Spring has less players

[ginekolog]

I have sort in TAS client so it brings games with most players on top. I dont care if there are 2000 empty bots somewhere, but yeah, new players will be confused.

It seems there are still players around, as play every day and find pplz. I ignore DSD though.

ZK is also good game, if only i could solve widget cpu spikes in long games.

[bfc]

...

By explaining and asking autohost owners to host only 1 autohost at a time, not 20. Putting limits of 5v5 rather than 8v8 would also help.

It's all well and nice discussing it here, but there's nobody with the power to do anything here. Lobby and forum moderation have always been considered separate affairs, and neither are in the best situations at the moment in terms of manpower and leadership.

Thank you a lot for your very complete answer AF! I think this makes things much clearer now.

If I got you right, that means that the fight we have make is mainly on the hosting side. We have to find a way to convince host owners to change behavior, and maybe convince autohost developers to implement ideas to help these changes to happen.



Maybe by trying first to group people that want things to change (there are at least a few in my clan..) so that we have more weight when talking to these guys, decide for one/two concrete action to do... and then occupy wall street if necessary .

[AF]

Which clan is yours btw? I tend to filter out clantags mentally,

SPADS is the autohost that has proliferated most, and it does not appear to be under maintainance. E.g. if a protocol changed forced everyone to update, that'd be 90% of all autohosts knocked out instantly.

IIRC SPADS ( developer bibim ) is a perl program.

Your easiest bets for persuasion are those autohosts ran using springie and relay hosts, but those hosts are not an issue, it's those who have set up 3-9 SPADS host with clantags or for other services.

Since those running SPADS cannot modify the core logic to use the behaviour I suggested implemented in springie already, instead we need to persuade them that what they have is overkill and does them harm not good.

Aim to make it so that no autohost owner is ever running more than 2 autohosts. There's quite simply no need for more than 2, and where BA is concerned there is no need whatsoever. The limits of 5v5 also, for example [fi] have 8v8 6v6 4v4 etc autohosts, which could all be replaced by 1 autohost ( arguably there is no need for them either but the clan may want to retain control of an autohost for personal reasons, so 1 or 2 max ).


Another Option

'Chanserv' could be used to tackle this, but I'm unsure of its effectiveness. If it were programmed to automatically close battles that had been sitting with no players ( e.g. if the host opened a battle and never went ingame, after a day chanserv would boot the battle ), but if SPADS is set up to reopen the battle when closed then this would be futile.

A similar setup could be used to prune channels automatically be unregistering channel owners if they haven't visited for longer than a month. In 2 months time we would see the channel count drop by 60-70% easily. It's not that big a request that people who own channels actually use them or at least visit them.

All of the above would require modifications to uberserver (python)

[smoth]

These are not aggressive questions, its' just that from a BA player point of view I can't say if, like ZK, we have that very motivated group of people to promote the game.

for lack of better terms BA was the incumbent or the status quo for a long time. it held the top game position for years and largely needed no advertising. Most of the motivated people started or had their own projects. SWIW, S44 and gundam all existed before spring.

ZK's team is probably the largest team with the widest range of contributors as far as actual effort.

However, it should be noted that beherith was making GREAT strides to make ba better. Both visually and balance wise. I have a highly negative opinion of the community's reaction to it. This is because the community largely doesn't want BA to change beyond getting rid of BA:DSD8v8..

If ba is to continue to draw in new players, bobs remodeling either needs support or assistance in completion. IF ba is to continue to draw new players it will have to advance.

[Jools]

SPADS is the autohost that has proliferated most, and it does not appear to be under maintainance. E.g. if a protocol changed forced everyone to update, that'd be 90% of all autohosts knocked out instantly.

My impression is that bibim maintains spads quite regularly, it autoupdates more or less each month or so.

Also, you can only host one game per process with spads, so it sounds weird to me that someone would host empty battles that much. Semprini uses spads and I keep it up mostly because the springie host is outdated for xta and people have told me semprini lags less than when using relay hosts.

Still, on the other issue. I don't like DSD (I mean as a map it's not very dissimilar from e.g. Tabala, but the fact that it is played som much.)

But if someone likes playing a certain type of game, who are we to decide they cannot do that?

[knorke]

its' just that from a BA player point of view I can't say if, like ZK, we have that very motivated group of people to promote the game. [BA]

BA is difficult to promote because of the TA content that is copyrighted* and not really good looking. Also there never was a real BA installer that includes all files needed for playing. Promoting a game with no setup.exe is impossible.
"Modernizing" BA was done before, the result was CA and now zero-K. That was 2 years ago (or so) and took the work of several people, so even if BA has 5 active modders it would take a while to get where zK is today.

3/ how can people with no specific knowledge of TA Spring related technologies help?

1) make better webpage: http://springrts.com/wiki/Balanced_Annihilation (anyone can log in and edit)
2) make a mappack (should be < 20 GB) so new players dont autojoin DSD
3) gaming sites will probally not host BA *, but you can still make videos on youtube etc
4) make a BA config for shard AI and see if that plays better than RAI and the other AIs

Springlobby is in limbo as development has ground to a near halt.

I think koshi & Braindamage still fix stuff. And then there is the whole new skining thing in ie evo's sl:
scroll down

[Carpenter]

But if someone likes playing a certain type of game, who are we to decide they cannot do that?

Well considering that these 24 player games are making people run away and killing an awesome, incredibly good game, I think there definitely is a reason to decide for them and not let them make the worst case scenario come true(unless it has already happened). Wouldn't really be a problem if the community was bigger but it is not.

[Johannes]

The way Spring hosting works now, with autohosts, the big games feel much easier to join than small ones since they're constantly active, even if in practice it takes a long time to get a game like that started but at least you can watch kids argue in the battleroom while you wait so it feels like it's progressing somewhere.

To achieve the goal of more varied game types to choose from, more players, and shorter waiting times between games a better matchmaking model would be great, but that's a lot of work and hard to agree on the details of it too.
I mean why could we not moderate a bit on who can set up autohosts and of what kind? Be the final decisions done by the lobby moderation team or by the devs of each game, cutting out the worst hosts would be a very helpful band-aid to the situation.
Anyone could still host any gametype they want by themselves or by relayhost. Or start another server or whatever. Autohosting need not be a right, it could be a privilege

[AF]

Oh if we're thinking of things we can do to BA to make it more 'appealing' there's plenty we can do such as building an installer with BA Spring a lobby and AI and 5-10 maps. Beherith would have done that by now if it weren't for BAR.

Those in the know see it as folly to advertise and spread BA, especially when the plan is to replace it with BAR ( identical gameplay, but with legal content).

I think koshi & Braindamage still fix stuff. And then there is the whole new skining thing in ie evo's sl:

This is SASI, it's based on springlobby but it's not the same. Koshi himself admits he is undermanned for the task of finishing SASI and has pleaded for help with no results. Various people have reported Koshi missing in action the last few weeks.

Also the only commits to the springlobby project in the last month have been by Rene Milk for the OS X bundle. No major changes beyond bugfixes and little niggles have been made in the last 6 months, and springlobby is pretty much the same beast as it was a year ago for the most part.


-------

Perhaps someone should speak with bibim, how does one contact him?

[Jools]

Autohosting need not be a right, it could be a privilege

It is a privilege already. You need to apply at the moderators to get the BOT-decal for your AH. They could deny not serious applicants.

Perhaps someone should speak with bibim, how does one contact him?

You can find him in the lobby or IM him in the forums.

[AF]

The reason we have the bot flag in the protocol is not as a privilledge, although bots do have slightly different affordances with traffic, e.g. they can send more messages per second, so that when a lobby bot sends the output for a lengthy command it doesn't ban tiself for flooding. It's primarily so that we can identify which users are real and which aren't

[bfc]

Which clan is yours btw? I tend to filter out clantags mentally

I usually play as [FLM]Bernardo. We are not the best clan, but we are good willing, we always try to favor small battles...

But if someone likes playing a certain type of game, who are we to decide they cannot do that?

I agree with that. Restrictions are not going well with open source games. We should think of ways of encouraging people to leave their 12 vs 12 battle rather than putting some restrictions that will be violated anyway.

"Modernizing" BA was done before, the result was CA and now zero-K.

I cannot say specifically for Zk because my cpu just won't let me run it, but IMHO improving BA is not adding loads of new units or changing rules and gameplay (+ cpu usage of new mods ). I like it as it is: balanced and simple enough to keep strategy at the heart of the game. I hope that BA is not considered here as a dinosaur that is doomed to death for the sake of new species (mods). BAR will save it!

[marciolino]

Perhaps someone should speak with bibim, how does one contact him?

I will try to contact him.

Well considering that these 24 player games are making people run away and killing an awesome, incredibly good game, I think there definitely is a reason to decide for them and not let them make the worst case scenario come true(unless it has already happened). Wouldn't really be a problem if the community was bigger but it is not.

+1

The way Spring hosting works now, with autohosts, the big games feel much easier to join than small ones since they're constantly active, even if in practice it takes a long time to get a game like that started but at least you can watch kids argue in the battleroom while you wait so it feels like it's progressing somewhere.

+1 and that it is a good enough reason to moderate/block autohost with no limit for players+specs.

[smoth]

I cannot say specifically for Zk because my cpu just won't let me run it

you've got my curiosity, your cpu or video card? care to post an infolog? I am really interested, care to post your infolog?

I hope that BA is not considered here as a dinosaur

It is.

that is doomed to death for the sake of new species (mods). BAR will save it!

BA/XTA are some of the few remaining mods. ZK isn't a mod of BA.. and so on.

DO I think BA will die, yes because people don't want it to advance, they don't want it to improve. BA still needs a great deal of work, while some work has been done as of late, more needs to be done.

[bfc]

you've got my curiosity, your cpu or video card? care to post an infolog? I am really interested, care to post your infolog?

ok i will look tonight, but i have to warn you that my story is long, and sad*
If I were you I would not care too much. The spring MacOs realease should change things soon.

(* I have an old mac book pro 2.4 Ghz, 2 Go of ram, independent mobile Geforce card i guess, with Snow Leopard on which i run Windows xp through Parallels 5 ... and still i mange to win sometimes )

[smoth]

Spring actually works on macs!?!?

[AF]

the next release will have a Mac build

[bfc]

Spring actually works on macs!?!?

It is. The current version just doesn't sync with other systems. But the next Spring release should, thanks to the recent work of few people. See the macOs thread

[smoth]

Very cool!

[Jools]

Indeed. Very cool.

Now we just need to port it to Amiga OS and we have all major platforms covered :)