Spring RTS Engine

Gota wrote:"better players bring more fun to everyone..

Wrong. Better people brings less fun to newbs, as they get steamrolled without getting to play even a bit.

Gota wrote:Without good players there can be no good deep and complex games in the style of BA,XTA.Be sure of it.

The game Total Annihilation was made before there was good players for it. The Cavedog teams themselves were not good players. So it's perfectly possible to build good complex games before they get a skilled playerbase.

Gota wrote:A big game with one newbie and all his teammates are good and all his enemies are good and a small game wit hall good teammates and all goodenemies amd big game with all bad playing allies and all bad playing enemies and a small game with all bad players and all bad enemies.

Uh, what? I understand that by "hall" you actually mean "all", and that "wit" is "with", and that "amd" is not the chip manufaturer but merely the conjunction "and", but still, I can't really see where you're going with that sentence.

Gota wrote:well it matters because in smaller games it is easierr to communicate and share information,it easier for a noob to see when someone is playing better and it is easier in a small game for a good player to give advice.

Except it's the contrary. In a large team games, it's easier to receive advice as they are more people to look at chat and to type the advice, in large team game, it's easier to see when someone is playing better as there are more point of comparaison, in large team game, it's easier to share information because whenever you place a marker or say something, they are more eyes likely to spot it, in large team games, team mate have their bases and armies more closed to each other and so more forced to cooperate.

Caradhras wrote: So, tell me what did you do to attract new players to Spring?

Do I really have to answer?

We've all seen the pictures Smoth. LEt's just leave it at that, eh? We were all young and needed the moeny once...

I did what was needed

Again. I would say its not the amount of players. It's the map size of the map and the way it is designed to play... Let's take DSD for example. Map is designed optimally for 10 players, but people still prefer to play it with 16. What can you expect from that kind of game?

Just to take another example: Altored Divide is designed for 10 players also and I dont understand why to make it overcrowded since it breaks the fluent gameplay of that map...

Imo you can have great 8v8 games whether its ota based or any other mod since the map is suitable for such game.

Sir artturi that all great and i agree with it however,fact is,people DO play 8v8's on altored.

he said nothing to the contrary yan. He said even if a map is designed for more players that doesn't mean it cannot house less players

As i understood it he said that 8v8 games can be good if played on maps suitable for so many players.
I agree,its better to play maps with exactly the amount of players the map was made for.
Games can even be good without that dependency being fed but the chances of that are lower.
I still think newbies,at least for OTA based mods,should be encouraged to play medium sized games first.

Hunter wins.

every game i join is autolocked at 10 as it should be because any more than 10 usually turns over crowded and lame but noo 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.

BattleMonk wrote:every game i join is autolocked at 10 as it should be because any more than 10 usually turns over crowded and lame but noo 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.

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...

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.

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...

Talking about autohosts... Few times people tried to !votekick me out, even though i was the host. XD

Everyone believe you can vote out anything today, because of these retarded TV-shows where people in the program itself can vote own teammates out, or viewers can vote out people, etc.

LoL i remember watching that "The Apprentice" TV-show once, and those adults were acting like kids and then some idiot bitch said "WE WILL VOTE YOU OUT!!" XDDD even when you CANT vote people out in that show XDD fuck XDD

@battlemonk

Why not ask the autohost owners to have their bots host max 10 player rooms? The engine doesn't need to be changed, nor does the mod, the autohosts just need to be put to max players 10.

This way all you need do is convince the autohost owners, and anyone who still wants overcrowded 8v8 games can host their own.

It would be nice if autohost owners could atleast DISABLE the ability to PM the !UNLOCK command.

HINT HINT.

It'd also be nice if autohost recorded some stats on players and then generated the !cbalance command based on the stats of individual players. Its probably not doable in reality, but would be a cool feature.

Yeah autobalance sucks, especially clan balance

[TS]Lollocide wrote:It'd also be nice if autohost recorded some stats on players and then generated the !cbalance command based on the stats of individual players. Its probably not doable in reality, but would be a cool feature.

It records stats on players already, try "!stats player playername". I can't say anything for the rest, though.

[TS]Lollocide wrote:It would be nice if autohost owners could atleast DISABLE the ability to PM the !UNLOCK command.

HINT HINT.

Well !lock autolock command would be very useful for admins and moderators to stop noobs wasting the game...

I think if there were some kind of ladder system, only more complecated than the one we had, we could have more aducational gameplay.

I fully agree that we're not "guiding" noobs to be a more competitive apponent. I dont agree with kdr. I do think the idea is good. But to do this i am afraight, will take more. to pass over our knowledge and give it trough.

If we would combine all aspects we could make some more fun games. We all can play mods with various mod settings. We all can play diffenent mods. we all can choice different maps. But it doesnt happen too much.

What if say, you can get a cup for playing 100 set up games. You enter a certain ladder system. Ther you need to play 4x4 10 on a water map, 10x a 3x3 on a land map. I know not all are fan of certain games. So let players have to work through 50 of the 100 games witch they prefer more.

You could even give scores after every game by certain criteria. And ppl could add ther own cup. We all ready have a drop warrior queen and a spam llt fairy, i bet they cant wait to greate there own cup. you get a extra cup if you manage to connap e few ppl for instance. This could be alot more enriching tahn just limit players

But to get this far alot of ppl should work together to make the system before you can seperatly add stuff
Just capping 8 ppl to a game. I think has alot different results.