I can see Smoth, AF, and forb being on that list... but seriously, why the heck did you add fang? The majority of smoth's "trolling" is him getting pissed off at people reaction fishing on him because for some reason everyone seems to reaction fish on smoth totally arbitrarily and at random.
AF and Forb tend to mean well but do socially inappropriate things none the less. That being said, generally they contribute far more than they detract in nearly all cases, and I always have and always will moderate based on intent, so I'd stop whining about it.
Felix... seriously, just because you don't pay attention to reality doesn't mean it stops around you. I've probably issued 50 mutes in the last 2 weeks. 4 lobby bans, one over a week in leanth. As tombom says, isach is still banned from roughly 3 weeks ago serving a long term temp ban. 2 other forum bans have taken place in the same duration on less known users. Not only that, but we've NEVER harked on policy and rules, we simply put, just don't moderate on the basis of "felix's feeling".
The following being said. Don't fool yourself. Politics isn't a factor in user retention almost at all in spring. The occasional person will get inadvertently caught in a flame war and start disliking another springer, even more occasionally this results in someone ultimately leaving the community. That being said, I'd wager we lose a good 98% more users due to them downloading spring and not being able to figure it out/set it up easily and giving up on it. I also feel that when we have put systems in place to improve past problems we've done a poor job of advertising that we've fixed things, so we're basically not tapping the rather large market of people who have already tried spring but quit because it was too hard to use, even long after we've addressed their primary concerns. The average user who hasn't decided weather they want to join the community or not is pretty unlikely to even encounter any mentionable drama.
Leaky Buckets
Moderator: Moderators
Politics itself does not damage spring directly.
Politics does keep the XTA mod bundled with the installer, it even helps keeps BA as the primary mod. It even puts pressure on the community to chastise any attempt to start using multiple lobby servers. It can even be seen on the new site design in the logo and the 3 way wrangling over what logo should be used. Politics itself does not damage spring directly, but its effects are widespread and it fuels the vast majority of our problem issues.
Felix, the issues are well known, and there are at least 60 multi page threads spread across the last 2 years that revisit the same issues over and over again and point out what should be done, but as I said nothing is ever actually done.
However since you seem to like mentioning moderation so much, I'd have to make a small point in addition to swiftspears post.
If you have complaints of moderation and certain people, why are you posting them in a thread to derail it? This sort of stuff should be sent to swiftspear or another moderator via pm, if only because it gives you a direct unhindered channel in which you can put across your view. It suggests that forum moderation isn't your point and that you're either derailing, flaming, or manipulating the thread in some other way.
But since you asked Ill list just a few of the many many things need:
- Finishing the new site
- More often releases, that may not even update the main engine but rather the content that's bundled with it, gadgets, widgets, mods, lobby etc.
- A usability study of tasclient and follow up fixes. Satirik has made a few changes that improve tasclients usability such as correcting the design flaw with the steps to hosting a game, but there's still a long way to go.
And there are many other recurring issues that spring refuses to deal with at all. Those items are the tip of the iceberg.
Politics does keep the XTA mod bundled with the installer, it even helps keeps BA as the primary mod. It even puts pressure on the community to chastise any attempt to start using multiple lobby servers. It can even be seen on the new site design in the logo and the 3 way wrangling over what logo should be used. Politics itself does not damage spring directly, but its effects are widespread and it fuels the vast majority of our problem issues.
Felix, the issues are well known, and there are at least 60 multi page threads spread across the last 2 years that revisit the same issues over and over again and point out what should be done, but as I said nothing is ever actually done.
However since you seem to like mentioning moderation so much, I'd have to make a small point in addition to swiftspears post.
If you have complaints of moderation and certain people, why are you posting them in a thread to derail it? This sort of stuff should be sent to swiftspear or another moderator via pm, if only because it gives you a direct unhindered channel in which you can put across your view. It suggests that forum moderation isn't your point and that you're either derailing, flaming, or manipulating the thread in some other way.
But since you asked Ill list just a few of the many many things need:
- Finishing the new site
- More often releases, that may not even update the main engine but rather the content that's bundled with it, gadgets, widgets, mods, lobby etc.
- A usability study of tasclient and follow up fixes. Satirik has made a few changes that improve tasclients usability such as correcting the design flaw with the steps to hosting a game, but there's still a long way to go.
And there are many other recurring issues that spring refuses to deal with at all. Those items are the tip of the iceberg.
Nah I don't agree.
Lack of time and the fact that everyone would like changes but no one can be arsed to actually do them is the reason some things didn't improve yet.
(Of course I know there are many people who actually get stuff done, I'd like to thank them for their time, but fact is that given the size of the project we have far from enough contributor/developer man hours. (not talking about yet another map or yet another mod or yet another widget but about real integration/debugging/interface improvement/management work))
Lack of time and the fact that everyone would like changes but no one can be arsed to actually do them is the reason some things didn't improve yet.
(Of course I know there are many people who actually get stuff done, I'd like to thank them for their time, but fact is that given the size of the project we have far from enough contributor/developer man hours. (not talking about yet another map or yet another mod or yet another widget but about real integration/debugging/interface improvement/management work))
5% retainment isnt that bad. The majority of players playing a new game for the first time simply wont like it. Some wont like the graphics, others the gameplay, still others will have hardware or software problems that make playing the game too difficult. Others just wont come off with a particularly strong impact from the game and will just forget about it. Still others will just get bored, and find a new game to hold their interests pretty quickly. Then there is Springs nature as a multiplayer game. It takes dedication and time to play multiplayer games on the net, you cant just muck around against an AI- you cant relax, and you need to pick the game up very quickly in order to be competitive (even on a team, they will need you to play your part). It takes commitment and dedication to keep playing a multiplayer game, and its just not time or effort most people want to spend.
Sure we can add more single player support. We should add more single player support. Its a very good idea. But how much, exactly, does it help the community? Any players who prefer single player over multiplayer wont be participating in multiplayer anyway, and so those players probably wont help the player community in the slightest. New players will learn some basics, but you can never, ever, possibly learn what you really need to know to play multiplayer from playing singleplayer. Sure, it might get spring installed on more computers and thus have more people tempted to play the multiplayer, but usually once people get to the end of the single player campaign, they never pick up the game again.
The best we can hope for is that some people will be attracted by the singleplayer, learn the basics of the tech tree and get a feel for the game, and stay for the multiplayer. Even in commercial games though, the amount of players who go on to play in the multiplayer is a tiny fraction of those who actually buy the game. Id be surprised if they have 5% retainment.
Sure we can add more single player support. We should add more single player support. Its a very good idea. But how much, exactly, does it help the community? Any players who prefer single player over multiplayer wont be participating in multiplayer anyway, and so those players probably wont help the player community in the slightest. New players will learn some basics, but you can never, ever, possibly learn what you really need to know to play multiplayer from playing singleplayer. Sure, it might get spring installed on more computers and thus have more people tempted to play the multiplayer, but usually once people get to the end of the single player campaign, they never pick up the game again.
The best we can hope for is that some people will be attracted by the singleplayer, learn the basics of the tech tree and get a feel for the game, and stay for the multiplayer. Even in commercial games though, the amount of players who go on to play in the multiplayer is a tiny fraction of those who actually buy the game. Id be surprised if they have 5% retainment.
HOW AM I A TROLL.. seriously.. have you looked at my postcount.. its freaking small comparitively.. so please explain where and when I have trolled people.. Id really like to know..
why does everyone hate me.. wtf did I do.. I barely interact with anyone here yet Ive apparently developed a reputation for being an EMO, asshole who trolls at every oppertunity, gets butthurt when people dont play/like my mod and is constantly hating on everyone elses mod.. YET I dont know where there are ANY examples of me behaving like that..
is it my name.. does it envoke prior memories of some other troll.. what is IT.. seriously..
why does everyone hate me.. wtf did I do.. I barely interact with anyone here yet Ive apparently developed a reputation for being an EMO, asshole who trolls at every oppertunity, gets butthurt when people dont play/like my mod and is constantly hating on everyone elses mod.. YET I dont know where there are ANY examples of me behaving like that..
is it my name.. does it envoke prior memories of some other troll.. what is IT.. seriously..
You do know I made several OTA mods and played a lot of OTA for at least 3 years before my first OTA multiplayer game?
Multiplayer only spring is a myth. And it just happens to be perpetuated by the same players, who usually have a hand in development or play heavily the primary mod of the time. Its an insult to the thousands of hours of time and effort AI developers have put into their AIs for it all to be swept udner the carpet or not even acknowledged just because they cant beat a guy whose spent 2 years practising every day.
Those sorts of comments are insulting and they're a flame imo. How would you like it if I said the same thing about multiplayer and rubbished the efforts of the entire modding community as small and irrelevant and in need of some actual work?
The vast majority of people play single player first, and then if they feel they are up to it they'll move onto multi-player. How else would you explain the popularity of games that dont have any multi-player capability at all?
Or that games can have hundreds of thousands of sales but not many players on their online lobbies? That then go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of their expansion packs?
Multiplayer only spring is a myth. And it just happens to be perpetuated by the same players, who usually have a hand in development or play heavily the primary mod of the time. Its an insult to the thousands of hours of time and effort AI developers have put into their AIs for it all to be swept udner the carpet or not even acknowledged just because they cant beat a guy whose spent 2 years practising every day.
Those sorts of comments are insulting and they're a flame imo. How would you like it if I said the same thing about multiplayer and rubbished the efforts of the entire modding community as small and irrelevant and in need of some actual work?
The vast majority of people play single player first, and then if they feel they are up to it they'll move onto multi-player. How else would you explain the popularity of games that dont have any multi-player capability at all?
Or that games can have hundreds of thousands of sales but not many players on their online lobbies? That then go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of their expansion packs?
that's just it
Spring loses players, yes, most of them being people who will never come back, and the greater percent, just didn't like it. Take me for example, I leave sometimes, come back, mod a little, and usually leave again. Most of our players do the same thing, they take a break, because the game gets boring, someone makes them mad, or they find a new game that HAVE to play.
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CarRepairer
- Cursed Zero-K Developer
- Posts: 3359
- Joined: 07 Nov 2007, 21:48
1.
You do not have this mod, would you like to install it now?
0..........100% done!
You do not have this map, would you like to install it now?
0..........100% done!
You can play now, enjoy!
2.
Offline battles in lobby client.
You can play now, enjoy!
When I first started playing spring like a month ago, the lobby client linked me to broken URLs. It still does. I assumed this UF website deal, which must obviously be the only place where these files are stored, is down. I'll just wait a while and try later. I was almost a casualty.
You do not have this mod, would you like to install it now?
0..........100% done!
You do not have this map, would you like to install it now?
0..........100% done!
You can play now, enjoy!
2.
Offline battles in lobby client.
You can play now, enjoy!
When I first started playing spring like a month ago, the lobby client linked me to broken URLs. It still does. I assumed this UF website deal, which must obviously be the only place where these files are stored, is down. I'll just wait a while and try later. I was almost a casualty.
Iamacup is somewhat out of action and when he does pick up UF work again there'll be a slew of bugfixes and features he needs to fix and implement.1.
You do not have this mod, would you like to install it now?
0..........100% done!
You do not have this map, would you like to install it now?
0..........100% done!
You can play now, enjoy!
Ontop of that another political wrangling lies in wait.
Iamacup stores all his files with MD5 hashes attached. Rather than add a CRC hash he wants spring to shift to MD5 hashes too.
Spring uses CRC hashes, and there doesnt appear to be anyone willing to implement MD5 hashes. The archives themselves also use CRC hashes in their headers, which in a recent patch where added. Implementing MD5 hashes now would slow unitsync down by orders of magnitude compared to the new uber fast unitsync hashing, while negating the added benefits of reading the headers, such as last modified dates not mattering anymore, and sdz and sd7 files being interchangeable as long as their contents match.
Sadly tasclient relies heavily on the server for battles. There would need to be a lot of extra refactoring of the battle code in TASClient to make it work, at which point you then have usability issues.2.
Offline battles in lobby client.
You can play now, enjoy!
The quickest method would be to launch a local instance of the server and connect to it at which point you have all sorts of little usability issues from the kludge.
The next quickest method and probably the best is to implement an entire single player client from scratch inside tasclient.
But that's still a lot more effort, and its easily squished by something programs SpringSP. So why bother?
These solutions are not well thought out, and provide more issues than they solve. They're tantamount to waving a magic wand. If only it where so simple!
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CarRepairer
- Cursed Zero-K Developer
- Posts: 3359
- Joined: 07 Nov 2007, 21:48
The tasks may be extremely difficult but not impossible, and my point is that it is my opinion that the 2 items I mentioned - and these alone, nothing else matters - are the only solutions to the leaky bucket. It is unfortunate but it is reality. You must have one download that works without requiring anything else.These solutions are not well thought out, and provide more issues than they solve. They're tantamount to waving a magic wand. If only it where so simple!
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CarRepairer
- Cursed Zero-K Developer
- Posts: 3359
- Joined: 07 Nov 2007, 21:48
I forgot to mention: obviously I am a smart enough user to know how to download files onto my computer as I am playing now. But this wasn't even the issue. In this fast-paced information age I didn't even consider a broken client, searching on my own, etc. I nearly defaulted to "it doesn't work, and I don't care enough to try to make it work because I haven't even played this game yet so it might not be worth the trouble." Imagine how much worse this situation is for a computer-nonfriendly user who wouldn't even know how to if they did invest the time. He will leak. It must work the first time with no effort beyond the first download on the first try.CarRepairer wrote:When I first started playing spring like a month ago, the lobby client linked me to broken URLs. It still does. I assumed this UF website deal, which must obviously be the only place where these files are stored, is down. I'll just wait a while and try later. I was almost a casualty.
I still think, as a stopgap measure, an official spring package (off the site here) should include Spring SP, and enough mods and maps that you can jump on the client and find at least 1 game you can join.
I mean, ok, so it's a couple hundred megs. Not that big a deal, these days. Still less than the multiple gigabytes most downloaded games run you.
I mean, ok, so it's a couple hundred megs. Not that big a deal, these days. Still less than the multiple gigabytes most downloaded games run you.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
The problem with spring single player is DEFINITELY not the AI. The AI is incredible in the context of the project.
The problem is... we may have the capability of playing single player, but for the most part it's still even more complicated than playing multiplayer (backwards from most games). Spring SP is very good but it's poorly packaged and poorly advertised within the community. Also, we still don't have any basic ingame tutorials nor do we have any campaign content for any mod, even now that it's possible to do.
Ideally we'd have someone develop more single player content, and then we'd distribute a spring SP release from the spring downloads page.
The problem is... we may have the capability of playing single player, but for the most part it's still even more complicated than playing multiplayer (backwards from most games). Spring SP is very good but it's poorly packaged and poorly advertised within the community. Also, we still don't have any basic ingame tutorials nor do we have any campaign content for any mod, even now that it's possible to do.
Ideally we'd have someone develop more single player content, and then we'd distribute a spring SP release from the spring downloads page.
You want to sove problems faster?you want official packages whith only the best luaui/mods/maps/ai/lobbies?
Chose a leader'im serious,someone that will decide on everything.or maybe 2 leaders.onw that will be a technical pro and the other a game pro.
all the things spring related will be devided into 2 categories and each of those "leaders" will make obsulute choixes on which no one will argue.
it will allow much easier and faster descision making.
It can alos be done in the following way.Everything is the same except those 2 persons decide on a few options and than make polls ....maybe we can decide on what there should be polles and on what there descision is final and non negotiable.
Now'i know it sounds like a risky idea but i think such a move will accelerate work and might allow for some mistakes but its better to have a few mistakes than no progress in any direction.
we need 1 max 2 people that will decide about almost everything including deciding on what is the most important on the to do list at any given moment.
if we have it more organized and everyone knows exactly what the communities goal is in any given moment and there are people whom you can ask to recieve answer on any question and get a final answer.
im not saying stop discussing things .discuss them and let the chosen leaders read your posts and decide...but their descisions must be final and all must agree to listen to them for better or worse for a certain period of time for example.
i knwo it might sound a bit crazy but i do thing we should try out such a structure.we can pic candidats and have a vote about who shoudl lead..and every month ave another vote..
Chose a leader'im serious,someone that will decide on everything.or maybe 2 leaders.onw that will be a technical pro and the other a game pro.
all the things spring related will be devided into 2 categories and each of those "leaders" will make obsulute choixes on which no one will argue.
it will allow much easier and faster descision making.
It can alos be done in the following way.Everything is the same except those 2 persons decide on a few options and than make polls ....maybe we can decide on what there should be polles and on what there descision is final and non negotiable.
Now'i know it sounds like a risky idea but i think such a move will accelerate work and might allow for some mistakes but its better to have a few mistakes than no progress in any direction.
we need 1 max 2 people that will decide about almost everything including deciding on what is the most important on the to do list at any given moment.
if we have it more organized and everyone knows exactly what the communities goal is in any given moment and there are people whom you can ask to recieve answer on any question and get a final answer.
im not saying stop discussing things .discuss them and let the chosen leaders read your posts and decide...but their descisions must be final and all must agree to listen to them for better or worse for a certain period of time for example.
i knwo it might sound a bit crazy but i do thing we should try out such a structure.we can pic candidats and have a vote about who shoudl lead..and every month ave another vote..
AF. As i said, better support for single player spring is a very good idea and should be increases. Single player spring is a Good Thing.
When i talk about the community, i mean the community of multiplayer players. This is what your estimate of 'how many people are playing the game' is based on, isnt it? Participating in the multiplayer lobby? This is where the whole 'leaky bucket' analogy comes from, that these people arent sticking around, that our population of multiplayer players is falling? This is what the whole discussion is about, is it not? How do you know that the 1000's of users who download spring arent playing it single player right now.
Having fewer players in multiplayer is bad. You cant find as many games, especially of the type you like, theres less room for new mods, and less people around willing to contribute to make new mods. Having fewer single player players means... well, not much. Its unfortunate, you might not get as much feedback on your mod for bugs and playtesting (disregard the fact that most developers here are actively hostile towards feedback)- but it doesnt impact peoples ability to play your game in the slightest. It doesnt matter to 1 person playing spring in single player how many people play spring in single player. He could be the only one, for all he cares. It might mean we get a few less content developers from among these potential players, but a player active within the multiplayer community is in my opinion more likely to want to develop content than one operating in isolation.
Single player games do sell well, and games with barely anyone in their multiplayer lobby also sell well. Thats precisely the point. A strong single player game is not tied to a successful multiplayer community. It helps, but its not the best thing we can do to retain players within the multiplayer community, because good single player games often dont translate into lots of multiplayer players.
When i talk about the community, i mean the community of multiplayer players. This is what your estimate of 'how many people are playing the game' is based on, isnt it? Participating in the multiplayer lobby? This is where the whole 'leaky bucket' analogy comes from, that these people arent sticking around, that our population of multiplayer players is falling? This is what the whole discussion is about, is it not? How do you know that the 1000's of users who download spring arent playing it single player right now.
Having fewer players in multiplayer is bad. You cant find as many games, especially of the type you like, theres less room for new mods, and less people around willing to contribute to make new mods. Having fewer single player players means... well, not much. Its unfortunate, you might not get as much feedback on your mod for bugs and playtesting (disregard the fact that most developers here are actively hostile towards feedback)- but it doesnt impact peoples ability to play your game in the slightest. It doesnt matter to 1 person playing spring in single player how many people play spring in single player. He could be the only one, for all he cares. It might mean we get a few less content developers from among these potential players, but a player active within the multiplayer community is in my opinion more likely to want to develop content than one operating in isolation.
Single player games do sell well, and games with barely anyone in their multiplayer lobby also sell well. Thats precisely the point. A strong single player game is not tied to a successful multiplayer community. It helps, but its not the best thing we can do to retain players within the multiplayer community, because good single player games often dont translate into lots of multiplayer players.