you can't tell me a general problem, what is the overall problem of the serco nation? no one wants to be sero? what do you think is required? maybe no one is listening but I am. I need something. serco is not my mindset. I need you tell me what is wrong.

Off the top of my head:

- The serco don't have a viable craft capable of chasing down and destroying a valkryie, nobody does. Itani pilots simply run away when they are outnumbered or outmatched and most itani are not interested in fighting so it gets old very fast chasing ships we are never going to catch.

- Serco don't have top tier light fighters, more pilots want to pilot light fighters rather than heavy ones (no fucking clue why). Itani are classified as the "light fighter nation" and thus more people seek that out.

- There is no serco station in deneb, it's not a proper contest, the issue there being not that the serco are at a disadvantage, but that it's actually more tedious and more time consuming to do the same things as a serco - so more people switch to itani.

- Entry statistics are skewed towards UIT and then Itani, Serco have less entrants to begin with so recruitment is much harder. There are a number of attributable factors to this such as the backstory but no effort has been made to even up the entry numbers.

- UIT by default receive +200 itani standing causing more UIT to raise their itani standing first. Players who start as UIT are more likely to make a second itani character than they are to make a serco one. We've asked for this to be changed and no dev response.

- Specifically for CtC, Itan operates a persistent bot which they use to stockpile xithricite and then move it later when everyone is offline or with a trident. This means they don't participate in ctc further than one sector in latos after which they are gone and the xith is moved later. If the serco don't adopt this tactic too they can't win, which means a serco player or group of players must pay more real money and run a vendetta server to actually play on the same level. We asked the devs to patch purified xith so it had a cooldown and couldnt be held in the bot for weeks but they just told us they were going to remove ctc altogether at first opportunity. This is not a problem with Itan at all, this is a problem with the developers not maintaining the game properly.

There, now have fun with that.

EDIT: fun reading beloww
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/23612
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/26085
http://vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/23091

Trust me, Jest. The last thing you need is for TRS to tell you what's wrong.

If you do attempt to lead the Serco, one thing you'll need to do is cultivate an interpretation of victory that views scaring away your enemies as ringing success rather than bittersweet or frustrating. You'll be fighting upstream against the prevailing attitude in VO that success is maximizing your K:D ratio, which Valks are very good at doing.

That's one of the things that I find annoying in VO, actually. I play a berserker, so to my thinking, one does not flee the battle to repair, ever. You only turn to leave the sector if you manage to defeat everybody else (at which point you can continue to the station even if somebody jumps back in before you reach the 3km mark). A lot of people instead think it is perfectly acceptable to flee for repairs as soon as you are no longer confident you can survive, particularly in a group fight -- most people don't pull that in a 1v1, and many won't even do it during a 1v1 that is happening during a group fight (they'll finish the specific engagement, and then flee for repairs rather than engaging the next opponent, insisting all the while that they aren't running even though there are still enemies to be felled).

I'm not saying that all Itani fight that way and no Serco do. That isn't the case. But the people who do it the most definitely tend to gravitate toward Valks.

So, if you want your Serco minions to have fun and keep participating, they need to not feel like they have been cheated a kill when somebody runs. Maybe that means collectively leaving for your own repairs whenever even one of the enemy flees so they can't get anything over on you, or maybe it means just not looking at the K:D ratio anymore and gloating every time an enemy runs away. I'd go for the latter, personally.

TRS the three threads you listed are good reading. The ideas I like best for the ship balancing are nerfing the Valk and adding a turret to the prom. This will be important when more people play.

But for now the game is numbers. Five to seven nationalist Serco online at once can control greyspace, but lately they don't come often.

A question I have is, do either of the Serco nationalist guilds actively spend time bringing noobs up through the levels? If not then I would suggest that such an effort be coordinated.

I guess Blitzkrieg Bob and BR1 disagrees with you. Serco are winning again by 480 :(

We have no noobs to recruit and bring up through the levels. I've only had two inquiries in the past year both were tablet players that I quote "[had] no intention of ever playing this game on a PC".

You can't run a combat guild with that.

Bess: That's carry over from last week.

But Bob and a few others are actively participating now. I'm going to be spending a few days in Deneb. I want to see the imbalance you speak off.

Oh! Two players are participating!

Well, that solves all the above problems.

Adding to the issues TRS mentioned there's also the fact that we're constantly associated as being pirates. That may be due to good PR work from the Itani or bad PR from us but the fact is that scares away some of the new players.

During my 3 months of subscription I was pretty much the only Serco nationalist around at my time frame except during the last few weeks after christmas. Still I did CtC because I find all the chasing to be good fun but in these circumstances it's hard to make a difference without spending a ridiculous amount of time online. Another issue with CtC on the Serco side is that our convoy passes through Sedina B8, so there's a much greater chance of pirates or Itani players in the area destroying them.

Who cares who calls who pirates. That's just propaganda bullshit.

Another issue with CtC on the Serco side is that our convoy passes through Sedina B8, so there's a much greater chance of pirates or Itani players in the area destroying them.

How is this an issue? Why don't you go make Bractus E-2 the new Sedina B-8? This is a player held belief and should not have any bearing on CtC mechanics.

Its an issue when new serco players come to try and clear out Sedina b8 to setup passage for the CtC into their space that duelling dropkicks like you dump on them for not following 'duel etiquette' or dumbshits like ecka call them cherubs and lowlives just for playing their role properly.

That's why it's a problem, and why when RED comes through B8, we smash all life in the vicinity duel etiquette be damned. People just expect that nowadays but it damn sure wasn't like that for a long long long time.

Oh, were you duelling on our ctc path? here's 3 gat proms in your face.

Suffer.

This is also ITAN's stance on the matter, though we're not necessarily as aggressive about it. If you interfere with CtC, expect to be killed.

If you want to duel unmolested, use /duel. That makes you blue on radar and any interference invalidates the duel.

Yeah, the people in your guild might be stupid sheep that hang of your every word, but if I tell everyone "hey guys look vendetta online is totally good for serco now" they're going to be like "what the fuck is in the water down there espionage not a thing has changed"

EDIT: on nice ninja edit there ARF

Yeah so i deleted that post to try and be more civil but sure, why not.

It wouldn't be a problem if you'd just gave up and left. The problem is you gave up and stick around and keep telling all the new Serco why the whole game is built against them and they shouldn't even try. You do this from IRC, link to your opinionated wiki pages, and troll these forums even though you haven't been actively playing in months.

Even if some battle crazed newbie wants to rally the Serco to arms, you show up and piss in their wheaties. "Why bother! Itani bias!"

Patently false, since all the of 'Itani bias' ideas are far far before my time. Ghosts thread for instance lays it out perfectly and none of that crap has changed. It never stopped me from pursuing my goals DESPITE every serco vet sending the same pessimism my way.

Only now do I understand why they did that. Things haven't changed and the developers aren't serious about fixing it. They'd rather listen to you tell them its okay while you hypocritically dump on the community and tell them its their problem. Well news flash, the game is full of biased rubbish that could be fixed with a few simple value tweaks and you'd rather have an argument over whos talking about what on IRC or who still fucking plays the game on what character rather than take five minutes to send Incarnate an email saying "yeah, thats actually true you should fix this".

I've always played more than one account, do the math, remember you're the idiot who swore TRS and Espionage were different people. Cheers for that by the way, I couldn't have done it without you!

Ghosts thread for instance lays it out perfectly and none of that crap has changed.

Actually, not long after Ghost posted his thread the devs reduced the SVG's turbo drain; not that that solves everything but it's not fair to claim nothing has changed, either.

Maybe it's time to dial it down a few notches here. This thread began as a competitive challenge issued to Serco players / rallying cry for Itani players regarding CtC. We're getting too far off-track discussing game balance and implementation history.

/2c

One of the main reasons for me leaving the Itani and joining Serco was because of all of the abuse they received with no end, UIT constantly labeling them pirates on no evidence, traders constantly doing things for the Itani side and blabber on about "We're fucking neutrals! Leave us alone!" (TGFT, har har har).

TRS is right, the game is stupidly biased towards Itani. I mean, look at how many Itani and Serco have posted above. Notice that only the Itani are saying "no, this shit is fine."

Anyways, any Serco reading this: Kill any trader that calls you a pirate, let the ones that don't call you a pirate go on their merry way.

Also Phaserlight, it's a role-playing forum. We're role-playing :P

Yeah, I'm the idiot who tries not to be a suspicious weirdo in a video game gives people the benefit of the doubt. What a dumbass...

Anyway, (thanks PL) let this be an invitation to all up-and-coming Serco who think they can rise to the challenge of leading an army!

Itani, keep your transponders tuned to channels 11, 201, and 202. Pirates and traitors attack the transports as often as the Serco do these days.

@TRS

1) I don't suppose you would have gotten a lot of requests for help from newbs in a year since I think you left the game around May or there about.

2) Newbs don't choose itani because of advanced game play options that they don't even know about. Beginners will go where the helpers are.