Spring RTS Engine

I think a rank system based on time is very good (as long as we remember the time spent in games doesn't always come in pair with skills).

However, in actual rank system there are two issues:

1. The time spent in games as a spectator is counted to a rank. It obviously shouldn't. One can just join auto-hosted game as spectator and remain there for a whole night. Soon he can reach high rank while not having any experience in playing. This issue should be easy to fix since the server knows which players in game are battling and which are spectators.

2. If you host a game, and the game is over, you can remain in the game as long as you want (i.e. for 2 days) and the time will be counted to your rank. This can be abused.

and?

doing that is like spamming on a forum to up your post count

no one will give a shit but you

hunterw wrote:doing that is like spamming on a forum to up your post count

no one will give a shit but you

Doing what? (btw, there's no post count on this forum)

Day wrote:and?

My point is: could be this issues fixed?

there's no post count on this forum

Please click on the link entitled "User Control Panel" to view yer postcount

Seriously, man. The "nubstar" issue's been around since the beginning. It's not going to get cured until we have a server keep track of games won and lost by players- actual tracking and actual rank, as opposed to what we do now. I dunno why it hasn't gotten done, but I'm guessing it's mainly bandwidth and server-time.

It hasn't been done because it would be so incredibly easy to abuse.

And concerning rank, what's the point of cheating? At a given skill level, people will think more of you the lower your rank is.

Why would it be easy to abuse? I mean, most commercial games track stuff... why can't Spring's server?

Sorry, maybe I'm missing a bunch of obvious workarounds, but couldn't the host report who'd been in a game, and the final victory state, and disregard any "victories" that occurred within, say, 3-5 minutes, and a record of who played whom, so that cheating was fairly easy to see? "Gee, Day played Flop 50 times today, and won every time, and every game took exactly 5 minutes and 1 second, I wonder if they're cheating the system"...

I guess the thing is, the current "rank" system sucks. Why not just let players rank themselves, weekly? It'd work about as well as what we have now. Even with the permanent-ID thing, it'll just mean that everybody (except for me) will have stars, then it's all even more meaningless than it already is...

I found some older discussion about ranks, and I tend to agree to some opinions stated there: the time based system is good for public "rank system", which aims only to differ players a little, and give briefly approximation of players ability. Just as much as is needed to set up balanced team game. This is a feature for everyday players of spring, who play for fun, not for gold.

If players want to compete, gain awards and be recognised for their skills, they should play some ladders with some ELO ranking :)


Well, sorry for triggering the discussion about ranking systems, I was just trying to point out that actual ranks are being given to spectators for nothing... But after some more thinking I came to conclusion that maybe it's good as it is. I mean, if someone is new he gains experience from spectating games, so eventually he can get higher rank just for spectating.

here we go again!

we should all save our posts in rank threads to a word document so every time one is posted we can have the exact same argument for 40 pages with maximum efficiency

I2:Isaacment_Day wrote:we should all save our posts in rank threads to a word document so every time one is posted we can have the exact same argument for 40 pages with maximum efficiency

what a terrible idea





instead there should be a web 2.0 ajax site which allows people to blog about their rank with a cool little widget in the sidebar which shows that he's tagged 1 post with RANK and not tagged anything else

dun

The point is simple: every ranking system is abused. The amount of work it would take to develop an actually _good_ ranking system is so massive that the devs just said "screw it" and did the simplest thing that could possibly work.

Personally, I don't want devs wrapped up in the Sisyphean ordeal of improving the ranking system. I want fun stuff. As, I'm sure, you do.

So forget the ranks.

We're keeping the current ranking system, because "time in game" is a trivial status symbol so it doesn't really matter if it is abused, but it's also a mild indicator of players approximate skill level so it has some usefulness as well.

Any system that will be taken more seriously will also be more abused, and therefore is useless.

I2:Isaacment_Day wrote:we should all save our posts in rank threads to a word document so every time one is posted we can have the exact same argument for 40 pages with maximum efficiency

Word

Lupus wrote:1. The time spent in games as a spectator is counted to a rank. It obviously shouldn't. One can just join auto-hosted game as spectator and remain there for a whole night. Soon he can reach high rank while not having any experience in playing. This issue should be easy to fix since the server knows which players in game are battling and which are spectators.

Spectator game time is needed for new players that can't play in games because of nazi hosts that kick anyone with low rank.

Regret wrote:nazi hosts that kick anyone with low rank.

How is it nazi to want to have people of similar experience level in your game?

Boirunner wrote:

Regret wrote:nazi hosts that kick anyone with low rank.

How is it nazi to want to have people of similar experience level in your game?

Its harmfull for spring I fear, we already have a small comunity, if people dont let noobs play the comunity wont grow

smoth wrote:

I2:Isaacment_Day wrote:we should all save our posts in rank threads to a word document so every time one is posted we can have the exact same argument for 40 pages with maximum efficiency

OpenOffice.org

fix'd

If it's just storage for easy copying, I think a nice .txt with Notepad++ is better than using a full office suite.