My thoughts so far, a top 10 list

For those of you who don't know, I played a bit of bolo back in the 90's, and recently found winbolo. I thought I'd give some feedback:

1) Open games are played SOO much more than back then. I was dissapointed in that at first, because only scrubs ever played open back in the day. I've found alot of talent out in the current Open world, and have been impressed by the play of many of you.

2) I cannot tell for sure, since I was away from the game for so long, but I'm 85% convinced that the gunsight range is a tiny bit longer than the original bolo.

3) Again, I cannot tell for sure, but I think pills may shoot a tiny bit faster and/or do more damage at higher velocity. I was known (after it was reveiled at the Swarthmore tournament) for playing with little or no armor most of the time. Seems like I take that one last shot now and die. It could simply be that I'm still rusty.

4) Very few peeps utilize the "decoy" method of taking pills. This is probably because in open games to die can be faster than refueling.

5) "Hardlining" pills by 2 players seems to be the prevailant method of taking a pill down... usually resulting in the death of one player (the closest).

6) In non-open games, many peeps focus way too much on pillboxes.

7) This list is not in priority order... this one is the biggest problem with winbolo at the moment: People ally EVERYONE. What the heck. So what if 2 peeps have 12 pills and 6 peeps have 4. when player #9 logs in, the peeps with 6 should not ally him!!! sheesh.

8) Related to above, I have yet to see a list of "boloettiquette". We should have something like that posted on this site for newbies, etc. as a general reference. If we (we already, and I've only been here 2 weeks :P ) are going to call ourselves a community, we should act like one.

9) There is no push that I know of to get peeps signed up for this site.

10) HROTH lives.

2) Yes, I think it is too, but to make sure I'll go check my Color Classic :lol:

3) Yes, the pills do shoot a bit faster any do more damage, but what I like about Winbolo you don't get "sucked" into the line of fire in Bolo. (I mean because you get pushed back and is bit harder to get out of the way) But in Winbolo you can turn out of the way quickly and aviod alot of damage.

4) Most of the players you meet in open games are newbies and never learned how to do the decoy method.

5) Newbies did catch onto this method though, they seem to stay in a large unorginized groups.

6) Thats so true, but once again it all depends on who you are playing if they are new they don't know that alot bases helps alot, so you don't get stuck into a corner with one base left and someone spikes it. Game over.

7) Newbies are invading!!! But its even worse when 8 people have 15 pills and 2 only have one. (most open games are this way)

9) Sadly theres alot of winbolo'ers who don't want signup, they could careless about Winbolo.net, but its probly better this way, there would be alot of childish activity around here if they did.

There are many differences between winbolo and bolo. And yes, alot of people like to spike nowadays, but I've won 1v1s before by taking lots of bases against offensive people (raping) and i actually won a game where I had only four pills, and the other guy had the rest and was spiking me with all of them, so i went around to the other side of the map by boat and took all his undefended bases and spiked his semi-protected ones, and then when he came back to refuel to rape me some more, he was spiked, and he ended up with 1 measley raped base... which he couldnt make much out of.


And about the differences, i actually think oscar made a whole page dedicated to that...

Good points BM, I have seen you in a few games, though I doubt you realized since I'm a sheep in... ah... sheep's clothing.

Some other great comparisons have been made at:
http://www.lindstein.se/bolo/winbolo.html
http://www.lgm.com/winbolo/goodclone.html

but I like that you have brought it up again, even if I don't agree that winbolo has to be an exact copy of a dead game written 10 years ago...but I digress...

7. My biggest pet peeve in open games is that ally-all mentality, especially worrisome by experienced players that should know better. I basically don't ally anyone in an open unless I trust them to not be a noob, so I rarely ally :P and no one allies me... strange...

7a. FireIce seems to have the main site for boloettiquette:
http://winbolo.netfirms.com/netiquette.shtml

9. I try and push for wbn use, especially for 2v2 or even games, since I do love fermat's logs. You just have to keep trying, there are more and more reasons to use it.

As far as all winbolo sites, you can check out the wbn links page:
http://winbolo.net/links.php

- Sheeps

fireice's site is just a smaller version of the boloettiquette posted on jolo's website.

http://www.lgm.com/bolo/guides/longfaq.html#etiquette

Beastmaster wrote:

1) Open games are played SOO much more than back then. I was dissapointed in that at first, because only scrubs ever played open back in the day. I've found alot of talent out in the current Open world, and have been impressed by the play of many of you.

only becuase we have a few open game spawning servers so once people are done the open game they can just join the next.

Beastmaster wrote:

2) I cannot tell for sure, since I was away from the game for so long, but I'm 85% convinced that the gunsight range is a tiny bit longer than the original bolo.

I'm pretty sure the gunsight range (of the tank) is not longer, if your refering to how far pills shoot, they shoot one full tile farther than they should.

Beastmaster wrote:

3) Again, I cannot tell for sure, but I think pills may shoot a tiny bit faster and/or do more damage at higher velocity. I was known (after it was reveiled at the Swarthmore tournament) for playing with little or no armor most of the time. Seems like I take that one last shot now and die. It could simply be that I'm still rusty.

pills shoot slightly faster, what you'll also find is lag bullets (aka as super bullets) were more than one bullet is displayed on the same square, so it counts as multiple hits.

Beastmaster wrote:

4) Very few peeps utilize the "decoy" method of taking pills. This is probably because in open games to die can be faster than refueling.

you will only find decoying between good players, who are good allies.

Beastmaster wrote:

5) "Hardlining" pills by 2 players seems to be the prevailant method of taking a pill down... usually resulting in the death of one player (the closest).

hardlining is extremely effective in winbolo. The hardlining you see is just a product of unlimited ammo in open games.

Beastmaster wrote:

6) In non-open games, many peeps focus way too much on pillboxes.

well, pills shoot one tile too, and they shoot faster, sorta makes sense to use them more since they are alot stronger.

Beastmaster wrote:

7) This list is not in priority order... this one is the biggest problem with winbolo at the moment: People ally EVERYONE. What the heck. So what if 2 peeps have 12 pills and 6 peeps have 4. when player #9 logs in, the peeps with 6 should not ally him!!! sheesh.

ya, pretty annoying, but you'll never escape this behavior

Beastmaster wrote:

8) Related to above, I have yet to see a list of "boloettiquette". We should have something like that posted on this site for newbies, etc. as a general reference. If we (we already, and I've only been here 2 weeks :P ) are going to call ourselves a community, we should act like one.

the same ettiquette rules apply here as the ones from bolo days.
http://www.lgm.com/bolo/guides/longfaq.html#etiquette

Beastmaster wrote:

9) There is no push that I know of to get peeps signed up for this site.

personally I'd like to see a greater push for the people signed up to actually play ..... we've got what .. 2500 people on the memberlist, yet we don't have that many people playing .....

Min

Actually, HROTH is quite dead. I never wanna see his lame newbie-ass again! :D :D :D

were you not the hroth before acro, i think i saw that on your account.


about the decoy takes; well, most of the time you can only get 2v2s going, and theres no time to decoy (youd have to leave your quad) but i played a great 4v4 today (which we won) and i find if people are more friendly to you and youre nice to them, usually you will set each other up for decs (like mah old buddy bluesnake)

that was one long-ass post Min :mrgreen:

It's beautiful to have an intelligent discussion.

One clarification: I don't think either bolo or winbolo is better, I just pointed out some differences that I thought applied... I'm relieved to know that the pillboxes shoot farther. I was pretty fined-tuned back in the day, and have had a couple moments of frustration when I've died when I didn't think I should have. Now I know why. :D Beware, I'm getting used to it.

There is alot of good info in this thread. Thanks much.

Ah, so that was you at the tourny who was armorless most of the time! I thought it was HB.

Winbolo certainly has differences from bolo, but I've long since forgotten or care what those differences are... As you said, get used to it... Very playable, and though so many complain about bugs, I'd say it's much much more stable than the macbolo I remember. Perhaps our networks are better, etc...

Lately most of the tourny spawners are no longer running... This is why I started spawning tourny games myself (albeit with a 4 player max). Why are these spawners gone? Please return them! I just can't get "into" open games, and I see so much talent playing in opens. The game is all about the stress and intensity! I think this is why so many old timers just can't give it up; I know that's why *I* can't give it up.

I think winbolo.net use would pick up if we mention to newer players some of the advantages of using it... So many new players don't really know much about winbolo.net, fermat.winbolo.us logs and ladder, or irc. Recently I pointed a few newer players to these places, and they registered right away. So perhaps we need to simply advertise more.

Can't wait for the log viewer! It is going to revolutionize everything!

Yeah, logviewer will be awesome.

One thing I need to clarify, will be their be a timer displayed somewhere on it, so when you want to point soemthing out to someone else on irc, you can just say "look at 2:01:58 , you just sat in the trees while they spiked" or something. maybe it's already there. dunno.

Welcome back Arizona...

Starting around September, the number of games/players significantly dropped off... Probably because of the start of school. But in general there are quite a few more good players out there than newbies, and I expect things will pick back up.

It may still be in its infancy, but before September I'd say the amount of winbolo activity was 3 or 4 times that of the best macbolo activity that I remember from the early 90's. Have a look at some of the games that have been logged:

http://fermat.winbolo.us/bolo

You might recognize a few names from there...

There are a handful of us who've migrated from mid-90's Macbolo to current Winbolo. I just (re)discovered Winbolo in June.

Since my original post, I've become much more likely to join an open game. The chaos ROCKS. So far, it's just all the lop-sided allying that drives me nuts.