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I'm not sure anyone knows what @Langbart is planing about BoonGUI. This project brought a very refreshing UI to 0ad. I decided to introduce in ProGUI the original BoonGUI panel. You can easily choose to switch between ProGUI and BoonGUI, and have one of them preset for Spectating and when Playing. You could already switch between mods automatically using @seeh's autocivP, but I also wanted to add the option here. BoonGUI overlay: ProGUI overlay: I disabled by default the panel to control the features such as the Trainer and Auto-Tribute. Some players were just using the overlay but the features were still draining some performance. Option page, you can define when to use BoonGUI or ProGUI, and you can enable the additional panel with ProFeatures: If you used previous ProGUI versions, and the advanced features, you may enjoy being able to customize the panels even more: I would probably also help maintaining a BoonGUI representation. I'm not as op dev as @Langbart but I'll still do it. I'll try to get this new version published on the mod downloader so that the classical BoonGUI overlay is also downloadable from it. Shame it wasn't already but I know it was a @Langbart choice not to. Since he didn't say anything, I'll assume I can/should do this. Git Repo: https://gitlab.com/4trik/proGUI/ Mod.io: https://mod.io/g/0ad/m/progui (not always updated)

Good morning. We develop for fun the game 0 A.D., which is a strategy game in which multiplayer is an essential component. However, the childish and toxic behavior of a minority of lobby players has always been an issue and a cause of distress for developers. I see with disgust that this continues to be the case. I suppose it cannot be avoided, since professional game developers also face a lot of verbal abuse from their players, but unlike them, we do not receive compensation for our work. Thus, it should be expected that most WFG developers, especially me, are not aware of the daily developments in the MP community, and are not interested in knowing more about them. Since a few days, I have been receiving complaints from several accounts, who harassed me and other devs in order to get Norse_Harold removed from his position. I have also been added to a conversation about one specific offender, in which Norse_Harold has provided convincing data backing his decision. There are probably other discussions I am not aware of, I am merely giving the context in which I write this post. The only complaint I agree with is the need for transparency around the rules (currently materialized as a draft Code of Conduct, which is not yet published). This is the team's fault for not publishing this CoC in a timely manner. For the record, Norse_Harold has been the one pushing the team for a publication, he does not withhold the CoC on purpose, quite the contrary. Sadly, we in the development team are notoriously inefficient at publishing rules, terms, or legal stuff. It is our fault that rules applied to the community are not clearly communicated and make moderation appear arbitrary. However, this does not justify the current situation. The method used by players to denounce the alleged abuse (spamming devs with copies of the same message, childish comparisons between totalitarian regimes and a silly video game) are jerk methods (not to say extremely cringe-worthy) which are just pushing me into backing the moderators. By the way, there are several moderators with identical powers. I heard no complaints of Norse_Harold alleged power trip from his fellow moderators. I just see the current wave of copy-pasted criticism as a concerted attack towards the most active and efficient moderator. I must say I am concerned about the variety of back channels used to harass people (including me during a weekend I wanted to take for myself...) If you are temporarily blocked on the lobby or the forums, just close your computer and go touch some grass. Or fire up a different game if you have no outside life, which is OK. Opening Insta or Discord to harass, complain, and start a concerted attack is gross misbehavior. In my opinion, this extends to what I read about the use of Element: while I find the idea of restorative justice extremely interesting in principle, I find it unhealthy to actively reach out to offenders, using different platforms, to burden them with injunctions. I would prefer to push people into disengaging from the community for a while and, I insist, going to touch some grass. This is the last input I deign to give in this thread, as I have more important work to do on 0 A.D., including helping to publish the CoC.

There were many players who showed interest in the idea of a series of tournaments with constant teams. Registration: comment bellow with your username or write me in the lobby. At this initial stage, we're keen to gauge the level of interest in this proposed tournament before we move ahead with team formation. So, if you're excited about this prospect and want to see this tournament come to life, we encourage you to register. Your participation could kickstart a new era in our 0 A.D. gaming experience! ScribeOfAges

a transparent process would be nice I guess, but mainly the moderator job should be to defuse and de-escalate. Norse-Harold knows the theory but how is it going in practice? is flame and problems really getting to new highs? remember you can't really keep someone out of the game and community.

A theory that might be totally off base: There is a causal chain at work here, running from gameplay, to smurfing, to sock puppets and spamming. Here's how I think it goes: 1. The competitive gameplay of 0AD is not (in-itself) compelling to experienced, high skill players. The strategy space is too flat. There's no way for the high level players to get ahead with innovative play. Success depends entirely on how cleanly you can execute one of the few viable strategies which everyone already knows. 2. In that environment the meta shifts from playing-the-game to playing-the-players. If you know your opponent's style, you can blind counter them and get ahead that way. As a result the strategy space any individual player encounters shrinks even more. 3. Some skilled players get tired of being beaten up on by blind counters, or just become sick of the dull high-level scene as a whole, so they start smurfing. In their minds it is the only way to get a fair multiplayer experience. 4. Moderators start accusing people of smurfing; some rightly some wrongly. The accused begin to feel persecuted. Grudges are formed. 5. Some of those aggrieved people start using DOS, sock puppets, and spam to harass the targets of their ire. They do it because if they can't have fun, no one should. This is a classic tit-for-tat strategy in a repeating prisoners dilemma. They will not stop. Rehabilitation does not work because it doesn't offer them anything they want. The only condition where they will stop is if you change the rules of the game so they can get the fun experience they always wanted by mending their ways. Right now that is not happening. A toxic environment forms and the original problems of design-frustration and meta-shift only get worse. Its a catastrophic feedback loop. Maybe I am wrong about this? I'm not active in the multiplayer scene, and based on stuff like the current kerfuffle I can't imagine wanting to be. But that is how it looks from the outside. Even in healthy games there will always be a few bad eggs who grief and smurf just to feed their own damaged egos. What is going on here seems totally out of proportion. It's not the people but the system that's causing it. Until you rid the system of misaligned incentives, trying to rehabilitate offenders or even establish a just and transparent retributive apparatus is a fools errand.

there's always a warning before actions are taken (either manually by a moderator or a bot) . Accountability demands integrity, those who break rules and blame moderators lack both. hmm, "they" dont hate 0ad per say, they hate to be told " hey stop breaking a rule you agreed not to break in the first place". You know, there's this saying, "Invisible in action, invincible in impact. Stealth is strength." But it's funny how when people realize you're the one addressing their bad behavior, they start pointing fingers at you. Lately, Norse_Harold has faced his share of accusations, but let's not be disheartened. Our goal remains to build a happy community together.

Please see my topic, hopefully it bring your argument to a peaceful solution: I have been playing with @Yekaterina for a long time, they used to be a nice player and helpful at contributing to developments. Some things happened and they gradually pushed her down the wrong path. We should look at what went wrong to prevent more Yekaterinas appearing. I am not appealing for anyone, I think boths sides have made mistakes. Obviously Yekaterina shouldn't make so many smurf accounts, try spamming and encourage other people to do bad things. But I also think it's not appropriate for a moderator to contact Yekaterina on a platform outside WFG at late night, especially when he/she felt harassed by the messages. If I understood correctly, there is a second set of "draft rules" that is not displayed at the sign-up page. If the moderators are enforcing any rules they should make it very clear for everyone to see, so that nobody steps across a red line without knowing. It would help to pin the rules at registration page or a gaudy location on the homepage. If you just enforce things without telling people, they will think that you are misusing your powers just to please yourselves, hence there will be "dictator" accusations. I do believe that the moderators are serving the best interest of 0ad but maybe some things should be made transparent or at least explained and some methods should be revised. When I read @Norse_Harold's post I get the impression that he fears Yekaterina's metamorphic identites and will try to stop him/her at all costs. I think this is a bit extreme, it will only provoke Yekaterina more and give him/her motivation to do more damage. On the contrary, if you just ignore the likely smurfs, for example the most recent inzhu, they will most likely stay well-behaved because they don't want to get discovered. So there won't be any wave of chaos. I also played with inzhu and they were well behaved in games, not toxic or spamming anything dangerous. On the forum this inzhu talks about multithreading, which is useful for 0ad. Had we kept inzhu, their expertise can be used to improvement of 0ad engine. Isn't this good for "restorative justice"? But after purging inzhu and disturbing Yeka at late night, Yeka is angry again and now we have chaos again. If you suspect inzhu is Yeka you can choose to kick him from your game and tell other hosts to do the same, but editing all of their forum account then provoking Yeka is too much and didn't have any positive effect.

Stop calling for bans. The problem to solve is very obvious. A noob playing archers civs won't even understand why even against AI, archers feel very weak. Sniping is making a technical but very repetitive sequence of clicks just to achieve a simple none-strategic task because of a lack of feature. Some unit re-balance could remove the urge of having such feature, agreed, but still the game would be in my opinion more enjoyable if you had one of these example feature: A special Stance where units attack weaker (or another criteria like class) units in there current attack range. A shortcut/Button to order current selection to attack a selectable group of enemy units. A shortcut/Button to order current selection to attack a type of units in range (you could hover one enemy unit and have all nearby units of the same class glowing to indicate which units are in range of your currently selected units, and that will be attacked). I'm sure one could propose better feature with in mind ease of use. The feature could be more or less optimized to account or not for current hp, overkill etc, but in any case, the goal is to shift player focus and battle outcomes on more interesting metrics then cps. Also you can see that all feature described require players engagement, speed, and for the stance one, some technical skills to reposition units in battle. They compress the spamming of 80 clicks down to a few one. Right now, if you play archers civs and forgot to put your hero or another unit on the correct stance of target, the famous "opportunity cost" is to let it suicide else you may lose 2sec of sniping that will seal the outcome of the battle. Leading to easier unrewarding scenarios. Since it seems proGUI is named on 50% of this topic posts, I can once again precise that my attempt with this mod was to remove the unrewarding limitations of the current GUI. It never felt rewarding to me to have to check manually which military building has stopped auto-queuing units for arguably arbitrary reasons. So ProGUI suggest two approach to make it less painful: Idle production buildings have clickable icons that you can use to view and reassign production. This is totally not "auto" and still you can use it to boom much better then if you add all barracks to a control group to queue units regardless of current production queue. I already advocated to think of an equivalent to implement in vanilla UI, because it's very useful. Auto-train (production controllable from a panel), where you control production variable for buildings to output exactly what you want them to, with the ability to task buildings to alternate unit production to make a specific unit composition. The basic usage of it is very easy, and late games are funnier when you have production you can handle easier by a overlay panel. As expected, removing unrewarding tasks (such looking for the barracks where auto-queue broke) from the game made it more enjoyable for me not less. The mod has a reaction time of 0.6 - 1.2sec and can't even make more then one order in that time-span, so it's probably not improving players gameplay because it's doing anything super-fast. The game is subjected to possible improvements and improvements are very often new features. On a open-source game you can kinda expect that mods experiment new features, that may or not inspire changes in main game. There aren't that much stakes at play in a 0ad game, AND the mod is available to all anyway.

IMO the fact that were this mod to exist, with: "ignoreInCompatibilityChecks": true set, it would be undetectable in-lobby (as I understand it) is more worrying then how the mod is perceived ethically. Maybe my understanding of mods is wrong, although from what I gathered from the proGUI thread is that this is still more or less the case. The discussion of "what's fair play re: mods" is an interesting one but seems way too porous and lacking (surprisingly) authority for it to be productive, so again IMO the ability to see what mods someone is really using seems more useful than 10+ people pulling at opposite ends of a "what's fair" rope. As with even the most basic semblance of lobby moderation and prohibition of racial slurs in usernames (has this happened yet?)—which was brought up numerous times on the forum to total inaction (and even push back)—I'm at least hoping that over time the total black box that is mod use will slowly get some attention. I suspect a few top players will change their approach (or at least lose some perks like totally revealed maps for allies and enemies) coincidentally around the same time.

Nubtrik

How likely? Likely ≠ is correctly Punishing people based on probability... How many more must be banned? Using your logic, anyone who has some resemblance to yekaterina must be banned immediately... That's a lot of people Who? How many? Why such intransparency in an open source game? Why can't the public see your deciding process? You can make an announcement thread and lock it immediately if you don't want chaos. As an user of WFG services I demand some kind of transparency. I am worried that some moderator will label me as Yekaterina and ban me at any time.

@Atrik I totally agree that spamming alt-clicks to win a fight is not a good place for the meta to be at, but I think adding automated tools that are optimized for the best results don't just remove clicks, they also remove the game we enjoy. This stands in stark contrast to the default unit and structure behavior which is not optimized and needs player engagement to get better results, meaning that players need skills to execute strategies as opposed to choosing them from a menu. I think the best case scenario is that we have a successful melee/ranged rebalance effort that makes alt-clicking less powerful.

A bit of traditionalist music from the south of Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul) Images with some riders.

¿Maño?

He was a soldier of Rome. Honor him.

That’s was what age of empires do with AOE3 and the mexicans dlc