"soft" force start
mushis opened this issue · 5 comments
QuakeWorld 4on4. the pinnacle of team play in fps. no doubt
But also, synonym to long wait times.
I have a suggestion.
today, there's /forcestart command, only can be issued by admins.
usually, this is an extreme atitude, after 20+ minutes waiting, everyone is bored, and some one must be elected admin, and sometimes its difficult to get the needed votes because most of the players are AFK. and then another hour has gone by. I could go on, but you get the point.
sounds familiar?
My suggestion:
A "Soft" force start - equal behavior to the forcestart command, with 2 differences:
- doesn't require admin, anyone can do it.
- doesn't kick players that didn't readyup until the end of the countdown.
Why this is good? it forces everyone to come back to the game, it isn't intrusive (no one is kicked). It speeds up the decision to do a real /forcestart, and hence a /elect will be also faster to get votes, because players are not afk.
It can be abused? yes, if it isn't controlled. I suggest a cooldown of 90 seconds or more (time when a new command can be issued).
I let you pick the name for this new command, i would suggest something like /forcesoftstart
forces everyone to come back to the game and what does it even mean?
Instead of that you suggest, I personaly think that there should be server ports explicitly configured for mixes.
- auto ready (always ready)
- server auto assign team (server enforces it, you can't choose it)
- auto kick for idling (3 minutes or something) (with autoready this one is probably excessive)
- server issue rpickup vote when server is full (its vote, you can skip it if majority agree to continue to play with current roster)
- server issue rpickup vote each match start (its vote, you can skip it if majority agree to continue to play with current roster), probably server should issue rpickup few times and ask for confirmation if majority is fine (but limit it for 3 times or something so it not endless)
- probably lower timelimit (10 minutes, so uneven games is not that painful), or/and fragdelta setting, this thing need some though
Tbh when I tell majority for votes it actually should be half of maxclients (for 4on4 games it should be 4 players).
What should this new command do? Just force focus of the clients, so the (ezquake) client become the active window? Like the matchstart doing it, if you are AFK?
@qqshka,
how should the server know, it should start a 2on2, as there are 4 players on the server, or it should wait for 4 more players to have a 4on4 going?
I am not sure if players would like this 'auto-teamup' thing. But with some fine tunings this could be interesting to test for sure.
@tcsabina, yes. exactly.
trying to clarify further. if you never experienced a force start, it does the following:
- forces the focus on the client, so it becomes the active window (what Toma said, I confirm)
- starts the countdown
- when the countdown finishes, it kicks non-ready people (my suggestion is different here, soft force doesn't kick anyone) - but at that moment everyone is with his client's window focused, and its easier/faster to elect an admin to take action on afk's)
qqshka's idea might be worth testing.
It could only be a command to enforce "mix rules", but players would have to activate it manually I guess. something like /4on4mix, right?
Dedicated ports make sense since we got so many. But I'm not sure server admins will adopt it - some will, most won't.
Game mode (4on4/2on2/etc) could be solved differently. Since server port dedicated to this auto-ready-mix-mod it could be just flocked to one of 4on4 or 2on2 etc. You could probably still allow select game code but it may cause issues, so better not.
What I am suggesting is not trying to solve all issues in the world but rather reduce human factor for faster games arranging, some matches still going to suck, but you have to choose what you dislike less - idling for hours and listen to whine or actually playing. Also I suggest enforced roster shuffling with some sort of controll with short (probably) matches, so experience should be more or less even and if shuffle failed when the match is going to stop early due to fragdelta.
And it probably should be promoted and explained reasons behind it etc.