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From the topic, you can guess this thread will be heavy. So @Stan` please feel free to lock this thread or ban me if you don't like it. Having been undercover with 20 different accounts over the past 2 alphas, I noticed some persistent issues in the multiplayer lobby (especially TGs). First, let's talk about smurfing. It is in violation of the agreement with Wildfire games to create second accounts without permission, however, many player often spam accounts; in the most extreme cases one person controls 30 accounts and share them with other like minded players. I myself am guilty as charged when it comes to spamming accounts. Why? You may ask. Well, these are the most common motivations for smurfing: 1. They find it funny, creating accounts with joke names or trolling unsuspecting nubs. 2. They regret their old name choice and a much cooler name came to their head after some time. They want to use the cooler name instead. ( This is totally me) 3. Looking for easy wins 4. One of their accounts has been banned or muted. 5. To escape bullying or targeting. 6. To test out new strategies without losing their rating. 7. Because they embarrassed themselves and wanted to assume a new identity. I would like to elaborate on point 5. This is something that only exist in OP TGs, where 1 team has an extremely skilled player and all of the enemies are scared of him. As a solution, the 4 enemies agree to collapse all their troops onto the good player and kill him or annoy him enough to force him to ragequit. The pro player is often placed with 3 nubs for balance, so he can't get much help. The 3 remaining nubs are easy to kill so the game is won. However, from the pro player's perspective, he had no fun at all: it is a 1v4 instead of a team game. In addition, the mechanics of A25 made cavalry extremely speedy and agile, so that they can deal huge damage to the pro player and escape unharmed before the others arrive to help. Furthermore, targeting happens as well. For example, I gained a reputation of having poor defence against cavalry rushes, because I wasn't used to the new mechanics in early A25 after the boom/ turtle A24. But, my boom is very fast and I can field enough units to wipe out any single player in a battle, after the boom. Those who know this, once they play on the opposite team to me, they persuade all of their teammates to rush me at the same time. In early A25 this would have destroyed me. But now, thanks to coaching from Hamdich and berhudar, I am much better and defending myself against rushes in a 1v1. But all of this was useless when 3 players of the opposite team rushed me simultaneously today, even though I was the pocket player! Clearly one of them has convinced the other 3 to do this to me as it is very unnatural to have 3 players all going in on the opposite pocket at the same time. I don't think even the strongest players can defend against 30 cavalry in their base at minute 6 while having to sustain a reasonable boom to support their weak flank player against a much stronger enemy next to him. Surprisingly, I survived the rush today and did boom up eventually, but my flanks had resigned and mighty army of 160 units with cav and champs were crushed by 2v1. This made me write this on the forum to inform the developers and project managers that such issues exist. I am not the only victim of this; anyone above a certain rating has suffered from this before and although it is a strategy, it ruins the game and there is no fun in 4v1 at minute 6. 30 cav at minute 6 is fine in a 1v2 game because your enemy has to sacrifice their eco completely to field this many cavalry so soon, and you will have chance to defend and recover. But this does not happen for a TG. When one retreats the others can take turns to harass and you will never be left alone. Today, each of them only had 10 to 15 cavalry (not much impact on eco) but it added up to 30. The A25 alpha made it very difficult to fight outnumbered so 2v1 3v1 are almost impossible no matter how pro you are. And this is exactly why many good players started smurfing - to escape being bullied by 3v1. They even share accounts and make newbie errors on purpose to make it harder to tell who is playing behind them. I sympathize with these people even though the rules don't allow it. Points 1,2 are fairly obvious and not so malicious. Point 3 raises another alarm: the lobby is very unfriendly to new players, which is why you don't see the leaderboard change often. I will discuss this in the next post. Point 4 is quite obvious... If they don't use profanity again in their new account then fine... The reason I smurf is mainly point 2, occasionally point 5 and 6. Point 7 exists; when some players make a mistake in a TG watched by many spectators, they feel embarrassed to play with them again, but they still like the game. So their solution is to create a new smurf identity and restart their 0ad career until they can redeem themselves in front of the specs.

It could look like this basically. (Didn't make it @Sundiata did. I wonder if the fortifications are mandatory. For the new unit texture, now that you're back @wackyserious maybe you could help? EDIT: Scabbards are easy to fix. Just XML work.

Buenos días o tardes; -Estaré ausente unos meses y me gustaría dejarles con las últimas remodelaciones , que ya sí son definitivas (las hice , porque o bien los edificios de lejos no se distinguían bien o por que no tenían cimientos y el edificio al estar en una elevación de terreno parecía que flotaban; Castro lusitano de élite; @soloooy0, intenté que quedara lo más redondo posible. Fortaleza lusitana; Mercado lusitano; referencias del mercado; -Espero que ustedes sigan apoyando y aportando con críticas y sugerencias o con nuevo contenido para desarrollar la facción y que sea una realidad en el juego(para orientarles , los edificios y unidades ya están terminados , pero igual las texturas de ambas partes no son las mejores y muchas traducciones están hechas pero faltan algunas). Disculpen las molestias* y hasta la próxima!!!

@Genava55 How about this one?

Hunumans

WOW I do like something like HUN as acronym for terrans! It's the UN but launched in the future. And also it has reminescence of "huns", and how they depredated Europe. So it could be quite a cool parallel thrown into space

https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Protoss_history basically the concept is that the Protoss consider themselves first race ( created) and are stoic + the tribal concept. We must play a word game with pragramatism.(may be)

If we use an existing name, it makes us believe that in the future it is related to this movement, which I don't think would be the best point, if it were better, it would be the acronym UN. In that future we could create something like the Human United Nations (encompassing the colonies and new nations created on the moon, mars, ceres and on the satellites of jupiter, saturn.

https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/United_Earth_Directorate

That was my thought process. Would make it easy to give every faction a completely unique look. One classic human, one super organic and one all tech and robots. For names I'm unfortunately not that creative. I would stick to humans, mechas (for the robots or the alien-human-robot hybrids) and to give it the special 0ad flavor, maybe just Gaia for the aliens. And yes gameplay ideas would be good to have

I want to chime in and say that I like the new look of Boudica a lot when compared side-by-side with boob-armor version.

whith this example, @Reyhan, you showed perfectly why it's not fun to have nubs on your team, and why many hosts only accept players of their level. even teams means more fun. also, if this bullying is an effective strategy, than I don't think it can be blamed. it's a coordinated assault, and it makes a lot of sense in TGs. All in all, I'd say you are painting things a lot darker than they are, and many of these issues are simply caused by 0AD having a small playerbase, and it having a public lobby, with a public chat. there's good to it, and bad. of course it is true that smurf accounts should be limited somehow, and that TG should have a rating system, both these things have quite some consensus. (but TG rating should not consider in game scores though, this too has been discussed). I also think that if the game also had a quick matchup system for 1v1, this would make matters simpler, and be more inviting to many new players.

Since 75% of the game is played as a team game, a team rating would also help the host to better assess a new player. An algorithm for this would be conceivable. A bit of creativity. We have very good and creative mathematicians in the community. (Yes the todo lists are very long. I do not expect any change in the near future (years). yes I have created little or no source for the game myself. Maybe this will get better one day).

Now let's talke about the second problem with 0AD lobby: it is very unfriendly to new players, for the following reasons: 1. Most team games only allow 'known players' to play. If someone new appears, the host will often displace them from the player slots, or kick them from the game. Sometimes the host will just immediately ban anyone who he has never see before. If a new player asks to play with them, the host will simply respond with 'I don't know you' then keep them as spec or just kick. 2. Smurfs exist and destroy new players before they get a chance to start enjoying. This is less of a problem since good players only want to play with good players. 3. Many quit without resigning. This makes many players underrated and is frustrating. Players with low ratings are never welcome in team games -> they never get a chance to meet the pros -> they can't improve. 4. Profanity. This happens everywhere. Elaborating on point 1, the reason behind the hosts' unwelcoming policy is because they are afraid of unskilled players ( called cosmic noobs) ruining their balance or decreasing the intensity of the game. This is a valid reason, and I was peer pressured into doing this as well. However from the perspective of a new player, they have waited for a decent few minutes in your game, only to be kicked out simply because the host has never seen them before. There is very little chance for new players to integrate into the 'known players' group so there is always a constant if not decreasing number of players. Sadly, the best way to improve is to play with pros in such games, so the chance of a new player becoming good is very slim since A25. This problem did not exist in A23 and I was lucky enough to become 'known' then. Right now it is always the same small group of people playing and they don't accept any new faces. For some hosts, even a player with a very high rating (1700) is kicked simply because the nub host has never seen that 1700 person before, who ironically turns out to be an old player who has joined since A17... Another reason is the host is scared of smurfs who might ruin balance. In some people's minds, new player without rating = smurf and deserve to get banned instantly. Point 3 makes it very hard to get enough points to prove yourself. In order to get recognised, a new player needs to gain at least 1400 points then prove themselves to a 'known player' who is not so stubborn. After that, he needs to join the TG with their 'known player' and the 'known player' has to recommend this new player to the host. Even then, some hosts still refuse. Once they are in the game, the specs will call the new player noob if they make a mistake, then smurf if they play well. The host might ban instantly if there is a smurf accusation. Obviously this is a toxic environment for any new players. So most new players quit soon.

I heard that too. they call them laundries.

Boudicca has a bronze girl-chested armor which is both fantasy and inaccurate: Caratacos has the weird belt from its concept art, which is conan the barbarian -like stuff: http://images.gamedev.net/columns/spotlight/0AD/big02.jpg http://images.gamedev.net/columns/spotlight/0AD/big02.jpg Cunobelin is less problematic but he has weird leather straps (purely decorative) over the body and with buckles (belt buckles are actually something the Romans popularized, the Celts used belt hooks and rings), there is also a Roman fibula on the shoulder (the penannular fibula appeared during the Roman empire) and the wooden scabbard that should be in metal and on the other side: Vercingetorix still has a round shield (which isn't accurate), the scabbard on the wrong side and a weird belt: Viridomarus uses the Battersea shield (which has been found in UK), a bronze fantasy cuirass, a weird animal pelt and the same problematic wooden scabbard: Finally the temple... isn't really looking like a temple: Honestly, you could use it for anything else and you wouldn't see the issue. There is nothing telling you it is a temple or any building with a religious function. This could be a storehouse, barracks, a noble house, a military camp etc. The building isn't bad, except for the round shields, but it is super generic and unspecific.

Hey, I stumbled over this thread a couple days ago (checking up on the bigger Libre / Open Source RTS projects), and funnily, this post here got me checking out "BAR" - when actually my background is from the SpringRTS engine :P. I'll introduce myself in separate thread!

That's what I was thinking. @Stan` @feneur

Even without definitive names could we start a sub forum with three discourses (game style, art, structures) separate one for each faction?

I could get used to HUN and SHA (maybe super human android?) But then we should call the aliens ANT to stick with that scheme (and to get that insect connection)

okay, now the difficult part : @Lion.Kanzenis there a Nahuatl name we could borrow for an ancient civilization? That would be cool for our "protoss"! For the zergs I have no idea honestly.. I'm looking around some terms for insects, bacteria and organic stuff Anyway guys! Let's keep it easy eh! If we find a good one let's stick with it, otherwise we can spend days for just names

My initial suggestion was that the Battersea shield be a prop addition to the Brythonic temple or other structure. But since you insist in a combat use, let it be equipped to a proposed hero before or during the time of Julius Caesar's invasion, if any.

For me, we can accept this as a good start. A good thing would be the initial names of the three factions, as well as their core gameplay.

Armored variant?

Lol. I was inspired by this idea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft But it seems there is already a (quite recent) RTS doing exactly that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Goo

AWESOME!!! This is the perfect kind of collaboration!! Thanks so much for providing other inputs! Very, very appreciated! I was kinda satisfied by the idea of our "protoss" being the fusion of human and aliens, it worked well as justification. But hey! I find the idea of an ancient civilization quite interesting as well. It opens the door for an interesting work of concept art around it. The rest sounds all very good! I also like the idea of an ecological collapse as backdrop of the story. Let's wait and see if others have some other ideas and, in case, I'll write up a "clean" version so we can go with it!

my thoughts (just as inspiration I quite like your ideas) :

sure!! Let's go with 2500 if everyone prefers! We can also change things in the story, eh! The idea was to run with something that everyone can agree upon, so we can "freeze" some features that can be translated into the game. Things like the name or characteristics of the races, the year, locations etc.. I've seen a lot of different ideas also in this thread, but nothing that was decisive, so I just wanted to cover this aspect so nobody will have doubts in the future on what we want to do. I think it's an important step to get the project going

I feel that on this one I agree with Lion.Kanzen, maybe 2500? That would give us a few centuries of living with the aliens. Aliens could own mercenary units of other species (like Imperium Tau), we could make a dichotomy between humans and new humans > one based their technologies and improvements on robotics and little and non-evasive geetic improvements while the other is more based on improvement extreme genetics without caring too much about ethical values (imagine here biological weapons and bloody humanoid giants (like minotauros made in mythological mod)

Much better. The fibula with the lambda is a bit odd but that's a minor issue and a great improvement The ditches are unnecessary. In fact, most sanctuaries simply follow the concept of an enclosed perimeter, many have ditches but not all have it. Well, there are some examples there: Wooden statues and other wooden figures, weapon trophies, small shrines... I am pretty sure that something like Roseldorf's experiment would be obvious to the players: A chainmail would be more accurate or even unarmored but with beautiful clothes. The site of La Tène with its dozen of swords, shields etc. is also a votive offering. Votive doesn't mean non-functional. The old school interpretation of nonfunctional and ceremonial weapons isn't favored anymore. First of all because we are finding more and more decorated items with visible marks of use. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/celtic-shield-warrior-grave-1725090

for me it is very soon.

Okay guys! I was talking a bit with @Lopess these days to understand if there's interest to continue elaborating ideas for this mod. Surely it would be a great pretext to experiment the full potential of pyrogenesis engine. I don't know if @Stan` you're also still interested about it, at least to supervise it with your experience, or if you're definitely too busy at this moment. Maybe with Lopess we can kickstart some little progress anyway. So, I thought that the initial step to move things further would have been to come up with a loose storyline that could cover a bit the setting of this new mod, the new civs, how they developed and it can give a backbone structure for future work. So thinking about this, I wrote a (very dumb) short story to explain how all the races have come in contact with each others: Some ideas for a background storyline: YEAR : 2121 (far, but not too far) After a third world war that has consumed the planet, the human race has finally found a compromise for global peace, creating a new overarching power to keep stability: the EGO, Earth Global Organization. It all goes well for years until one day an alien civilization finally makes contact with the earth. Some communication is established between human and aliens and, after an initial conflict, the two parts finally come together. Thanks to the contact with the aliens, the humans enter in possession of new knowledge and resources that make space travel quick and affordable. This is especially possible due to a new energy source, the "dark matter". The collaboration with aliens makes possible a new age of space travel and colonization for the human race and they quickly manage to establish a colony on Mars to source the new resources. On Mars and on the following planets, the humans discover a new league of materials, the ADIUM, a metal elastic but resistant that can be mined from space or meteorites and can be modeled to create almost anything. Once on Mars, the EGO take control of the entire operations of colonization and estraction, and secretly start to experiment with the alien collaborators. Finally they manage to merge the DNA of humans and aliens and create a new superhuman breed in their crazy experiments, the SHU (Short for Superhumans, lame I know). Quickly the SHU becomes dominant on the new planets, cutting ties with their human progenitors on the earth and try to dominate everyone else. Meanwhile, the aliens discover the crazy experiments that had been secretly conducted by humans and they break the collaboration with them and declare hostility to humans. --------------- So with this backstory, at the end, we have: CIVS: - EGO (Terrans) try to reconquest their lost colonies. - Reptilians (Zergs) an alien-organic species (haven't found a good naming yet) - SHU (Protoss) a superhuman, highly advanced race that is combination a humans and aliens + mecha features RESOURCES: - dark matter (energy) - Adium (metal) SCENARIOS: - Earth: destroyed and a bit apocalyptic because of the terran wars and alien presence - Mars: space colony - Alien planet: where the aliens came from. The planet is all organic - Some other planet, highly technological, where the SHU had been experimented Inspirations: Starcraft (ofc), Warhammer, Gears of War, Final Fantasy Spirit Within, C&C

the castro is 10 I love it and the market is really well done, reminds me of the ruins where I live. very good spectacular designs, I am looking forward to see the civ in an alpha.

I am making some montages with 3D plus 2D techniques to create Cornelius Scipio. first i'm looking for compositions.

We should start a new thread about improved rating system. However, an idea is that rating gain could be a function of the player's score. For example, rating gain = A * ln(B * score + 1) Where A and B are some constants to be determined as appropriate. This model has the advantage of no ridiculous rating gains from just one game, due to the property of logarithm (f''(x)<0). The +1 is necessary so that a player with 0 score does not get a negative infinity rating. Using this model, taking A=1 and B=1, a 9000 score player would gain 9.1 points, a 30000 score player would gain 10.3 points; a 800 score player would gain 6.9 points. You may argue that this is unfair as the 30000 score player did much better than the 800 score player. So let's consider some function that takes account of the player's individual performance and the overall performance of their team: f(player score, team average) We can deduct points if a player plays too badly with respect to their team, and reward the overperforming players. So we can have a comparing term player score / team average or, player score - team average And then we operate on the result of this comparison to give a rating change. One such model is rating gain = A * exp(B * (player score / average score of their team)) - C C is a threshold constant, which determines whether someone gains or loses points after comparing with their teammates. The advantage of this model is that a player in the losing team who played very well can still gain a lot of rating in spite of their noob teammates. Suppose a 1800 player is paired up with 3 cosmic noobs, the 1800 player can still gain quite a lot of points if he scores 20000 and the noobs score 5000 each. On the other hand, a noob player in the winning team may still lose points.

maybe only in a later implementation a team rating should be distributed somewhat differently (in a later implementation) if this is not possible quickly and easily. Otherwise, as a first step, a very simple team rating could also simply be implemented once first. Some very good players may fear that the distribution is unfair as you probably contributed most to the profit (if you use a very very simle date basis).

Music @OmriLahav

Maybe something like this?

@Stan` I would really like you and any other moderators to be aware of these problems. I can't offer a solution for every one of them, but some can be solved by better code.

Now onto malpractice in the lobby 1. Spamming. This can vary from spamming any nonsense to profanity. Some hackers are proud of their spamming skills, and they creat sophisticated spams that can temporarily block out the lobby chat or game chat. The most notable examples are 'snow people mountain people' and 'follow the white rabbit'. The spammer may join any game and start spamming so that the player's screen is full of white patterns and they can't see the actual battle anymore. Fortunately this hacker has been inactive for a while. This made many hosts ban specs and makes it less friendly for new players who want to learn from pros. 2. Trolling the bots. Some people repeated ping the ratings bot or wfg bot. 3. Cheating. This can be done in many ways but generally it either involves quickly changing the game from rated to unrated or vice versa before starting or trying to gather enemy information not through scouting but an observer PC . Cheat codes need to be banned.

The unwelcoming hosts also explain reason 7 for smurfing. I tried to get my friend to play in TGs and he booms faster than me and will outperform everyone if left undisturbed, so every time the opposite team double rush him. Obviously he will be slow after it. Then people call him cosmic and ban him. In order to get back, he had to create smurf account and regain rating to redeem himself. Most people don't have this perseverance and they quit, which is why 0ad does not have many players.

some physical characteristics and can clearly see the difference.

Lobby: Eternal Blizzard Offender: emapis The player exit the game at the end. commands.txt

See:

Offending player:Madai My lobby name: seeh i (seeh) got about double eco and more then double pop he (Madai) told me then he will exit and he did commands.txt metadata.json

Yes. This is the reason why so many people exit without resigning when he's winning a game. If he'd knock it off, he'd have far fewer rating disputes to report.

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