Lol, Gook, stop being such a drama queen. If you can't withstand some criticism, then don't post, but don't force us all to hold your hand so that you can feel comfortable in an effort to curry favor for yourself and look as if you are the assaulted party. I mean, please, if I let all the negative criticism of myself to have any effect on me, I certainly wouldn't be here. Get off the cross. We need the wood.
And by the way, your agenda is so transparent that everyone can see it. While I laud the sentiment to make the D2 better and address issues, you are under the delusion that that is not what has been going on the whole time. The D2 is infinitely better than it used to be. You have forwarded proposals that prey on community dissatisfaction that have your own version of what you think you want the D2 to be embedded in them. I have no problem with you or anyone else setting up whatever server they want. It's a free country, but advancing your own views as what the community wants is disingenuous to me. The polls are inconclusive and certainly not representative of community wide sentiment in any shape or form, nor are they proper polls that were given any gravitas or supported by any articulation of what those poll options meant or what the consequences of them are. I happen to have training in constructing and adminstering surveys and I have to tell you these polls bear absolutely no resemblence to anything that produces reliable results.
As to your agenda, let me make this clear. Here is my narrative of your arrival here. You come on and stir up memories of past glories couched in rhetoric of how great it used to be to play as a Kzin and how it sucks now and how the fun has been sucked out of everything. This is the first step in a campaign to bring back old style D2 servers. Then you proceed to pick apart everything that has been built from the D2 since you have left and how we haven't gotten anywhere and we have the same old problems, which is true in one sense, but total bullsh** in another, and frankly craps on all the work people have done to make the D2 better. Then you post the hex-flipping Kzin manifesto from ages past unqualified in any manner and as far as I am concerned putting this forward as your view of D2 reality. Then you procede to oppose anyone who tried to pick this manifesto apart as the sins of D2s' past and "let's never go there again" with silly conjectural arguements about the "reality" of the game and how vast space is or some other tripe. Finally, you drew upon a couple of polls and community dissatisifaction and the ideas of others to advance a hex-flipping, deepstriking, fleeting, stock server concept of the D2 that can only be recognized as aspects of your individual agenda and one that benefits Kzins in general. Have you said one thing that would not assist the Kzins? Have you not publicly decried the Kzins as the D2 whipping boys that all the changes have been foisted upon and your extreme dissatification with your perceptiion of that state of affairs?
So your agenda is transparent to me. Now, if you had begun by actually asking people what they thought they wanted out of the D2 in a serious manner instead of advancing your own ideas with Kzin-trumpetting prologue, I'd be able to take you seriously, and I don't even think that all the ideas that have been presented by you are bad, if that is what people want. However, when someone presents a Kzin-first front I think I have every right to call them on it. I fully support your entering into a dialogue to make things better in the D2, but don't start that conversation by saying that nothing has been done to make things better. That discounts all the work that scripters and admins have put forth to address long-standing issues in the D2, and if you can't see that, then you are definitely advancing an agenda.
People are discussing and addressing D2 issues and have been since before you returned, but their solutions are not yours and to say that people haven't been discussing or haven't done anything to address D2 issues is disingenuous to me. I am all for all kinds of servers, but your effort to paint the current D2 servers as some sort of homogeneous status quo is merely a ploy to advance your own view of how things should be. I can't think of a more heterogeneous set of servers in recent memory, and to paint them with alll the same brush is ridiculous and disingenuous.
There has been a continuous dialogue about how the casual D2 player can be helped and encouraged to play, but there has been no consensus on the issue or the solution, but I guarantee the solution is not some hex-flipping server where the casual player logs on to see all his work and the work of his race rolled over by a few nutters.
And by the by, I am a person who actually likes to play this game. You know, the game, the thing that occurs between looking at the D2 map. You advance that AI missions are meaningless and unrealistic. I agree and that is why I hate them vehemently as the deciding factor in so much of the D2. As I say, I'd rather spend an hour in a good mission or some PvP fight then do 10 meaningless and easy AI missions in that amount of time. I certainly do not want any help in making my missions easier for me and I certainly don't want to make it easier for hex-flippers who already have it easy. It seems you'd rather spend as little time as possible playing the actual game if it advances flipping hexes. If all you want is a board game with hexes on it, there are many, many other software titles to accomodate that style of game-play, as well as actual board games, but I assume their rule sets are too "complicated" for you and of course so much more so "complicated" as D2 server rules.
I think what people actually want is to play meaningful situations in the game engine, not just mindlessly beat up on the AI, but I could certainly be wrong, and I think that is exactly what people have been working toward in the D2.
And if I seem hostile, that is just my status quo and people's perception of me. Don't count yourself special to be on the receiving end of it Actually, I think I have taken a rather civil tone in recent post, thank you very much. So take down your ridiculous favor-currying, martyr poll and get on with whatever you think you are doing.