Springie autohosts balance games based on Elo, not server rank. I believe some XTA autohosts are Springie-based. Try those.

Alternatively, play with people who are attentive and will balance the game manually. It worked well in the past and should work well now.

Those games were balanced manually.

Yeah there are no auto-hosts anymore.

And, I find it pretty hard to win a game without my commander. I mean, he is my only intial unit. Pretty hard to do it without him. (Except for turning on special mod options, ooh shiney).

I have always said that the problem in XTA is that there is a huge gap in player skill. That's the thing with XTA, a player with 10 XTA games experience can destroy a player with 100 BA games experience, yet the other way around in BA I reckon it'd be a much closer affair.

Despite that, I don't think your summary of XTA players being ravage beats that kill noobs instantly is fair. Although some may, I myself try go easy on them. Thing is, when you kill them with 2 AKs and a Storm, it's pretty hard to not beat them hands down.

That, with the inbuilt feature of Advanced Labs, and SpringDownloader breeding a new kind of newb, one that joins, idles, remains silent and then leaves. 15 times. Make it very hard to get new players to join, espcially since they join and leave within the time it takes me to even notice they've joined. (Usually because I'm on msn or whatever).

And where was I in the "I beat these pros in their hayday!" claim

Oh, and I find noobs rather than pros are aggressive with their commanders. Although it depends what you class as tactical aggression and blind stupidity. Commander making a b-line straight for yours/your base within the first 5minutes or a Commander cloaking to D gun 2 llts and a HLT in the middle of the map 15minutes in.

oh please bring back autohost that supports !notify

LCC det left, his autohosts left also

Error milkbar autohost are gone also

Still i dont think this is a problem , human hosting is regular better than autohosts tbh.

AF well man, why dont you come back playing XTA, i dont really think that it was the fact there were to many pros owning and raging that killed xta.

In fact it were unbalanced teams that killed xta.

Xta had a influx of newbs some months ago, the games failed cause games that have more than 5 players in each team tend to fail in xta, just cause newb people dont know how to play team games in xta.

All players of 1 game stacking into the same battleroom, its such a sad way to play... If the noobs and decent players split into their own separate battles, everyone might have a much better time - in any game

Wasnt it the op com and some other crazy gameplay features that ruined xta for some?

no newb people dont know how to play fullstop.

my first game was ruined cos of a prick that knew it was my first game started air and killed all my stuff with 2 bombers. com cant make AA and since i had no metal and my lab was dead i couldnt make AA bot either (starting new lab = bombed while stalling) cos of that prick i didnt try xta again for months. when i did the players were nice and helpful. and i played semi regular. want new players? then when u spot one be helpful and dont play your best but play in a way that shows the unique points in XTA i.e encourage micro over random spam

I think i have a solution to this problem.

It seems what is deterring most new players is the huge jump in skill between them and the pro players. If there were some way to reduce this gap, the games would be more balanced, the newbs would sometimes win, and more people would be encouraged to play.
I believe if there was more single player support for xta, the newbs would have a chance to practise playing and learn the basics, before fighting multiplayer.

As it stands, there really is no point in playing xta unless you started 4 years back, because when youre up against players like babbles, shift, knorke, pintle, neddie, noruas, scifi, basic, frozen_legacy, raar, manolo..(the list goes on) you simply dont have a hope in hell of even enjoying 3 minutes of gameplay before being slaughtered, time after time after time..

I have a solution to all our problems.
I present the double dgun!!! 50% longer than the regular weaker dgun!!

I couldnt think of anything to increase the amount of combombing and dgunning of enemy coms in BA8V8DSD until i saw this abomination. You should be ashamed.

I killed someone's commander with 2 peewees. My bad for spamming.

And I usually ask people if they want me to go easy on them, some people would be shocked if pro players struggled to beat a newb, or appeared to. But when people do this, in a relayhost:



It's also annoying 1v1 newbs all day.

XTA players aren't that invincible, it's much harder to catch up to top BA players than top XTA players. Blaming the game for rewarding skill too much is pretty awful reason to blame for lack of players, at least if you request changes to the game itself because of that.

That's kinda what I was aiming at earlier, sorry if you felt personally attacked cause of it AF.


Just find ways of matching noobs together, instead of everyone playing in 1 big clusterfuck



Some personal reasons for disliking XTA:
Too strong comms, could be countered by playing bigger maps though
Too strong scouts, makes expansion slower by too much
Too strong mines, something that's invisible and so powerful is just lame, kinda luck-based
But I'm not really asking for a change, if the XTA players prefer it this way it's fine, I always have the option to not play XTA.

Id agree with your dislikes.

I agree comms are too powerful. It's not as cool when you're not the only one who can do it. Although I think morphing commandrs should stay.

I've always said scouts are stupidly powerful.

Mines are hard though. You can just make mineclearers and they are easy to remove. But I can see why you dislike them.

Com morph doesn't make much sense does it?
If you already start with a mega giga com like the one in xta having upgrades is a bit #@!???
I think that if you want to keep morphs than make the initial commander weaker.
You can't take the OTA powerful com and slap morphs and upgrades on it,something must give(actually the XTA commander is probably even more powerful than the OTA one).
Make the initial com weaker or take away dgun(inb4 OMFG,NO,DGUN MUST STAY) than there is tons of room for morphing(firs the commander is without a dgun than after it morphs once or twice or three times it gets one).

About mines.
You can send mine clearers BUT you must have a kbot lab and you must micro the mine clearers.
I mean what are mines designed for?where do they fit in how they operate now.
Are they meant to allow someone to defend big large areas?
Are mines meant to hold chokepoints?
Are they geared more towards when you have tons of e?or when you have excess build power?
What XTA needs is someone to take the dev and make rational decisions.

I suggest Scifi or Deadnight cause both have experience with modding,unless Noruas has plans of course.

@easier to move to BA from XTA - I dont think that there is an example of an XTA player that moved to BA and actually became uber at it...

dojeh?

Its much easier to start playing xta than ba from the gameplay view. The reason I switched from ba to mostly xta was because I could restart playing xta after long breaks and still beat the best. In ba... no chance.

The reason xta doesnt keep nubs is simply because you cant quickly join a large xta game which can cater for one new player. Stick a total nub in the corner of dsd 8v8 and he is fine while he watches others and slowly learns.
Xta is less forgiving due to the much smaller player base. Typical scenario: new player wants to try xta, joins 6 player game, other 5 players will inevitability be xta vets and so the game is impossible to balance for any kind of decent gameplay.

Solution:
Encourage more 1v1s!!
*Smaller number of players required to reach critical mass
*Current xta pros are well versed in the strategies required in team games but lack the speed for 1v1s so the skill gap between them and new comers (especially ba players) will be much less
*Players will learn the skills required for the larger games very quickly

you'd currently be lucky to find 5 pros