Yeah, challenges shouldn't be refused for any reason -- allowing that a little bit kind of eats away at the point of the system. For that reason, I like Lothar's "reasonable accomodation"
approach better than the "you can refuse Loni" approach I stated earlier. Just a question of how to get it working right. (Yeah, that means I'm reversing myself, yeah I try not to do that too much.
)
Yeah, smarts are an issue. I know I give up two or three dumb kills to smarts every time I play non-retro; they've been kind of an achilles heel since day 1 coming back for me! Note that I said challenged players [we need a term for this that doesn't sound so . . . PC] have the right to insist on no homing
weapons, so smarts (and notionally megas) would be included.
That cuts out a pretty big piece of the game, which is kind of unfair to Loni_ in a different way. But I really am still inclined to go with competitive stability over fairness to macs. And perhaps it is a right that won't always be exercised.
While we're on the topic of standard versions, I really don't know what the situation is in D2. I know some people have adopted the retro versions as their single player game full time, but I don't know what people are doing in multi. I've never been asked to play D2 retro (whereas in D1, people ask before launching NON-retro!), so I don't know what the community norm is there, but I suspect it's not retro. Of course, the relevant community is 1v1 D2 players, which is like . . . Jinx and Loni. So Loni's half of it right there.
[This is only relevant to the challenge system because we ARE going to have a D2 trophy. ]
It is a near-certainty that I'll make a D1 version geared toward competitive play sometime in the near future. I'll do my darndest to support macs, but I can't promise I'll succeed (or that I'll still have the hardware to support macs 5 years down the road). That's a drawback, for sure, but simply following core Rebirth has its own set of drawbacks, too, as those who've done that for the last few years will tell you!
I wouldn't start it as a ladder version -- some of the things I want to do, like improving net code, would benefit both DCL and Rangers. And it couldn't be an official DCL version until this community had widely adopted it on their own anyway -- as you see has been my approach with retro. And if it's any comfort, I'd still rather do it as contributions to core Rebirth or as a branch in that project than a full fork, but I'm not sure that approach would give me the freedom to be really responsive to the competitive community. If it took three weeks of strenuous arguing to get the homer mod into Rebirth, I can only imagine what would happen if I tried to make large scale changes to net code.