oh and after you jump to more wizzies, you got 1 fail, 1 pass, 1 fail, 1 pass, 1 fail, 1 pass, 1 pass. and you lost 250k wizzies/agents.
remove the random miss!!!
or remove the races!

Opps are useful and can make tactical differences. I wouldn't miss them but we're not waiting for an all-nuke galaxy I think = /

Balance must be kept. If you have an opper race who has superior succesfull-opp chances/possibilities it must have a drawback and imo it shoud mean that they are on the bottom-side in attacking and in the middle for banking.

Will it make these races more attractive to play? I doubt it ...

I share your frustration with the random fails though. It costs a lot and it's really really annoying when you play to have enough agents/wizzies to do every job. You make yourself weaker in ground/figs and yet, more then you want/expect, you have extra rebuild costs. Gaaaah!!!

= )

just gotta do it right ... didnt i demonstrate in ON?

well, here goes :

Opping concepts for dummies*

1) Ops are limited, so make sure you have several people able to do crucial ops. Most people dont have loads of op defenses, so an attacker with some useful ops and a good amount of oppers can actually do quite a lot of useful stuff allready.

2) Have specialists, with lots of the relevant oppers, and keep m in reserve. Yes, it seems counterintuitive to not use the best oppers you have, but keep these guys for opping targets that resist your other, less powerful oppers. Keep m for those ops that NEED to happen. This will increase efficiency, and by using the specialists less you also prevent big losses of oppers on freak fails.

3) Small specialists are better than big ones. Yes, the nw and planet count of the opping party compared to nw and planet count of opped party is a factor. When the opping party is bigger than the opped party, a penalty is applied. Mind you, when the opping party is smaller, they do not get a bonus. Still, a small resourcing pax is a lot more efficient at spells than a big popbanking one, coz they face penalties less often. 

4) Freak fails. They happen. Unless you have an overpowering numerical advantage (10x the needed amount and more), quite often even. Doesnt matter that you have 3x the amount of oppers where you only need 2x the amount, you'll still fail. Its a game of chance, and every time you engage in opping (most definitely with such ops as hypno, estorms, portal ops and nukes, they seem to get more of these than other ops) you expose yourself to losses. Nothing to be done about it. Calculate it in before you start.

5) Use your ops wisely. Seems logical, but still people seem to do a lot of just-for-the-heck-of-it opping. Consider the long-term effects of ops in a war, and how easy they are to pull off. Depopping a big popbanker might seem like a lot of fun early in a war, but you can bet your ass he has a ton of wizs, and maybe your attackers need some portals down too, and in the long run it'll pay off more to keep their attackers at many ticks from your planets than to hamper their cashflow early on. Maybe you can more easily hamper their income by depriving them of food by casting reduce food production on their easier-to-hit farmer. Do the crucial ops first, and the fun and/or frivolous ones later. Smart fams most often have paxes cpff enemy attacker portals to hamper their attacks, and deprive popbankers of pop by having attackers raiding their planets, instead of having paxes depop bankers and attackers bust other attackers' portals. Its all about the losses vs the gains here.

Hope that helps

*1: no im not saying YOU are a dummy crioz, this is a quite normal manner of introducing concepts to the less-informed before we get into yet another shouting match
*2: this is opping CONCEPTS for dummies, not opping for dummies. It allready supposes that you know what ops do, which oppers do which ops, how the slider works and so on.

Thought id try to clarify a couple concepts that have been around for, well, ever since IC started. Since ive won several best agopper awards, and people like wendy and a couple others were also opping specialists, i would say some people seem to be quite succesful at the opping game. So, if youre not willing to take some wellmeant advice, i can only give you one hint : if the system has been around forever, and others seem to DO make it work, is it the system thats flawed coz you cant make it work, or is it time for some introspection?

Crioz is right, and he's explained it perfectly.

Freak fails, and planet count and nw penalties, have always been around. All that was added were the Oct Hurricane for paxes and the wardancer op. I've checked change logs, announcements and even asked some mods, and the odds for succesfully performing an op have NOT changed. In your example, your pax had 5x the spell power compared to the rev's defense. As i said in my well-meant concepts post, unless you have 10x or more the needed amount (thus, 20x his defense value at least) you'll get freak fails. Since its hypno, quite a few even. So, conclusion, you got unlucky (and i'll admit it was a real bad streak, but hey, they happen) with ops, and now they're 'broken'? *shrug*

That it sucks to be an opper these days, and why lol, keep up UD.

render i posted in bugs...talked with mods....pm stefan and nothing :-) only ignore for me.

You_Fool it doesn't matter where you wrote. it won't change anything.
DON'T BE AN OPPER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I laughed so hard at this

There's ways to test whether you'll succeed at a harder op, by using a smaller % of your agents/wiz with an easier op and see if it gets through. But it's not all a numbers game, luck is a big part of it as well. Especially in hypno's, which is why no one uses that op. Estorms all the way!