Spring RTS Engine

Really, this is a problem. Let me draw a picture here, teenager, low self-esteem, gets all his highs from beeing a rts-general, looks down upon the inferior gamers, joins spring, looks even down upon other rts-players noaw. Hangs out in dsd-games.
Hates nubs and shows that.

That sort of guy is what keeps any game from building up a playerbase. Becausde face it, nubbody is born a general. One day everyone is nub.

Also, some people never will be good. Just because they are canonfood for the topmost mentioned playertype, dosent mean they dont deserve a game-experience that isnt fun. (Singleplayer if it has to be, Ressourcebonus for Players who train nubs during multiplayergames)

INB4 unrealistic demands: MOAR MODERATION, MOAR SOMEBODY ELSE DO ALL THE WORK, MOAR MOAR, MOAR LESS
INB4 OP cant INB4

ZK player stats


There arent that many teenagers

Assuming that the 10% of the votes for over age of 50 is more or less a joke and most probably by a teenagers (cos' they like to joke a lot) theres still almost 50% (adding the 10% of joke votes) teenagers of the whole playerbase. (If we agree that teen-age is by definition the age between 13-19.)

problem is that if you hit a problem right on the spot, suddenly there is silence in the thread. Weve got to tame this crowd somehow. All this, "i-will-start-a-new-comunity-with-my-own-mod" doesent get far. If people dont find a game after 5 mins, they will join ba dsd, and meet the topic. So solving suggestions? How can you get people who dont play nice, to play nice?

Internet police and moral guards or bots that filters all the bad language - I've seen those.

Imo most of our problems would be solved by actively discouraging smurfing and binding people to one nick. Add a halfway decent matchmaking system to that with true upper bound autohosts for noobs and huzzah.

How does binding people to one nick make them behave better?

BaNa wrote:Imo most of our problems would be solved by actively discouraging smurfing and binding people to one nick. Add a halfway decent matchmaking system to that with true upper bound autohosts for noobs and huzzah.

Was offered years ago and it still didnt happen.I'd guess spring will die before it does..

PicassoCT wrote:How does binding people to one nick make them behave better?

Good question. However, binding to IRL-names would!

That could however, scare these people to other games.

How many people actually play spring anymore?

Professor wrote:

BaNa wrote:Imo most of our problems would be solved by actively discouraging smurfing and binding people to one nick. Add a halfway decent matchmaking system to that with true upper bound autohosts for noobs and huzzah.

Was offered years ago and it still didnt happen.I'd guess spring will die before it does..

Offered by whom and in which way technically?

10% of > 50 are most definitely not a joke. Why would it be a joke??
By random sampling of our german players I discovered very high ratio of > 50.
Also often you get father & son playing the game.

There are even some > 60 grandfathers around.

very_bad_soldier wrote:

Professor wrote:

BaNa wrote:Imo most of our problems would be solved by actively discouraging smurfing and binding people to one nick. Add a halfway decent matchmaking system to that with true upper bound autohosts for noobs and huzzah.

Was offered years ago and it still didnt happen.I'd guess spring will die before it does..

Offered by whom and in which way technically?

Many threads were opened many ways discussed but none actually did anything...this happened several times in the past few years.
This is a recurring topic.

Yes of course. Its just that I cant remember that anyone ever proposed a viable solution to this. Its not enough to open a thread and to say "Smurfing sucks, we need to stop that". The hard part is to figure something out that effectively stop it.
I am quite sure if someone would come up with a really good idea there would be people to implement it.

BTW: Whats you real nick Professor?

Professor wrote:How many people actually play spring anymore?

the same as always. Spring is just as "alive" as it always was. Who's smurf are you?

very_bad_soldier wrote:Yes of course. Its just that I cant remember that anyone ever proposed a viable solution to this. Its not enough to open a thread and to say "Smurfing sucks, we need to stop that". The hard part is to figure something out that effectively stop it.
I am quite sure if someone would come up with a really good idea there would be people to implement it.

BTW: Whats you real nick Professor?

It's not true..
I mean there were solutions offered.
There were several threads talking about making a profile and linking it to emails and all sorts of other suggestions and solutions to problems that were brought up(inb4 Smoth starts focusing on how bad an email solution is or some other petty issue to try and discredit the entire issue).
Just nobody cares mush cause its mainly a gameplay experience problem and a general one related to all projects not a single specific one.
I obviously dont blame people for not doing anything about this issue but fact is nobody cares enough about this to be willing to put a lot of effort into it.

email is a pretty easy thing to get around just as you are hiding behind a false name now.

IP addresses are easy to hide behind etc. I wonder what proxy you are using or if you just moved and now post under a different name to hide your identity.

I dont think email verification is an effective solution. I understand when nobody wants to invest work in such a solution. Have there been any better suggestions also?

How about a gamemechanism, rewarding if you shelter nubs?

My suggestion: a reputation system to enhance smurf detection
* a user-account has an additional field "reputation/smurfiness"
* players can add or subtracts points using commands on trusted autohosts
* lobby clients show the "probability of smurfiness" with an icon/number
* autohosts auto-spec users with high smurfiness --> autohost-owners must play along!...
(* advanced/balancing: smurfiness upper-bound/auto-decline/trusted users/etc)

As with all technical circumvention techniques, it's not about denying, but about making it to costly to be fun.

This should be accompanied by generally discredit smurfing. For example by using not-cute names/attributes ("smurf" sounds kinda to nice) --> "[xyz]xyzxyz was auto-spec'ed, reason: cowardliness"