Also, if nobody else will use this, it's also a nice reference for myself as I will also be trying to sort a lot of stuff out. Also note, I'm not a programmer myself, but I do enjoy looking into the logic of things and I do a fair amount of graphic design so don't expect a complex geeky approach to this.
So without further ado:
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Lobby and Server
- GUI Friendly: Maybe make all lobby's newb friendly and use buttons as well as commands. Right click menu lists are my favourite.
- Profiles: Having a profile system has been discussed a bit in the past but was forgotten. I think this would be a great feature allowing players to each have their own profile storing their join date, ingame time, most popular played mod and map and other nice statistics.
- Completed!
New Ranks: This may have happened by the time you read this post but new ranks would be nice. - Ranking and Balance: In fact, the rank system needs a serious discussion. This has been discussed many times in the past and different conclusions have been reached. Some argue that most damage ranking may cause players cheating to get higher ranks, some argued that time based ranking doesn't give the best balancing which it doesn't. This needs a whole look over as I seriously think an actual ranking system should be based on skill, not experience or ingame time.
- Commands: Make Autohosts use nice menus and buttons too. This has already been partly implemented with TAS Client. When votes are cast, I have a nice shiny tick, cross or neutral button to press. This makes things easier. Maybe hide all !commands from other players sight? they don't need to be seen as the system or autohost usually tells players what the user has voted for anyway or w/e. having 16 players spamming !vote 1 in the lobby is despairing.
- Smurfing: Probably one of the most touchy issues on this board as there is so many disagreements. I personally think it's a major problem. The balance is already silly as it is, but smurfing completely wrecks the whole thing. Not only that, smurfing allows players to easily avoid bans, kicks, mutes, recognition among many other things.
It may be impossible to stop, but it sure as hell is possible to stop 90% of it happening. Many people like to smurf including myself for a lot of reasons. But personally, I'd prefer it if smurfing was stopped. - New! - Tournaments and Ladders: Spring used to have a working ladder system ranking all players who played ladder games. The died and has never been replaced properly and ladder games are now pretty much dead too. This needs reviving as it was awesome and Flop wants his cups back. Maybe in the future it would even be possible to setup an automated tourney system where the players involved are entered into the brackets and then it logs their games and updates them onto an online ladder page.
- New! - Autohosts: Autohosts play a major part in Spring game hosting now. They never used to be so popular but what with the success of them and so many tasks they can now perform, they are in many ways better than human hosting. They have their disadvantages such as lack of correct balance. Humans can often tell who is smurfing and who plays better or worse than their rank and balance teams accordingly. However, I much prefer auto hosts to manual hosting. But there are so problems with a lot of autohosts that can be easily sorted.
Firstly, I think the voting system needs some work. I would suggest the Admins give certain members a higher trust level than regular members. These trusted members would have heavier voting influences than regular members. Also, they could maybe lighten certain players trust level causing some serious offenders to say only have the influence of half a vote.
I agree that suggestion has a lot wrong with it but there needs to be someway of not allowing a gang of trolls or newbs to join a game and vote to change map to DSD because they don't have any other maps or can't be bothered to play anything else.
Another big problem I see with autohosts is the large difference in them. Some break a lot, some use different commands. Some don't play anything but DSD. Sure, this is all up to the host to decide but I think there should be some kind of test or regulations an autohost must pass before it is allowed onto the public server to host publicly.
These would only be necessary things such as "Does the autohosts have a constant speedy connection that can be depended upon?". "Does the bot follow all the general rules?". You may be surprised but I've seen a good few bots which don't let or want certain races in their hosts which is edging on racist bots!
Some bots also don't allow combombing, napping or some autohost owners even kick for killing them ingame. Again, I agree a lot of things like this should be allowed as it's the autohosts owner on what the host is and what it does. It's also their choice on who they promote to trusted users. There are however some serious problems with some autohosts that need to be sorted.
Even the question of "Are there too many autohosts?" arises again and I personally think it's fine to have however many autohosts there are. But again, there are some big issues which are caused by having a whole load of empty bots.
Also, having a regulation system for bots would also allow the server Admins to add bots to the bot list allowing them to use the bot icon which also allows TAS Client to use it's shiny autohost interface. - Completed!
New! - Matchmaking: Just about every retail game out there uses a matchmaking system which matches up games with players of similar ranking. In Spring, there isn't a lot of players anyway so it's nice just to get everybody playing everybody. Although, this has some major drawbacks as you've got players who've been playing the game since history began vs players playing their first game. This is a terrible way of matching games.
I just think it would be a nice idea to implement a matchmaking system which automatically sorts players into games with similar ranks to them for the best balancing. This would be an optional system of course with dedicated matchmaking autohosts especially for it. The autohosts could use passwords or something which are automatically determined by the server or w/e so the matchmaking system can chuck them into the right battles without any players jumping in by their own will.
Maybe even setting it up so you have filters or which preferred mods, maps and player size games you like to play and if they are available, you will take priority in joining them first. The more players that play Spring, the better this system would work.
This is just a little idea of mine I think would be nice to try out for a week or two to see if it works well or not. - New! - Clans: Clans in Spring aren't really as supported as they could be. Currently to be in a clan involves renaming your username and sticking a tag on the front which not only can cause confusion to new players but also takes up character space for your username length. It's really not very efficient and could be vastly improved.
Personally, I wouldn't show clan tags in the lobby but maybe a clan 16*16 symbol or something instead? I think the option to create a clan, join a clan or play a clan match should be integrated into the lobby and server. Shiny buttons make for dribbling onlookers.
Maybe even a system when you can only create a clan if you are a certain rank. Possibly automate everything so when a new clan is made it automatically creates a channel with that clans unique name and automatically adds you and any members to its auto-join list.
Then you could even set certain titles and permissions within the clan such as Founder/Leader, Staff and Members. I just find the current clan system very gimmicky and a bit of a 5 minute job. I like the idea of having several big clans rather than have every player with their own individual clan with one member.
- Spring Files: This needs some sorting. The search engine used is poor and rarely displays the content required when using the search. Also, I don't know about SL but TAS Client doesn't link to the right map 80% of the time when you open the dl link. Also clicking the minimap should take you to the dl link. It rarely does.
- Spring Replays, ModInfo and MapInfo: Trade's really done well on these sites and their features but I don't really think they get the attention they should. I was think maybe some automation with the lobbies would be nice.
For example, if you click on a minimap or map thumbnail in the lobby, it could take you to the MapInfo page of that file which provides download links as well. ModInfo could be implemented into the lobby somehow. For example, you could explore all of a mods units and stuff within the lobby and find the mod info for whatever mod you click.
Spring Replays could use an automation system where users can choose to upload their replays to it and view replays from it within the lobby through a replays section. This would be epic. - The Wiki and Download pages: As much as I love the Wiki and all of the content on it. It's seriously hard to work your way through it all finding what you want to find. There's an incredible amount of information that's been written upon it over the years by the community.
A lot of the articles in there could be put into some nice big directory where new players can easily see them all laid out.
The downloads page isn't terrible appealing. Most new sites feature a nice shiny "Download" button on their homepage which can seriously boost downloads and players as it features a really quick and simple download the the installer. The download page should be nicely laid out in a non-wiki format with a nice table of OS's, Test Builds and other such downloads. - Sex: The Wiki is really helpful, however, it's not the slightest bit nice to look at and read through. I was thinking nicely formatted text and sexy images would make it more appealing for new players. The games page should feature the best screenshots that can be found for each game and links to each project's website. This currently only features a few of the great games in development.
- The forums: This is an extremely great forum board to be a part of compared to many others I've been in over my time on "teh interwebz".
I just think it could use more publicity again and there are so many great articles like the wiki that need digging up and sticking or chucking in a directory which I tried to do with all the ones I could find. Truth is, there's way too many great articles for me to dig through and read alone.
Ingame
- New! - Widgets: A lot of mods and some games use way too many widgets and some allow users to use their own widgets appending to the list of the ones that the game enforces. The server, players, mods and maybe hosts should have Blacklists and Whitelists which would exclude or include any widgets they desire. For example, there have been some cheating widgets in the past, if these widgets were blacklisted on the server, they would be unusable by anybody. This may be easy to get around, but again like smurfing, would reduce it.
Some games and mods have problems with having too many widgets or using widgets that don't work any more. Blacklisting these from the server would remove all the broken widgets from use. Some games and mods may require a certain widget they have made in order to make the game work correctly. These could be added to a mod whitelist which enforces all users to use that widget. Most widgets of course, wouldn't be in any filter and would be able to be turned off or on at will. But I believe white listing and blacklisting would help many issues.
- Legal issues: Ok, I'm pretty lost on where we stand with this now and it could really use explaining to any players who come here before they start playing stuff which could be illegal for them? This is what is circulating in my head atm: Atari owns OTA and all the OTA models and scripts belong to them.
Some mods pretty much are or use OTA as a base to build upon. Many of the models in these mods belong to Atari and are being copied illegally. Some mods are trying to move away from OTA by redesigning all the OTA models to make them their own. Is even that legal? Is playing BA illegal?
Could Atari shut us down if they wanted too? I'm really confused on this now and so are a lot of players and some new guys don't want to get involved in anything like this so they quit. I also heard to play the mods legally, you need to own a copy of TA, is even this much sure? This needs to be laid out and announced to the community. - Playerbase and popularity: I'm a heavy BA player. The reason I and most others don't play other games and mods is for a few reasons. Firstly, there isn't the player base on other games and mods for me to get a game every time I want one. This is largely off putting. Secondly, I'm fairly lazy, but am willing to take the time to make sure I have all the maps, content, widgets and everything I need to play a mod properly. Many people, aren't. The amount of widgets I see when I press F11 in CA is tremendously overwhelming. A lot of them don't even give a full description of what they do.
Anyways, that's besides the point. What I'd like to see happen is players who spread out across the community and get everything active. This would be incredible beneficial to the community but would be just as incredible to achieve. Would need a lot of work but getting players playing new stuff would be nice.
That comes with map popularity. I'm sick of DSD. There are now ever a few DSD only hosts which have started to crop up. To solve this, every autohost should use rotational map listings like SPADS, DSD shouldn't be on this list. Maybe add it back in after things have calmed down? Anyway, just get people playing something else, I'm fed up of DSD.
General
- The Installer: Somebody needs to maintain and update this just as much as the website needs maintaining. Having old content or lobby's in the installer is a bit annoying. Also, add TAS Client back! Satirik came back a while ago and it's working fine now so should be added back.
- Policies, Rules, and Punishments: One of the head Admins of the community (preferably Neddie) needs to make a big fat rule list of what is and isn't accepted in the Forums, Lobby and Ingame and according punishments if these are broken. A lot of these things would need big debates but at least the obvious issues should be addressed like ban dodging, racism, and intentional game ruining.
Since moderation has been existent in Spring, it's never really been confirmed what is and what isn't allowed. There is no current "line in the sand". As I said before, one mods ban is another mods warning. Players punishments shouldn't be decided on people's morality and opinions, but law.
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These are all things that just pop into my head every now and then so I'll be heavily updating this list.
Bare in mind, these are only my thoughts and many of you guys will love or hate me for a lot it but I'm happy to suck up all the stuff you guys can throw at me.
Posting your own ToDo's would also be epic.
Thanks.
