Spring RTS Engine

Once again, all this shit could be solved using that:

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26812

That is fucking boring, so much problems could be solved using that simple thing that require no coding and almost no admins gave a feedback, imo that is just cause they all hate BA and want it dead.

EDIT: dont play on autohost where admins are only from one clan (e.g. LOeT) which mean only a few admins are present to solve ingame issues and also cause they only believe to their own "logical".

albator wrote:Once again, all this shit could be solved using that:

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=268

That is fucking boring, so much problems could be solved using that simple thing that require no coding and almost no admins gave a feedback, imo that is just cause they all hate BA and want it dead.

EDIT: dont play on autohost where admins are only from one clan (e.g. LOeT) which mean only a few admins are present to solve ingame issues and also cause they only believe to their own "logical".

dead link

fixed. Thanks

Kids have no persistence these days.

Petah wrote:Kids have no persistence these days.

we need persistent gamers, we don't need persistent worlds!

gonpost wrote:I understand that most people play to win, so that's why they have a hard time dealing with having noobs on their team. And I don't think it's reasonable to change that attitude. We simply can't expect to change it. Also, spring's community is very old so most players are experienced. That makes the problem even worse.

So what can we reasonably do? Honestly I think the biggest problem you guys have is having too few games that are too large. In the days before autohosts, it was most common to have 3v3-5v5 games with a number of 1v1 games. Logistics made bigger games too difficult most of the time. The smaller games allowed for two very important things:
1. Noobs could get their own games
2. Noobs were coached by the players on their team because there were only a few players, and every one really mattered

I think that the second point is the biggest. When you have only 2 other players on your team in a 3v3, the experienced players can spam the noob with advice and he learns very quickly. I haven't played spring really in a few months at least, but in those 8v8 games I'm almost always the only one to help out the noobs with legit advice, with something besides just yelling at them. In big games people just forget about the noobs.

So honestly, I think your best bet is to stop playing 8v8 DSD. Will you? No. I think that if you get rid of autohosts, you'll solve a lot of problems. Will you? I doubt it.

The autohosts just promote having huge games. And I think they're what's hurt spring the most.

I must say it's also possible that spring's just an old game and old games do die eventually...but I don't really think anyone can prove that one way or the other.

No matter what spring BA will probably be my favorite RTS for the rest of my life. Nothing matches its complexity, required skill, steep learning curve, and fun. I've logged over 1200 hours and I still learn new tricks sometimes haha. :D

Really interesting reasoning gonpost!
I just dont want let BA die because some autohost owners dont want to loose their popular-host-shit.

The questions I would like to know the answer (one more time...)
- Why we cant moderate autohosts?
- Why we cant ban an autohost?
- Who could have the decision power to do it?
- Why nobody ever answer these questions?

albator wrote:Once again, all this shit could be solved using that:

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26812

That is fucking boring, so much problems could be solved using that simple thing that require no coding and almost no admins gave a feedback, imo that is just cause they all hate BA and want it dead.

EDIT: dont play on autohost where admins are only from one clan (e.g. LOeT) which mean only a few admins are present to solve ingame issues and also cause they only believe to their own "logical".

+1
So small changes could result in huge good improvements. If it does not work, things could be reverted without much lost (it cant be worse than it is know btw).

COME ON ADMINS LET'S CHANGE SOMETHING! AT LEAST TRY IT!

Following the gonpost idea, the autohost moderation could be based on a priority scheme (BA-only ofc). I mean, no matter how much autohosts are online the server could hide them (or just lock them) and them follow the idea above:

> 1v1 to 3v3 hosts appears available.
only when this battle is full or ingame
> 3v3 to 6v6 hosts appears available.
only when this battle is full or ingame
> 8v8 to 12v12 hosts appears available.

In this way, we would have more small games running at the same time and all types of host would be possible.
It would decrease the waiting time to join a battle also since more games = more possibilities to join one.

marciolino,

I like albator's idea fairly well. It's similar to starcraft II's system I think. If this system is imposed on autohosts, then people might host their own games to bypass this, which I think is a *good* thing. I can't see it hurting. And discouraging smurfing is a good as well.

I think your last idea about the priority scheme based on game size is *not* a good idea, unfortunately. I can't see that getting the desired results. What you need to do is not place more limits. You need to change the system at the bottom so that the desired effect occurs with a system of similar complexity as the original. In other words, don't add more rules on top of what already exists - change the ones we have, or get rid of the ones we have and replace them. I wish this was done more often with real laws...

So what you should really do is make smaller games more appealing, or change what makes big games so appealing. Right now, in my opinion, autohosts enable people to play the same map over and over and they promote having a few very large games. When real people host, they get sick of playing the same thing over and over and so they change maps. Logistics also make huge games more difficult, and the fact that hosts will eventually want a map change will increase the number of different hosts, resulting in many more smaller games.

When I left spring again a few months ago, I remember logging on probably 10 different times towards the end and only finding a single huge BA DSD game. And as an experienced player, you can only play one map so many times before you get sick as hell of it. That's why I stopped playing. There just wasn't anything that was fun to play.

To answer your questions...
- Why we cant moderate autohosts?
The owners of the autohosts or lobby admins can.
- Why we cant ban an autohost?
The owners of the autohosts may remove them, or the admins can ban them.
- Who could have the decision power to do it?
The owners of the autohosts or the admins.
- Why nobody ever answer these questions?
Because the owners of the autohosts don't want to, and some admins don't want to. Change is never easy, and it's uncertain. Uncertainty breeds fear, and so people don't change very readily. But spring is open source and community controlled, so you kind of need a consensus on things.

If we can't get rid of autohosts (which I suspect may be the case), then I *really* like albator's idea.



Despite everything I've said, we still have to ask ourselves something. Why is the decline in BA players a very RECENT trend? Autohosts have been around a while, to be fair. What happened recently? Is it just the effects of autohosts or whatever may be the cause catching up to us? Or did something happen right around that time which resulted in the large decline? Is spring just getting old?

I don't have a good answer for that question, and it troubles me. I'd like to see an annotated timeline of BA players with any major change to BA or change to the engine/lobby plotted on the timeline. I think that would helps us out greatly. Can anyone supply that or tell me how I could find that information?

gonpost wrote:Change is never easy, and it's uncertain. Uncertainty breeds fear, and so people don't change very readily. But spring is open source and community controlled, so you kind of need a consensus on things.

* How can such a consensus be found?
* Does it really need to be the whole spring-community?

(I don't hear 0-k, evo or gundam devs & players complaining about player-decline / autohosts / unfriendly-players.)

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"?

Because the solid block of persistent BA players got tired and either left or moved to Zero K?

The major problem of BA is the community IMHO.
In Zero-K some things never happened, and newbes are welcome.

Ba is a difficult game, and a new player need much time to learn. If there are some players (and we know who they are) who play only to troll, to offend (often in a racist way) and to kick newbes.. we haven't any chance: our destiny will be to remain less and less.

We only need a severe moderators that BAN every troll. Seriusly.
first time = 1 week
second time = 1 mounth
third time = 4ever.

This is my point.

gonpost wrote:Autohosts have been around a while, to be fair. What happened recently? Is it just the effects of autohosts or whatever may be the cause catching up to us? Or did something happen right around that time which resulted in the large decline? Is spring just getting old?

BA's playerbase took a turn for the worse ever since its 1v1 scene completely died out and big team battles became the standard rather than the exception. This caused most decent players to move to greener pastures.

dansan wrote: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.


I also think that some more regulation to autohosts would be really helpful, maybe not the strict categories like Alba said but just having to choose SOME rank limits that are not the full spectrum, for example an autohost is allowed to have 4 different ranks allowed on it.
And at the very least make changing teamsize need voting. At least upwards, since changing it downward helps the game get started faster while upwards does the opposite.


And when you look at people playing ZK, I notice that there's a lot of new players who play small games by themselves. While it's pretty obvious that marketing the game to new players helps (compared to BA having basically zero advertising), but I think it also says something about the ease of use to set up a game in ZK lobby.
Though most veteran ZK players are in a 8v8 host anyway, so for me personally it's no improvement in getting games to switch over.


For me personally though, the reason I've stopped playing almost completely for the time being is not to do with not getting games. Since usually there still was someone to play with, if I could just be bothered to PM some folks and wait for 10 min.
It's both for external reasons of having less free time, but also internal reasons that there's constantly some new change that will annoy me... Like the pathfinding changing every engine version now and yet never feeling adequate, not even as good as it used to be a year or two ago. Really I look forward to when the game will feel stable in a way that it does not have faults that annoy me every other game and make me feel I'm playing an inferior version of what we used to have.

gonpost wrote:I'd like to see an annotated timeline of BA players with any major change to BA or change to the engine/lobby plotted on the timeline. I think that would helps us out greatly. Can anyone supply that or tell me how I could find that information?

Thanks for the graph Niobium.

So, facts. When BA started declining in popularity:
-Zero-K gained popularity
-Spring 0.82.7 was new
->16 player hosts arrived (albeit ~3 months before)
-The problem with spring's pathing was first mentioned for 0.82.4 in August of 2010 (or at least that's the first mention of it that I can find: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=23901).

Now, let's go through these.

Obviously Zero-k gaining popularity is something that no one's going to change.

Spring version 0.82.7 came out. I can't find anything special about that release, so its timing is probably just coincidental. Nothing especially important happened with it as far as I can tell, at least for a regular player.

16 player hosts came out shortly before its decline. 3 months beforehand is an acceptable amount of time. This could definitely be a culprit.

Spring's pathing has been broken for well over a year. Is it fixed now? I know it's always been annoying, but I'm not sure that this would affect player numbers...though it might annoy noobies. Not sure on this one. Either way, as far as I'm concerned, this has been the biggest single problem spring has had (or did have until the last release, I don't know if it's fixed) simply because every player has perceived it as the biggest problem. But I can't see it causing or even contributing to BA's decline in any large way. But I CAN see it hurting attracting new players.

It would seem that the largest culprit is actually games that hold >16 players, and not necessarily autohosts. It would seem that the number of <12 or <16 player games is not correlated with BA's player numbers, just >16.

So the strongest argument seems to be that >16 player hosts are most strongly correlated with a declining BA player base.

Having said that, I'm sure we could agree that certain things would *help*, though they may not contribute largely to the size of the player base. These things include, in my opinion:
-Friendliness of existing players and willingness to teach/put up with new players
-Possibly the existence of autohosts

I'd agree with the friendliness of the existing players to some degree. Can we do anything about that? Perhaps with temporary bans if we provide chat logs to lobby mods, but that's about it. Or you could just ban all players from Brazil. :p But all joking aside, you can only do so much about this option. Warcraft III has a shitty player base and yet it's still popular.

I guess that autohosts themselves might not be so bad - it's more the size of the games themselves. However, I still think that autohosts promote playing the same map over and over again, whereas this is not the case with real players. This causes people to get bored (like myself) and stop playing.

So let's get some conclusions here.
tl;dr

-**First and foremost:** Reduce the max players in a game to 16
-Ideally get rid of autohosts, but more realistically promote player hosted games. This promotes map variety so people don't get bored.
-Increase friendliness of the players through temporary bans for especially dickish behavior...maybe reward friendly, helpful players somehow?
-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.

Opinions ya'll?

Sometime around the middle of the year Ubutu had a release that caused Spring 0.82.7 to desync consistently.

gonpost wrote: So the strongest argument seems to be that >16 player hosts are most strongly correlated with a declining BA player base.

That's what I said before seeing the graphs! It was always quite obvious to me tbh

Jazcash wrote:

gonpost wrote: So the strongest argument seems to be that >16 player hosts are most strongly correlated with a declining BA player base.

That's what I said before seeing the graphs! It was always quite obvious to me tbh

Aye, but it's good to analyze them somewhat even if it's mostly just correlations. When people make simple statements without backing up what they say, nothing is taken seriously. And sometimes you miss things.

The point is that unless anyone has other ideas or can show that my logic is incorrect, then a clear course of action has been set up. All it will take now is someone with power to come along and make it happen... And if no action is taken, then viva la revolución and replace the current leadership. :p We all want to fix this problem, and I'm just providing what I think is a good starting point for fixing it.

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

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.

I'm so frustrated... I just wrote a posting for 1h and then pressed the wrong button to loose it :(