Spring RTS Engine

Just another quick question…

What do people remember about the days of manual hosting as compared to the days of auto hosting?

Well, autohosting made it less personal, which isn't automatically a bad thing. However, personal hosting could only be done by those who knew how to port forward, which is the lowest barrier to entry that I can think of, but many users didn't bother and preferred playing on others.

The known good hosts usually got lots of players, the known bad ones usually could rope in one or 2 noobs, grief them, and then sit there by themselves.

Bad actors were dealt with pretty quickly. At the time when I was hosting AA every day for like 6 hours a day, I also ran a TS server for us to use, and decimator was a lobby mod, so we had fast access to get bans and stuff for trolls and griefers.

The games were generally a lot more personal and more fun to some degree. You would also have games with wacky settings, and some pretty off the wall stuff.

I specifically remember when we had a 8v8 (iirc) commshare match with one comm and 16 players. It was the most beautiful mayhem I've ever seen. (It was on riverdale, was anyone else here there in that game?)

Autohosts solved a real problem, and that is rooms that didn't need port forwarding. If spring would send UPNP port forwards like other games, this wouldn't be a problem. However, it is not uncommon for AAA games to require ports to be forwarded nowadays (e.g. cod4 requires me to forward some ports just so I can invite certain people to my party).

Autohosts kinda killed a bit of the community aspect. There was no voting or anything like that. If you wanted something changed, you had to ask the host. On good hosts this resulted in a lot less chaos generally.

Autohosts introduced what is essentially chat clutter (and frankly, it looks ghetto as hell).

Personally, I think that spring as a whole would benefit from the introduction to upnp port forwarding and less autohosts (although, not all routers will have upnp enabled, so that is ofc a point to think about). The impersonal nature of autohosts led to some breakdown in the community spirit. That said, there was no less than 1 flamewar a day on the forums, so there's that.

The level and speed of automation (of ts/balance, colours, afk-ness, kicks/bans) mean that in practice a modern "human host" would simply be an autohost with voting turned off and a single person holding all the controls. This exists already as !boss mode. I haven't actively watched hosts for a while but my memory is that when (rarely) it gets turned on, it doesn't seem popular, most people don't like losing their little bit of influence.

Yes, some aspect of collegiality was lost when the automated hosts became the norm, but afaics this was the unstoppable march of progress.

Autohosts killed Spring