Fffreak9999

To be honest, I would like to change the SBH completely, the use of them is either extremely overbearing or extremely useless. Overbearing when no base defenses are in place (GTs/AGT/Turrets) as they end up with free reign of GDI's base. Useless in nearly all other cases, since all they tend to do is sit around and do very little. I would replace the spy crate to only give SBH Units (to both GDI and Nod). Then either keep SBH purchasable or remove the ability to buy them and give Nod a different unit, which would be rather unpopular, but would remove a lot of camping style of nature that Nod tends to do with the SBH.

Another alternative could be to alter the damage dealt by a beacon based on the number of players. Drop the amount to 2.5k or 3k or something like that when at 16 players or under. Not outright lethal but gives anywhere from 25-50% health damage immediately.

Yeah, you don't know what priority your CPU has to handle the workloads when its not bare-metal. VPS are good for low priority roles or things like download mirrors

Please keep it limited to a single thread as mentioned by Handepsilon

They appear to have reasonable specs for VPS. But I have never used them so I can't state anything about reliability tbh.

Yeah, unfortunately many places don't offer good Windows VM packages. I know many of the EU servers that currently run, use OVH (which as a massive server hosting platform, they tend to offer very good deals and widespread network infrastructure.) You will likely find that many places do not offer good CPU VPS servers, since the majority of tasks that they tend to cater for are web platform related stuff, not gaming. Although if you want a VPS that is quite popular (although slightly pricy from what I remember), you can try NFO

Can you get a server to run under Linux: Yes, but it is a pain in the butt to do, trust me I've ran the servers in Linux and the random bugs and issues we have come across is annoying. However in terms of rough windows PC/server specs to host a server From a bit of testing (with various server hosting levels) Universal Specs: You want at least 4GB of RAM for a single server (recommend giving at least 6GB (if you want to use a 64 bit server) to ensure that you have enough), as more players and larger maps makes use of SSD is recommended, but a good HDD will perform just as well, it will just take a little longer to load up. Network Speed - This is very important, but as long as you have a good upload speed (At 100Mb or higher (to take into account if you want to host custom content such as mutators and maps) then this will be more than sufficient, although if you only plan to host a LAN server or a small group server you can get away with a lot lower).

I recommend keeping this more civil (all of you), further argumentative and non-constructive communications from the people taking part in this thread may result in the thread being locked.

We are not over-estimating, We saw the impact of Recon Bikes being available for purchase before, especially when we released the seasonal map Flakeside. They heavily dominated gameplay for Nod (which while there is counterplay options available to GDI, once people got used to it), the games ended up being over very quickly because their high burst damage is dangerous to non-moving targets like buildings

It was an issue on our end (server list) no DDOS or the like.

What I mean by semi random is that all players submit an application to join with a minimum of 2 (or 3) roles they intend to play as. Such as in a similar situation to the PUG: Offense Infantry Support Infantry Base Defense Vehicle Driver Commander etc or however someone chooses to divide the categories. If you choose to do role based selection then you randomly assign the high priority roles into a pool to divide them up and spread evenly between all created teams (depending on player counts) and max player limits. Then you work your way down the higher priority roles until you have balanced (at least on paper) teams. As was mentioned before some of the main issues in squad wars was the overwhelming strength of one or two teams by having the very best players (who were all friends) join one team. Or you could do a complete random group selection, where no player knows who their team mates will be till they are drawn.

Yeah, we have already fixed that. Hande broke it

Sure, go ahead.

I'll look at it tonight.

The only way I can see this working would be a semi-random pool selection for team creation. Kind of similar to PUGs but not chosen by a commander.

We had a mini-competitive season a while back with the Squad Wars. It proved mildly popular but rather unsuccessful overall.

Those stats were heavily abused

I believe we have this done intentionally, as it produces an element of surprise and means base defenders need to pay attention to not just the announcer, but other UI elements and visuals to see what is the true target. Doesn't mean it can't be changed, but thats what the case is at the moment.

This was done because of the incompatibility of the scoring system we now use. Scoring was overhauled a couple of patches ago, and now gives far less points than the old method. Also, the old scoreboard had some issues with some players rapidly boosting their stats through either abuse of mechanics or other known methods.

FYI: Post merging has occurred

It occurs frequently when tabbing in and out of the game. I get it when I do PUG organisation.

Unfortunately no, it is a combat overhaul based on weapons not a balancing agent.

Bare in mind that this mutator is not a finalized version of Yosh's mutator and is still undergoing balance changes and there will likely be a lot more number crunching he needs to do.