BattleMonk wrote:theres always some noob who types !unlock or !autolock 16 or pms the bot to get in the game and it always ends with the game being an 8v8 every time. its just lame and theres nothing you can do to stop someone who wants an 8v8 unlocking it all the time so every game fails. and i aint hosting. most games are done on bots so it is a problem.
I also really think the easiness of doing "!unlock" or "!autolock 16" on autohosts is really a problem. But as I said
here, concerning SPADS:
Initially I planned to prevent changing the autolock number (i.e. "teamSize" parameter in Spads, when autolocking is activated) directly, forcing people to call a vote when they need to change it. The goal was to prevent people from unlocking a battle just because they have friends who want to join, thus transforming a ready-to-launch 5v5 game into a 8v8 mess on a small map... But I realized people were too much used to being able to change the autolock number as they want, so finally I kept Springie behavior by default...
However:
1) If they want to, SPADS bot owners can still make players have to call a vote to change the teamSize parameter. They just have to remove "teamSize" from the "freeSettings" list in their spads.conf file. Maybe players will get used to it but I doubt so unfortunately...
2) The default configuration of SPADS makes it impossible to unlock a game for a normal user without being in the battle room as a player (not spectator).
3) The default SPADS configuration also automatically forces the players who joined last to spec if there are too much players for the current nbTeams/teamSize/nbPlayerById parameters, which once again can only be changed when being a non-spec player in the battle.
4) Concerning Springie, autohost admins can deactivate !autolock and !unlock commands in private messages, which at least forces people to be already in the battle to unlock it
SirArtturi wrote:Then we come this issue called autohosts, which i myself see quite problematic and annoying. Why ? Mainly because most of the autohosts are limited to max 16 players and have dsd on their maplist... Well that sure is easy way but doesnt really encourage people to improve their skills and do different maps for change. Even more, It makes for example, my intentions and hopes to play and make different maps very difficult. Since nobody joins my games... They rather pick the easy way...
Well, although this makes some players go away from my Spads* autohosts, I use automatic map rotation on some of them. And I think on the contrary this helps playing alternate maps. The problem with unknown maps is having some players to join first, then usually the battle fills up quite fast. With automatic map rotation at end of game, there is usually already some players in the battle room when the map is rotated, so other players join, download the map, and it starts quite fast... or sometimes all players leave because they don't have the map and join another dsd 15+5/16 autohost...
SirArtturi wrote:I blame autohosts ! :D Sometimes when there is strict host that knows what he is doing the games will become better in quality and balance.
I also think a good human host is better than an autohost without autohost-admins around. But a "good host" is quite subjective actually and there's not that much of them (who didn't get a game stopped when the host left because he didn't remember he was host, or because he was noob, or simply because he rage-quitted ? who didn't get a lagging game because the host had bad connection/cpu ? :/). And usually autohosts are set up with severall trusted users who can manage the autohost quite well, and in this case some autohost features can ease the hosting task on the contrary...