Overall I think it's been beneficial for BA to be on its own server. Sure there were growing pains with players not knowing where we are, but that can and should change. Ideally if we had a sizeable lobby development team, we could design a better client that takes advantage of the new situation. The entire problem with split servers is not inherent with split servers, but that our entire infrastructure isn't designed for it.
BA's problems specifically come more from its management and the community dynamic. Mando/Ares are very opaque with their management which makes it hard for outsiders to see how they address problems etc, which promotes the feeling of there being a problem that needs to be fixed. The more transparent they are, the more people will see that we're working on fixing it
For other games – I can't really speak for them. I understand there is a discoverability benefit to being in the same lobby, but there are other ways we could make this more discoverable. (1) SL could pull a list of servers from the website or somewhere. Name them with the name of the games – "Beyond All Reason", "Balanced Annihilation", "Metal Factions", and possibly "Game Incubator" for the official server. Even better you could have icons for these, that would be awesome. (Even if these were hardcoded in, and were added via PR, this would at least be something)
(2) Along with this, these servers could provide an auto-download list that auto-downloads the game, engine and 1 or 2 maps. Providing some sort of a "Game Selector" in Single Player that will auto-download resources is crucial too.
If some infra devs are willing to cooperate with Lobby devs to this end, that would be awesome.
I don't think my suggestions should take a lot of work, but (2) sounds a lot less trivial than (1). I'm not in a position to contribute PRs for SL myself at the moment. (I haven't been able to compile it successfully in a while, alongside inexperience with C++).
ivand wrote: ↑28 Dec 2020, 20:06
ThinkSome wrote: ↑28 Dec 2020, 14:22
chatturbators
Saying like this about people who collaborate and build spring games as a result is at minimum rude and generally not very smart.
Agree, plus unhelpful chat hasn't seemed to be much of an issue recently. Thankfully.
I also get the impression there are like 3 different forks of SL at the moment – ThinkSome's, Tulipe's and the official one. I don't hear a lot about any of them so I'm not up to date on what's going on. Would be awesome if they could work out some way to collaborate with each other.