A welcome to new players?

[Floris]

Niobium, any chance you're willing to plot a graph of maps being played over time?
It could affirm the DSD only host's influence on it all.

[Niobium]

That tiny little red bit is responsible for the decline of BA? From the graph I would guess less than 10% or even 5% of games being played are >16 players.

Note that the battle size graph is over all spring mods, so non-BA mods are contributing a bit to the number of small games being played (And not so much to the larger games, as the non-BA lack the player bases to do so)

niobium, any chance you might make a graph of maps being played over time? It affirm the DSD only host influence.

I got the graphs from here: http://planetspads.free.fr/spring/stats/, go nuts.

[knorke]

All the recorded stats are flawed in some way.
Might as well try to read tea leaves...

[MileyCyrus]

@ OP
You didnt have to specify what the map was...

[Floris]

so I found this graph:



Seems DSD got slightly more popular over time, can't say it happened suddenly. Okay maybe somewhere halfway in 2009.

[dansan]

So my question is: Why can't just "the BA community" decide on their own, that it wants to run a "2 month BA-autohost regulation test period"?

You really need to ask that? It's not like there is some hivemind to decide that, as things stand it just takes one person who's not agreeing to the regulation and capable to run an autohost.

Just ban that autohost (and when repeating also the admin).

Oh and google_frog, very, very few players use Ubuntu. So I put that issue into the irrelevant category.

I'd say about 5-10% of the BA players run Linux. I cannot say how many of them Ubuntu (but I guess >=50%). The thing with Linux users is, that they stay longer, because they are more forgiving to understaffed projects and have less choice :) Anyway... though it does not explain 90% of the loss, 10% less players and 10% less new players is not irrelevant.

That tiny little red bit is responsible for the decline of BA? From the graph I would guess less than 10% or even 5% of games being played are >16 players.

The 8v8 hosts are in the category nbPlayers <= 16. Those plus the >=16 make up around 1/3 I'd say. What cannot be seen here is from which game they are and how many specs are also in those hosts.

So to move forward here are some formalized rules to focus the discussion:

BA-autohosts-rules[0]
* Autohosts must be registered with lobby admins.
* Autohosts must have map-auto-rotation always on.
* Autohosts have a max player limit of 16.
* Autohosts have a max spec limit of 10.
* Autohosts must serve different purposes. (No "tabula1" and "tabula2" hosts, no "6v6" and "6v6 2" hosts.) [1]
* Autohosts have a rank range. Allowed ranges are 1-4, 3-5, 4-7, 5-7.[2]
* Admins and players are encouraged to speak up against and ban disrespectfull behaviour.

Exceptions: tourney, engine/game/map test, event[3], special-purpose-host[4] good-reason -> talk to lobby admin

[0] For pulic autohosts that host BA games only.
[1] If you want a new 6v6 host to auto-spawn, when the existing one is full or ingame, just use springie.
[2] 1-4: beginners only, 3-5: medium only, 4-7 medium and exp., 5-7 exp. only
[3] An "event" can be a host that runs a 16v16 game ONLY on friday 13th 8pm-12pm CEST.
[4] For example a cool host would be a only-the-10-newest-maps host.

IMO admin[team]s from clans are not needed. Zero-K seem to live well without them. I think they encourage an odd understanding of "justice", as the admins are only responsable to their clan and not to the whole community (exc fab and vbs ofc).
My idea would be an admin-team that manages hosts, bans and smurf-lists together.
But with the above list it's not really important, interested admin[team]s could just apply for setting up a host with the lobby admins or for managing with the existing admins.

[Floris]

eh... I've never seen a real clanmatch happen. The only thing about clans seems to get to play on the same team as your buddies.

[marciolino]

Thanks Dansan, you did write it again
(I started writting this post before reading the last ~6 posts but I will post it anyway)

Thanks gonpost for all your effort and analysis of the situation. I agree with most of your ideas and conclusions.

So which concrete actions should we take know? (I hope we will take some after all this)

-**First and foremost:** Reduce the max players in a game to 16

I dont see how we could convince autohost owners to limit the max number of players without forcing them. Ok it is open source but it doesnt means that we cant have some rules.
One more time I think that we should moderate autohost and not just leave autohosts moderate as they want.
It doesnt means we will ban all autohosts, it just means we ask them to respect some rules.

-Ideally get rid of autohosts, but more realistically promote player hosted games. This promotes map variety so people don't get bored.

How we could promote more player hosted games? Again, this seems impossible to me without moderation.

-Increase friendliness of the players through temporary bans for especially dickish behavior...maybe reward friendly, helpful players somehow?

Like Gigamez said we should have more severe moderation on autohosts reducing tolerance to trols/insults.
But how? If there is no autohost moderation I cant see how we could be more severe. For example I am not admin on LOeT server and I cant ban.

-Getting rid of the annoying things in the engine that can really put off new players, like pathing problems especially. I know this would turn me off an RTS if I were new to it.

Imo it is important but devs are already working hard. I dont know how to speed it up without helping them to do it.

For me, to attract more players more important than "pathing pb" would be to have an easier dedicated installer for BA.
For example an installer with essential widgets for BA, the 20 more popular maps and the last mod included.
Something like u can install and play directly

[dansan]

For example an installer with essential widgets for BA, the 20 more popular maps and the last mod included.
Something like u can install and play directly :mrgreen:

I don't know about "installer" problem... I have never installed spring in Windows and don't know how installers work...
About widgets: Best would be to talk to BA-devs to include important widgets in BA directly.
About maps: make a ZIP with 20 maps, upload it to springfiles, edit http://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation and make a proper "download"-button (instead of hiding it under "links") which lets you download BA and the maps ZIP. There is a forum thread about "map torrents" somewhere...
Afaik everyons waiting for BAR, but I think BA could be made simpler to install now, even if the advertisements have to wait.

[koshi]

I've built a nsis based framework for win installers ages ago, abma one that's prolly even easier to use. It's just everybody seems to be too lazy to actually go ahead and use either of them to make a BA installer (and keep it up to date!). Same reason BA _still_ doesn't have its own website.

[marciolino]

BA - BARemake will soon have a dedicated website

But a dedicated installer with maps/mod/widgets stuff would be awesome!
Someone could do it? It doesn't seems to be so complicated.

[Jazcash]

I'd be happy to make a nice web design for BAR once it's finished and polished. Along with new loadscreens and whatever else I can provide ^_^ I did want to do this with CA a while back but it updated so often all the models used in the screenshots became redundant quite quickly. Then eventually the name did too so I scrapped it.

[marciolino]

I think we have enough discussion and conclusions but I feel that this thread will be one more thread about the same problem and nothing really done.

So please let's finaly decide something and do something. Maybe it won't be THE solution but then we can try something different, and keep trying

[knorke]

BA-autohosts-rules:
Only people who could enforce them are the admins running the server. They have no interesst to do so. (at least I do not remember them taking part in those bawwbaw threads)

The rest of the ideas can be summarized as "someone else make the game better."

[albator]

Who are admins that could have power to enfoce this ?
Neddie ?
Quantum ?
Aeon ?

Cannot we just vote for a couple of new admin who would have power to take care of that ?


What I have in mind is something like that: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26812
But with the rank range opened to discussion. Feel free to give your opinion

Also, that should only apply to team game only (no ffa for exemple). Once agin, feel free to give you opinion.
And ofc, it should be decided to have one single 6v6 host with no rank limit to . [x]autohost could do the job (it already does) if vbs agrees

Also, I wander if the rules should apply for all autohost or only for XvsX with X > some value, lets say 4.

[marciolino]

BA-autohosts-rules:
Only people who could enforce them are the admins running the server. They have no interesst to do so. (at least I do not remember them taking part in those bawwbaw threads)

If the admins can't even discuss about the problem it shows that we need better admins. Who are them? How we can can change this?

The rest of the ideas can be summarized as "someone else make the game better."

If you didn't read or understand all the ideas exposed please don't try to resume them.

[luckywaldo7]

You guys are asking the admins to deny the rights of people to freely host autohosts to fit your agenda of changing the game to match your definition of fun.

I hate 16+ games myself but I don't think 16+ autohosts should be banned just because they don't fit my tastes.

On the other hand, I might not care to stop you guys if this is limited to BA autohosts, because it would be hilarious to see the remaining players flock to 16+ Tech Annihilation hosts.

[luckywaldo7]

The Zero-K method was to lure people to "official" hosts with experience points, persistant awards, and Planet Wars. It would be more work to do something similar with BA, but they say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

[MidKnight]

...



WTF, this thread.

[gonpost]

BA-autohosts-rules:
Only people who could enforce them are the admins running the server. They have no interesst to do so. (at least I do not remember them taking part in those bawwbaw threads)

The rest of the ideas can be summarized as "someone else make the game better."

If that's the case, then this thread and all like it are pointless. And so BA will die. The point of threads like these, however, is so that the admins can see our logic and see that change must occur to save the player base.

I'm not sure what your last sentence meant.

You guys are asking the admins to deny the rights of people to freely host autohosts to fit your agenda of changing the game to match your definition of fun.

I hate 16+ games myself but I don't think 16+ autohosts should be banned just because they don't fit my tastes.

On the other hand, I might not care to stop you guys if this is limited to BA autohosts, because it would be hilarious to see the remaining players flock to 16+ Tech Annihilation hosts.

What? I'm not sure where anyone implied that they want to ban 16+ hosts because they aren't fun. The whole point of this discussion, and in particular my analysis, was to present facts about what occurred near the time that BA player numbers started to decline, analyze those facts, and determine what was the culprit of its decline. The most likely culprit seems to be the existence of 16+ player games, but there are a few other things I mentioned as well.

And agenda? That's a politically loaded word which honestly should be fine to use. Our agenda is to save BA or at least boost its number of players back up. That's our agenda.


On another note, I would like to add one more concern to the pile about autohosts. I just remembered, thanks to watching the only game of BA with more than 1 player in it, that endless stop votes and a single troll can prevent a game from starting for over an hour. That's absurd, and a single point of control (a real human host) would prevent these things from happening. I can recall many instances where these types of votes just end in everyone leaving because they're sick of it. Thoughts?

Who are admins that could have power to enfoce this ?
Neddie ?
Quantum ?
Aeon ?

Cannot we just vote for a couple of new admin who would have power to take care of that ?

Unfortunately I don't know. The only person with any leverage I've ever really had any faith in is Beherith. He seems to be mature, reasonable, and capable. Threatened to ban me once when I didn't notice that I had ~200 fleas on patrol because he thought I was trying to crash the game, but oh well. :p