I gave it a try and am convinced it's the best possibility to play ts to date.
There are only two possible arguments against it.
The first one would be the lack of skill of the players, but honestly the gap isn't even that great to xwis nowadays. I've had some fun 2v1 games and most importantly these guys are interested in learning. I've not been called a cheater at all so far, instead they keep asking (in a nice way) how I did the things I did. They also try to copy what I do and try to use their own head to advance the strategies. (One time a guy tried to copy my infantry rush and sold his cy to get more money thinking he could overrun me, even though it's a dumb thing to do, he did try to copy my play and more imporantly improve on it to the extend of his knowlege. Impressive compared to any below average xwis-ts-player I've encountered in the last years)
The second point to make against it is no rating system whatsoever and no ladder. Yeah, this will probably be a breaking argument for a few and I could understand it, if the ladder was still used on xwis. No prizes? Ladder still valid. No Hall of fame? Ladder still valid. No real competition? Ladder still valid. Fine with me, but is the ladder on xwis anything other than noob bashing nowadays? And is achieving rank 1 in a month anything but a testament of how many games you played against noobs? Well it's up to you to decide if the ladder is worth it or not.
That being said I was overwhelmed by the pros of that server such as
basically no lag
instant transfer of mod maps
being able to play all maps (fs maps included) and chosing wether it's with ts or fs units
modifications to the actual game that can be turned on and off
a social system or at the very least a decent chat system
Let me do some explaining for these points to make myself clear
basicially no lag is literal. I've played this one guy who said he has a very bad computer and when he joined my game the cncnet bot said his connection is "very bad" (yes you're shown how good the opponents connection is once he joins) I kept him and played 1v1, the first 5 seconds of the game lagged to the point of a "fast xwis game" then the lag completely disappeared. No lag, no delay.
Instant transfer of mod maps. This is one of the biggest and best points for cncnet. Now you might wonder why a ww player even cares about this and rightly so. Let me explain: I've said for years that the official ts maps suck as they're not even and some are just complete crap. From the very beginning of ts people thought that way, that's how maps like bbg popped up to make the odds even. If it wasnt for the 1 minute data transfer restriction at the start of the game (and seemingly 1kb/s maximum) I'm sure there would be tons of awesome maps for ts nowadays. I myself tried to make new maps but people never used them. I cant blame anyone since the maps were too big to ever load online even though I tried to keep the filesize small. On cncnet the map transfer seems to happen before tiberian sun even boots up (at the max kb/s), therefore the filesize doesn't matter. I'm thinking of improving the maps I made back then and make them like real official ts maps. Awesome stuff for both ww and mod community!
Being able to play fs maps on the normal ts engine speaks for itself.
Modifications to the actual game that can be turned on/off. For years we've been told that the source code is a mystic thing only ea has and cannot be decrypted. Somehow cncnet are atheists to this belief and just edit the game in whatever way they wish. Everyone knows that having more production facilities doesnt improve the production speed in tiberian sun, well there's an option in cnc that you can turn on (and yes, you can turn it off aswell so don't be scared) to implement this function into ts. While I'm not interested in this specific option it shows it's possible to change ts' basics and opens a whole new world for changes.
A social system or at the very least a decent chat system. Well this one is really basic for now but already a huge improvement compared to any prior ts platform.
I wouldn't blame olaf or any other xwis staff for that matter to delete this post or the whole thread, but I wanted to let you guys know my opinion on this and that I'll use no other than cncnet to play ts anymore untill something better comes along.
by the way, it supports ra/yuri aswell but probably isnt worth it for that community. Points that come to mind is no QM function (as its a random 1v1 being put together as I understand it?) no ladder (as the yr/ra ladder seems to be valueable to this date) and probably more points contra aswell as pro that I wouldn't know about as I don't play ra/yr.
~Seb
Edited by ItsMeSeb, 08 January 2014 - 07:16 PM.