Spring RTS Engine

When new players come to spring and join the official server, the only reliable chat channel they're all put into is "newbies".

Saturday afternoon, "newbies" channel has about 70 users. The second channel with the most users is "main" with less than 30 users (the rest are bots).

This is about the autohosts' promote feature. Currently autohost bots aren't allowed in the newbies channel. What's the point of bots promoting games if they're locked out of the most populated channel.

Bots should be allowed, other ways should be found to prevent spam, if necessary.

How is promote handled by different lobbies? maybe there could be some standard of behavior. Promotes for different rooms could be shown in chat with different colors too, and maybe greyed out after a while to signal that they aren't "fresh".

Another option would be to have everyone also joining "#main" by default

The purpose of #newbies is for new players to ask questions which can then be answered by the veterans.
Bots were banned by design as veterans would likely leave such channels due to spam.

Additionally I think that (using channels for) promotion is a stupid idea anyway. If people want to play games they'll join them in the battle rooms. All released lobbies support battleroom listing which do a much better job than channels ever could.
Promotions only use case should be for special events and tournaments, not for non-stop spam. And in that case better notification systems are desired (opt-out, game-specific, dialogue box/integration with the OS notification system), see Steam for an example.

I actually had #main opened until recently, but it seems that a new SpringLobby behavior makes notification sound when a promotion happens, so I left it.

People can join battlerooms, but they don't know if game is about to start, or if players are just idling there. It's passive.

promote is a way to publicly broadcast "game room X needs people now!". There's intent to it.

on the other hand, the ring kind of annoys me too when i'm not looking for games.

I'm of the opinion that people shouldn't be in battlerooms (as players) if they don't want to play.
Channels are for chatting, battles are for playing.

It could however be used to give information on how many players are needed and thus which games would start sooner. I'm still not convinced this is really all that important. People are intelligent enough to guess that by just looking at the battle list, and matchmaking is the future anyway.

Anyway, this kind of promotion doesn't really belong to channels, and certainly not to #newbies.

That said, Having players join #main by default would make sense, or even just #<gamename> channels. I think this is what most lobbies do.

gajop wrote:The purpose of #newbies is for new players to ask questions which can then be answered by the veterans.
Bots were banned by design as veterans would likely leave such channels due to spam.

thats the exact reason why bots aren't allowed in #newbies.