When you are giving usfags something for free you must remember they are in constant war on communism and won't like community lead to alter their accomplished assets.

I remember it is a law in US that you can't sell something which can be gotten for free or not a law but the consumer protection policy enforces it. That mixed with bad education can collide with rest of world views.

Its game neutral, see my explanation on the "please implement !join" thread. Atm only some ZK autohost used juggler, but all would benefit from !splitplayers or !move.

I've turned it off for non-juggled (AutohostMode=0) hosts.

That's not true though. GPL, f.e, something perfectly legal under US law allows you to sell your product (and not just the support).

Wait, who is talking about advertising Zero-K? Zero-K lobby supports other games. The message even gives instructions on how to turn on full support for other games within the lobby.

SL does not support the !join function. Which is required by juggler. Without it, non-ZKL players are simply kicked from games. A lot of players where asking why this was happening. After fruitlessly trying to get !join implimented, Licho was forced to put that message in instead to explain why people are being kicked from games.

You can question the rationale of creating Juggler in the first place, but most modern RTS games have a matchmaking functionality. Juggler massively increased our number of games while it was operating, and also split games by skill level. It is desperately needed to increase our activity and our number of games, which is what keeps players around.

Hell imagine if juggler had multi-game support. People could tick 'EvoRTS' and play BA until someone else who picked 'EvoRTS' came up, then they'd instantly be in a game together. That is actually how Zero-K lobby originally operated, but the lack of functionality like !join meant that this matchmaking service had to be removed because it was not robust enough.

Of course Licho has gotten nothing but shit for this kind of thing in the past so I doubt he would be inclined to do that (Remember when CA downloader was banned from inclusion in the engine release because it had the name 'CA' in it? It didn't even treat CA games preferentially, people had been asking for peer-to-peer map and mod sharing for years and when Licho finally develops it he gets shat on).

From my point of view juggler was flawed at the start, regardless of !join support or player base. It really doesn't deserve to be called a matchmaking system as it doesn't really make matches as much as it reorders them, often in a way you don't want. It just breaks the user experience when you join a match you want to play, and then it moves you away, not respecting your choice (which was you joining a game, not going to the matchmaker). If I want to play a custom game, then I should be able to do so.

Proper matchmaking involves finding a match, with players that have the mod and map, and instantly starting it, no chit-chat, no waiting around and no moving around. It's also supposed to respect elo (although not possible atm with the user base probably for larger games, but should be done for 1v1s), as well as queuing with friends (that's how your user-base will grow silly!). So basically, people can wait until the right circumstances are met, and then !join, which is how any game with matchmaking does it (wc3, hon, lol, tribes, just to name a few).

Btw, a couple of things juggler did that were also annoying, and made me switch to SL when it was still active, just to note a few: 1) It had no respect (due to no information obviously) about whether or not I was trying to play with a friend, 2) when i was spectating a match it would sometimes move me to another game and start it, thus closing the old game window i was spectating (this is really nothing but a bug probably), 3) it would sometimes put me in 1v1 rooms with noobs, who would then get annoyed, often flaming that I was trying to follow and grief them or something.

So ye, screw juggler, but implement !join and hope we can work things out for a matchmaking system.

Even an outside matchmaking system could be good, where for start you'd f.e go to the zk's site and there you could queue for the match (much like dota league did it in the wc3 days, but with support for group queues, queue types, etc.), logging in with your lobby nick. And once there are enough people the matchmaker would send you a !join, and once everyone is in instantly a !start to the bot.

<3

And that is fine, I agree, but the players do not need to be notified of this, the lobby devs are the ones that need to be prodded. If you can't get them to play along, don't punish everyone who uses that lobby.

Licho, you approach EVERYTHING with a "Me vs Them" mentality. Perhaps that is the reason you get so much shit for things that you do (And by "perhaps", I mean "definitely").

Downtime is one of Spring and Zero-K's biggest problems. The amount of time spent waiting for a battle is too high due to a limited playerbase. If there arent games, the players go play something else.

Juggler empirically increased the number of games and the amount of ingame minutes. It also massively increased the rates of the kinds of games people wanted. Before juggler we were consistently seeing huge 8v8 and 10v10 games because people go where the other players are. I thought people just liked these kinds of games. They don't, with Juggler, we had 3 4v4 and 3v3 games going at a time instead of these huge unfun hour long clusterfucks. People set their preferences for smaller games and thats what they got.

Before juggler, the 1v1 scene was dead. With it, if two players are sitting around waiting for a game and would rather be playing a 1v1, they'll be put into a room so they can play. Because of this, we're now staging tournaments and seeing regular 1v1 games.

We do actually have a custom game vs matchmaking system set up. Custom games are ones you host yourself (and just like SC2, LoL etc, they arent recorded and don't get stats, XP or elo). Matchmade games are games on Springie. Sorry if having a chat and map selection puts you under the delusion you are not subject to matchmaking, we're just trying to preserve some of the old functionality.

Juggler had a lot of flaws, but even in this flawed state, it managed to achieve all of its desired outcomes and several we didn't expect. It needed to continue to be patched and improved, but SL not supporting it was one of the major things that made it fail. If it tries to make a match and the players it is trying to move cannot be moved, it fails to successfully create a new game.

If the developers refuse to add this functionality, we end up with a lot of frustrated players blaming us for juggler 'not working'. All we can do is inform the players that their lobby client is not supported for this service.

That is still no excuse for spamming every SL user, saktoth.

Meh fuckit. Who cares. Lobby devs love to ego wank. Enjoy.

hard times, but forb, you could just shell out for your own autohosts

Sure, as soon as you start paying the devs of the spring games that you play, or ANYTIME you start contributing even a fraction of what I do to this community.

I had to upgrade to a VPS because SpringInfo, and springfiles rape the shit out of my server (Mainly springinfo, though springfiles grabs nearly 5 gb per day). Are you going to help pay for it, or contribute to all the other spring shit I am involved with?

Please think before you shell out a glib comment that is insulting.

I dont see what it has to do with me

I find it incredible how something as simple as a support for a command(s) cannot get implemented into SL.

Is this a good time to mention that we need a good cross-platform lobby, preferentially coded in Qt since it is the future?

You mean javascript? Yes.

Actually, SL has been supporting the FORCEJOINBATTLE commands since 2012-03-08, about a week after we agreed on the functionality and a patch for springLS was available.

Then what is all the fuss about? Sorry if i am missing the point here.

That was months after juggler awas removed because of no SL support and this FORCEJOIN cannot be used because its not used by uberserver we use yet ..
so its useless now...
SL still does not support the only way available !join and it wont.

varikonniemi, that means the ball is not in SL's court anymore. Maybe ask aegis and licho nicely to support the appropriate lobby protocol extensions.