[douglas]

With regards to programming, I think most of us that are volunteering are smart enough to learn, at the very least. I just can't say "o hi I know some 68k ASM, can I help design your website?":P If Gerbil wants help, I hope he's prepared to give free lessons, because I don't know anybody here who's familiar with PHP.

I can teach PHP and OO coding in general; when I said I was rusty, what I meant was I have a couple of years of solid experience (I've written a forum from scratch, high-performance caching for a 500K hits/month site, and been paid to mod osCommerce amongst other things) but I haven't touched it in maybe 3 years, aside from a couple of small pet projects (lolnoobometer).  It'll take me a bit to get fully up to speed (plus I'd have to learn the codebase which will be non-trivial).  The same goes for CSS, although my javascript-fu is pretty good.

That said, PHP's lack of static typing might cause me to have a nervous breakdown.  Duck Typing makes the baby Jesus cry :(

Oooh oooh new project - port TSC to Java!

* douglas shot

[Spinballwizard]

With regards to programming, I think most of us that are volunteering are smart enough to learn, at the very least. I just can't say "o hi I know some 68k ASM, can I help design your website?":P If Gerbil wants help, I hope he's prepared to give free lessons, because I don't know anybody here who's familiar with PHP.

Oddly enough I took a class where we did some work in 68K...

But yeah I'm always willing to learn stuff. But I'd rather support porting it to Python. Java doesn't have the capabilities that TSC could really use IMO. But PHP is fine. (I just know Python.)

Also I'm not sure if tournaments are the way to go or not. The thing is garnering the interest of the community. Problem is if the good players join then the newer players who don't know as many peeps or as many tricks are excluded, ousted in the early rounds and kinda left out. I do kinda want to see TSC venture out into a more casual Sonic player too; that's why I suggested the challenges revival in the first place. (I'd be willing to head that, by the way.) And by casual, I'm looking for people like myself; they play for fun, compete when they feel like it/at what they're good at, but in general aren't hardcore competitors. I don't want to detract from our standard of excellence, obviously, but we probably could be a little less elitist.

[Thorn]

^ I'd say that the tournaments and leagues get initial interest pretty well... they just don't hold it. This suggests to me that we enjoy competing directly against each other under pressure as a distraction from the static rankings, but something is fundamentally wrong about the formats of the tournaments that causes dropouts and anger. The format I'm considering contains no elimination of competitors (although you can still get pretty far behind if you're lazy), yet still gives you a reason to do well all throughout the tournament instead of waiting until the last round to blow by n00bs. It's going to be catering towards people who can access the site at least once every two or three days (i.e. most everybody who actively competes), with short deadlines to get challenges done. The challenges themselves will be limited to a short timeframe that starts as soon as a player finds out what the challenge is (as with Tournament 1/2), to drive out some of the memorization. I'll be going out of my way to add different restrictions to the rules or alter the games themselves to further that cause.

Granted, I still don't think this format will be perfect. It's going to take a few more tournaments before we find out how to satisfy everybody on a site devoted to a game franchise with an unpleasable fanbase. But I do think that when this format is found, we'll draw up enough competitive play to keep TSC truckin' for a while.

I call them... Thornaments. *shot*

[Aitamen]

Personally, I like the idea of clans or rivalries.  My best speedrunning I've ever done was against the Quadrinity in S1MMv2 and against Eredani in S1MMv4.  Both times, someone looked at my records and said "I can't beat that!" and I repeatedly made them understand that they could not ^_^

those were back-and-forth record-holdings that were somewhat ridiculous and also awesome...  in both cases, even though I came out on top, I cut the time to ~1/2 of what it originally was.

The big thing here is that I refuse to play against people I don't like or think are innately better than me...  I don't know how many people here feel this way, I'm just throwing out thoughts

[douglas]

But yeah I'm always willing to learn stuff. But I'd rather support porting it to Python. Java doesn't have the capabilities that TSC could really use IMO. But PHP is fine. (I just know Python.)

WUT?  What can python do that Java can't?  I'll grant you, web dev in an interpreted language can be quicker (at least if you're working in a small team with a small codebase; I maintain static typing is the only sane path for large teams/codebases), but as languages they're equally capable.  If we're talking what frontend libraries are available then sure python has web-oriented stuff like django, but java's no slouch - webwork, gwt and so forth; if we're talking productionisation (servers, containers, request handling, ...), then again they're really damn similar in terms of what's available.

PHP's a different kettle of fish - its major benefit is that the core libs are targeted at web developers and that it's installed like everywhere; the downside is that it has fugly syntax, a frankly lacking development community (and I say this as a former semi-active member of said community), and quite often a disregard for good OO design paradigms.

Now look, you've made me derail this thread with a programming language Holy War >:o  Someone get us back on topic, or failing that post a funny image <_<

[Spinballwizard]

Ok programming crap aside...

The main thing shouldn't be on the technical side. We need to garner interest in TSC again. That was my main thing with the challenges.

Also I do not have a nonsensical image to post as I am lazy.

[Bilan]

Also I do not have a nonsensical image to post as I am lazy.

Allow me.

[Werey]

Part of TSC ruled by werey.... would be the TSC doomsday :o


But really.. i would.. but it would never happen anyway

[Aitamen]

all else being equal, someone with a DC will do better on City Escape rings than someone with a GC.

"All else being equal, these two things being different changes the stats!"

Yes, only playing half the game means you can only max half the stats...

If you can't play because you don't have the money, too bad...  no one cares that, if I went to tournaments, I would often win, because I don't have money, but you don't see ME crying over it, now do you?

sorry, really bad mood today...

[Thorn]

^ Minus was referencing one of Stefan's points, not voicing an opinion -- Stefan had made the claim that skill should be the main factor in ordering stats by rank, and this was a counterexample. There was nothing for you to respond to there. If your mood is so bad that you can't read the context of the post before responding to it, perhaps you shouldn't click "Reply".

...God, I feel like the forum police, but somebody had to say it. :(

[Bilan]

THORN FOR OVERLORD

[EngiNerd]

Also, it primarily references the fact that, the primary OTHER case where spending money would potentially improve rankings is SU360, which we decided to have separate charts for.  Eh, no big deal, I forgive you.

[sonicam]

Wow, I thought I'd come back and check up on the site and I see this news update. Quite saddening, but this site really did hold up pretty well. Rolken, whatever you do, you should be very proud of what you have achieved with this website. Not only did you create a place for healthy competition in Sonic games but you helped create a community of people and long time friends. I wish I could do something to help, but my absence has been way too long for me to know anything about Sonic gaming anymore.

[Bilan]

omg a sonicam :O

[sonicam]

Yes sir, hey RPG, sad that you guys are leaving. :[

[Parax]

Considering I'm around pretty often, have tons of free time, and am fairly competitively active, I'll volunteer for doing various work with the site's functions like adding charts etc. Wish there was more I could do but I don't really have the skills/knowledge for anything else needed so yeah <_<

[Seidnerz the Platypus]

Something about this saddens me quite deeply. While I never really got to know Rolken* or Yse this is still the first time I've seen prominent members members leave (although I'm sure it's happened before.) What I really like about this place is it didn't have a hundred mods and a tyranical leader with a stalin 'stache and a jewel encrusted banhammer**, and yet it still felt like a nice community where things I did that my IRL friends would be like "lolwut?"*** about can be appreciated and  while a miniscule minority of the world sees the chart I'm trying to clambor up, it makes me feel kind of improtant in a weird way. I'm sacred what a power vaccume could do to taht but I think it will work out all right. I'm not going to nominate myself for anything besides possibly cour jester, a guy there for comic relief who is funny when he fails rather than when he's actually trying to be funny.

*While I don't know him that well I did get a sense that he really acred about the community with the "new tsc member experience" topic

** If anyone wants to photoshop a picture of that I would love to see it.

*** Yes my friends uses lolwut in their spoken english.

[Luxray]

*** Yes my friends uses lolwut in their spoken english.

i use most meme's in spoken ingrish so they're not out of place >_>

[EngiNerd]

** If anyone wants to photoshop a picture of that I would love to see it.

OLD
There's a PSd Magic card for it somewhere ... I haven't seen it in awhile though.

[Aitamen]

^ Minus was referencing one of Stefan's points, not voicing an opinion -- Stefan had made the claim that skill should be the main factor in ordering stats by rank, and this was a counterexample. There was nothing for you to respond to there. If your mood is so bad that you can't read the context of the post before responding to it, perhaps you shouldn't click "Reply".

...God, I feel like the forum police, but somebody had to say it. :(

I feel like there was something for me to reply to, because he views stats of the game in a very different way than our charts do.  A lot of people do, and it annoys the piss out of me.

If you don't own a game, you can't compete in it.  the SA series is interesting because you have to have two consoles and two disks before you HAVE THE WHOLE GAME.

I was discrediting it as a counterexample because it has incorrect premises.

[Bilan]

I don't own Sonic Battle and I have submitted stats for it.

I don't own Sonic Pocket Adventure and I am Champion of it.

[Magnezone]

damnit rpg stop posing as mike

[Aitamen]

I don't own Sonic Battle and I have submitted stats for it.

I don't own Sonic Pocket Adventure and I am Champion of it.

Umm...  ROMs are the same as the game, and you have ROMs, so yes, you do have the game

dur.

[Bilan]

Not in the legal word!

[Spinballwizard]

damnit rpg stop posing as mike

I second this.

Also I call BS, RPG loses every championship he gains within days of gaining it.