Spring RTS Engine

1 year ago:

I host a game. Players join, and patiently wait till there are enough players and everyone has gotten the map. I balance teams, nobody complains, and I start the game. We play. People fight to the last man/unit, and everyone has fun. GG, time for another round...

Today:

I host a game. Players join, leave, join, leave, join, leave, join. Finally, there are enough players. I balance teams. People keep unreadying and switching their teams. A few morons keep trying to comshare. I kick them. I wait for more players. Some players are impatient and leave. Finally, I have enough players again. Everyone is ready. Just before I click start, someone quickly unreadys, switches team, readys, and some other guy leaves the game. We go in-game. One team has an extra player now and one team has one less than others. However, the team with the extra player loses one guy, as he crashed/timed out/whatever. However, people start whining, and instead of listening to me saying it was from the team with the most players, they insist I restart because teams are "imbalanced". So half of the players quit. I restart. People ready up, this time teams are fine. SPRING CRASHES. I say "don't leave, don't leave, just ready up again, it's the game, not my server!". Obviously half of the players go like "WTF THIS SERVER SUXXXXXXXX!!!!11" "JJ45 have you ever hosted before??????" "omg thsi is gay :S!!!!1" "I cant fucking wait", and there we go again, 70% of the players leave the game. Then, I patiently wait again. Players join. I balance teams. We start. 30 seconds into the game, someone suicide commbombs me without even having any other units than his comm. Ok, I'm out of the game then. "lol JJ45 was pretty dumb when he didnt built defense :D" someone says. After some time, the strongest player times out. He had a lot of stuff. One of the spec is willing to take his stuff, thus I decide I'd use cheats to let him back in game. I tell that if anyone else uses cheats while they're turned on (which was about 10 seconds required for the spec to type the command and take control of the disconnected guy's stuff), I'd kick them. OF COURSE, when I enable cheats, this one genius spawns 500 krogoths, while another one spawns a farm of silencer silos. The krogoths somehow chain-explode and that causes my PC to explode too (freeze). After 2 minutes, the explosion is over and everyone has timed out from the server. Alright, somehow I still have the motivation to just remake the game. Apart from noobs who keep unreadying and fucking up the teams, as well as crashy people and people with shit computers and laggy connections nowhere even near sufficient to play 10+ player games, everything goes well. We play. Nearly couple of hours into the game, there are now two teams remaining; one team has 1 player, the other has 2. I'll call the 1-player team "team A". I'll call the 2-player team "Team Shitfuck". Both teams had a defent amount of units and defences, which could have resulted in some nice battles. One player from Team Shitfuck says "gtg my piza come" and quits, giving all his stuff to his teammate. Team A uses all their units to launch a massive attack and at the expense of all those units, destroys 30 solar collectors, which was about 10% of Team Shitfuck's economy. The remaining player on Team Shitfuck self-destructs, claiming he "was finished anyway, it was over", even though he had lots of units he could've sent to combat Team A and bomb them into oblivion with 20 krows. He also had twice more economy and defence. I spectate in amazement. "Game over", no big battles, just one of the biggest ragequitters I've ever seen. I proceeded to bash the fuck out of anyone who dared to say "GG" afterwards.

I'm just hoping that with more players and a friends list we can have enough decent people for regular games and enough indecent people to be as popular as a Blizzard title.

Wall of text.

Oh and thats precisely the reason i play up to 2v2 max.

Its sad because its true.

We need a way for spectators to take control of a team without using .cheat.

Ehh. Not much we can do, neddie is working on it, though

tldr

the internet is full of nice cuddly ppl. thats why i invest so much emotionally into it

This.

jj dont u host games with like 16 people?

there are at least 5 spring regulars with the name JJ I dont think this is the same one as the one who made springmark :I

xta is good because the community is regular and dosnt contain morons

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:xta is good because the community is regular and dosnt contain morons

Well, I was thinking about this, too. But is there any way to avoid stupid suckers? I mean, playing bad isn't the problem, but ending a game in fear to possible loose it, ragequit or cheating (before the official end) is insupportable.
I don't have any ideas. Stats were an Idea of mine, collecting detailed information about wins / loses and quits (like ragequit / tomeout), but it doesn't seem worthwhile.

Hm i dont have these problem... but i try to play in games with known people that are good.

1v1 is the way to go

AF wrote:We need a way for spectators to take control of a team without using .cheat.

But that would need spectators to somehow compromisse thenselfes to one team, watching only what it can see the whole game waiting for a chance to take, since it would be unfair for someone who is seeing everthing to suddently join one of the teams.

JJ45 is exagerating greatly, but I must admit that at least 20% of the games I play end because of crash or unsync, or never start because of stupid players or bad host, or get screwed by complete noobs who dont have any idea of how to play (I really think that one inside this category should start by watching or playing 1vs1 games) or idiots who do stuff like starting 1 pixel away from other ally com or bad hosts who ragequit.

Grow some balls and kick/force spec jackasses who don't obey your iron will. You're in charge and have your responsibilities as the host after all. Eventually you'll be known to be able to host a decent game that doesn't allow suckers to join

Are you sure you meant the whole community as opposed to Greenfields players?

Not saying Spring's community doesn't suck, but it's not as bas as you seem to think. Not that I read everything you wrote, no sane person would try to read that wall of text.

ZellSF wrote:Not that I read everything you wrote, no sane person would try to read that wall of text.

You have time to make a comment, but not the two minutes to make sure your reply is grounded in what was actually said?

JJ45: what were the ranks of the people in the game? do you think it would have helped to have a requirement of either being a certain rank or being polite to join the game?