who won't be able to use the guns because of this vendetta. I spend more time these days playing Bloodline Champions simply because I am, at this point, very tired of these problems, and it's killing my motivation to work on the #3 server or play it because of how associated BW is for me now with these issues.

And for that I apologize for your clients. But the fact is that you are only using 5 or so weapons of ours, weapons that you no longer have permission to use due to your lack of respect for Sgt. Kelly, RuneStorm, the RuneStorm community, and me. I hardly think your clients will leave your servers because of how incredibly awesome our weapons must be and their sudden absence.

As for "elitist" bullshit... I'm not sure what exactly you mean here. Would you call Relic Entertainment elitist? Blizzard Entertainment? Electronic Arts? Stunlock Studios? All of these companies recruit high-level players of their games in order to balance them, because lower tier players cannot play the game to the extent that they understand what is balanced and what isn't. Is it elitist that I cannot walk into the Houses of Parliament and make a speech on the floor, because I am not an elected Member of Parliament or have other authority to be there? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. One thing is for sure - I am not going to lose any sleep over it, nor am I going to insult anyone, because I understand perfectly well that I am not qualified to be there making speeches and legislation. The same would go for you and your members - bandying around accusations of elitism every time there's something you can't do isn't the way forward.

You are expecting us to have standards similar to that of companies paid for what they do. You make unreasonable requests for a couple of guys who do not have the resources to do what you ask, and you insult us for not being terribly concerned or in agreement for your requests. What do you call this?

But we had no problem with you trying to achieve these goals. We were in full support of it, but it wasn't our goals, so we didn't go for them.

While you may not want to balance your mod, you have provided no satisfactory reasons for why not. Again, I say. Everyone else is aiming for a balanced game, and I was even prepared to help and do all the groundwork myself. I did spend a significant amount of my time balancing BallisticPro. Why should you be any different? You, and RuneStorm as well, could have gained so much more recognition had you done so in the first place.

We have no reasons to balance it, we don't have to give any reasons, it is our thing. We aren't looking to make money from this, we aren't trying to please everyone. Again, we are keeping things to scale with default BW, and how BW is decided for balance was addressed earlier.

BW is one of the best mods for UT2004. Crap balance plagues all UT2004 mods except CarBall, which I note has a dedicated online community playing it. ChaosUT is a particularly good example of terrible balance - the MUG, Crossbow and Chaos Sniper Rifle are inherently useless, and the ERDW and Proxy Mines absolutely destroy opponents. The shame, and the real reason I've taken this so far, is because BW's art and coding are absolutely leagues above everything else in the UT2004 mod scene - there is no finished mod that really compares to BW - and yet there are two or three played servers for it because gameplay, design and balance were ignored. It's a crying shame, it really is. It's like making a really beautiful car, and putting in a shitty engine. Sure, you will find people who will still drive it for how good it looks, and some personal appeal to them... but everyone else will go find a car which looks good and drives nicely as well, and that's exactly what they did. It didn't have to be this way...

How can your statement of "everyone aiming for a balanced game" be true after saying this?

And tell me, how many popular, balanced mods released within the last couple years have even 2 or 3 played servers? UT2004 is an old game, and in a market with so damn many MP centric games much newer than UT2004, how can you honestly expect any mod to an already old game have many populated servers still?

Last I knew Carball was around before BW was by a couple years. I got the GOTY edition of UT2004, pretty sure Carball was on there.

BW didn't have to be balanced for competition either, but I'd say it still had a damn good run for a mod so late in UT2004's life.

Regardless of the originator or the person contributing the most work, I believe a team is a team. For example, in the Assault gametype, there are a lot of poor maps. Over the time we've been rebalancing this server and recreating maps from scratch or almost from scratch in order to improve crippling gameplay problems. A lot of this is mostly my work, but if anyone subsequently improves it or adds to it, they get shared author credit. Hell, on many of these maps, I didn't even leave credit in the LevelInfo to myself. Anyone who has the will to contribute work for nothing gets equal credit. I'm not the only one who finds it quite vain that the pack is branded as Sergeant Kelly's.

Do the people that you rebalanced maps for consider you to be part of their team? They may be appreciative of it, but I doubt they consider you a part of their team.

And I think the people whose opinion should matter most in this subject are the contributors to the pack. So far there has been no complaints on the matter, if one should arise I'm sure it will be addressed. And its not as if no one is getting credit for their work, that's listed quite clearly. I'm surprised you should even care about this topic, you seem to think you have a right to our content, but you only contributed to your own version of it as far as I know.

Yes. I agree that there are a lot of mods worse than yours. I wouldn't have bothered pressing so hard for improvement and balance if I did not think that in some areas you possessed skills. However, I do not think it would have been a major pain to balance the mod, and I also think that expressing my concern that coding time was being used upon prototype weapons with no art which weren't going to be included in the V9 pack instead of fixing problems with V9 online compatibility is a completely legitimate grievance. It wasn't effective time management, especially when you had stated to your members that a release would be coming out soon. Valve Time is for when things go wrong, not for covering for making side-projects instead of concentrating upon the impending release.

As I said before, balance is not something we can do easily (again, lack of people interested in balance) and really isn't something we had a plan on worrying about anyways, as pointed out earlier. We were plenty happy to see you pick up our idea and balance it to how you see fit, at least when you still showed some respect for the people involved in its creation.

Coding time being used upon prototype weapons? He was waiting for me to finish up my models and get them into a usable state. He was just experimenting with code and ideas during that time waiting. We don't have experience managing a mod involving several people known only through the internet, with the team second having an unreliable internet, and I really don't think your grievance is legitimate at all. When people can only communicate and share work and progress through the internet, without proper training in management skills, it is unrealistic to expect them to always have their time scales correct. We still have a real life that requires money to worry about after all.

Rest assured - if BW wasn't moddable, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Default BW is unplayable.

This is the exact sort of thing that's the root of all the problems. Obviously Default BW is playable or else you would not see nearly as much interest in the mod.

I am not infallible nor did I ever claim to be. The people of these boards have learned that the hard way more than once.

Sorry, I was under the impression you were better than me. I don't know how I could have ever came to that conclusion.

"You can even argue with Azarael / Steorra, who has happily decided to troll there as well." Verbatim. This is calling for backup.

Sure, after you trolled. Though I thought you were referring to after that. Again, my mistake.

I would enjoy seeing how I was trolling. I'll provide a definition for you:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory[citation needed], extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[3]

Given that my entire grievance with you was that there were too many emotional responses and a lack of discussion, I think I shot down your accusation completely simply by stating that the aim of a troll is to provoke an emotional response and to derail discussion. A troll has no interest whatsoever in the subject matter of the board or topic, seeking simply to cause annoyance and disruption, and if I were a troll, I wouldn't even be talking to you now.

Tell me, exactly, what type of response did you expect from this:

I hope "finishing up" means that weapons will have the same functionality both online and offline, because otherwise I will have to laugh when the guy who's branded a community effort under his own name despite having the leadership, charisma and management skills of the average sewer rat can't even code properly.

I have no idea what else to call it. Give me another word. Doesn't change what I saw.

Oh, hey, look, found another example:

http://uppix.net/0/7/d/794340836007795b ... 08782a.jpg

I still have no reason to respect their wishes. I won't ask you necessarily to convince me though. If you can convince three of our members here that it should be done, or convince me directly, I will honour your request - just as when in an organised debate, it is not the opponent who must be convinced that his position is wrong - it is the neutral audience who must be convinced that your position is correct. Be assured that people here are far more diverse than on BWC - nobody here has ever sided with me for any reason other than the points I have made.

To be honest I never really expected you or your forum members to be convinced of anything different than what they currently believe. I simply aim to make sure this discussion has two sides to it.

Ironically, your penultimate sentence here was an insult. But as you wish. Let's just say that a lot of people here are lurkers, who will be reading the discussion but may not necessarily post. If they should contact me in game and express agreement with you, I will add it here.

Ironic, isn't it? I'm willing to hear whatever they say though. Lay it on me, either in agreement or otherwise.

[Jate]

That's some big political warfare you're having here.

As a player of the mod I feel obliged to comment an issue that has been brought up in this thread. I'm not able to trace all discussions you guys had and can't see who insulted whom first, so I'll address the balance.

When I first played BW offline with bots and monsters, I found myself sticking with just a few weapons out of 40 something of them, because some of them were noticeably more powerful than others. One could say that it is fine to have a progressive scale for weapon power in an offline game, like in the games with a single player campaign mode. After all, there are tons of single player games out there that get by this concept just fine. But wouldn't it be better to make use of all weapons in game? I mean, developers put their work in designing those, and with a progressive scale some of this work would see little appreciation as everyone would just load with superweapons and never use others.

And speaking of this game, which explicitly says "Tournament" in it's name, it's even more important to balance the weapons to give all players fair chance, fair competition. As a modification of a competitive game it should have a decent weapon balance.

[CaptainXavious]

I understand your views, but I don't think the game itself should necessarily dictate how the modifications of the game should be (after all, what is a mod for but to make a change to the default game?).

And I think implementation of the weapons (loadout vs. swapper for example) can make a big impact on how balance is determined. For loadout, balance should consider each weapon mostly equivalent I think (but with 40 something weapons, I still question the necessity of that), but for Swapper, it could work completely different. Either you have about 10 weapons with minimal randomization for the weapons, or you have all weapons available with random being a definite factor. If it is highly random, I think the risk of being stuck with a wimpy gun would be an interesting factor that one would have to keep in mind. For competitive play, this random factor might not be good, but then again I don't see how having a small selection of those 40 weapons randomly available at any given time would necessarily be good either.

Personally, I usually only use a couple guns (specifically my own guns) for most of my invasion gaming too, but I enjoy a game of Evolution Loadout for progression, or perhaps a rigid selection of 10 weapons for some SP style levels (monster assault comes to mind) to give myself a chance to explore a nice selection of weapons outside of my comfort zone.

I actually don't use my guns specifically because they are powerful though, since my choice usually is between CYLO mk 1, coach gun, and Bulldog (powerful against few big enemies, not so much against lots of little ones), which have a much more personal connection to me since they are my own creations (coach gun not specifically mine, but it was my first animated gun in a game). Pistol selection varies, sometimes its MR-DR88, but I don't have too many preferences in that field.