owenshooter wrote:to get back on track... i'm not really sure... right now it seems like the powers that be get ideas and they seem to be half baked or just dead in the water... case in point, Conquer Stars... they were supposed to be a great new thing... they caused lots of excitement in the forum... then we quickly realized you couldn't really do anything with them, so what is the point? i heard it would all make sense soon and that they were figuring that out... ok... so why not figure it all out and then release the drab stars upon the community? i don't get it... they gave us something that caused a buzz and now they are a bit of a joke for those of us that are active in the forums...
The best explanation of the Conquer Stars was provided by metsfanmax in this thread:
Get bigwham to explain what he has in mind with conquer starMetsfanmax wrote:...There was no master plan in mind when inventory was created. It was created as a framework so that as good ideas come to light, there is a way to implement them. That has been clearly seen with the other things that the inventory is now capable of doing, like the Easter event we're in right now. The conquer stars themselves don't need to ever be useful for more than entering autotournaments; they were there as a way to make the inventory have something upon launch.
owenshooter wrote: i think they are trying to move CC back to when it was fun, before the old team killed off the forum and ran off a lot of prominent CC'ers (thank myself that perma-bans can now be lifted), but is it enough? the forum has always been a small slice of the community... the biggest issue it seems that they need to deal with is the cheating. the lack of different types of games being played. CC seems to have turned into a point race and less of a casual gaming site. i don't know... something needs to be done and i think they are trying to do that, but the place just continues to seem like more of the same as the time passes us by...-el Jesus negro
Cheating and farming are much reduced. It might not be immediately obvious, because there's still the occasional high-profile cheating case which creates a big stir and makes it seem like cheating is rampant, but an objective look at the numbers shows that it is vastly reduced. The farmers, especially, have been reduced to insignificance. They still have their freestyle quads farming traps out there, but almost nobody falls into them because they've been relegated to page 60 of the join-a-game, veterans don't bother looking at that page, newbies are steered away from it with a wide range of new-player initiatives like the coach bot and the SoC guide program, and abusing the invite system to get people there is punished reliably.
The biggest obstacle is still inertia. Once a system starts moving in a certain direction, it take a LOT of effort to change its course. CC got into a downward spiral of departures leading to depressed attitudes leading to more departures, and that spiral has been brutal to overcome. Still, I remain optimistic.