Dunedan

That's not related to the game itself, but to the connection to the lobby.

I just changed some config on the lobby server. While that doesn't fix the actual issue, it might speed up the time it takes to work again for affected players. If a player is affected now and rejoins the lobby after 90 seconds, they should have a working state again. There is a slight chance this has a negative effect on players with flaky connections though, which might get disconnected more often from the lobby. Please report your experiences!

The "0ad" package is available in "oracular-updates" though.

The lobby is getting updates more or less frequently. This wasn't directly related to Alpha 27 (if you're hinting at that).

So here is what happened yesterday: We deploy changes to the lobby using Infrastructure-as-Code (the code for that is available at https://github.com/0ad/lobby-infrastructure/). Applying changes yesterday included a value for an XMPP MUC room option as a boolean (true) in our YAML configuration. That got converted by Ansible into a Python boolean (True) and when applying it to a string (True). As you might notice that changed the capitalization. While ejabberd (the XMPP server we're using) accepted that value, it doesn't support capitalized booleans and hell broke loose when a code path accessing such a configuration option got executed. For one option (like: "ejabberdctl room conference.host logging True") this does cause the XMPP MUC room the option got applied for to get completely deleted immediately. This resulted in the lobby not being available anymore. Debugging what happened took some time. As a workaround we're now passing the configuration values as strings in the first place, which ensures the capitalization stays as desired and doesn't trigger that behavior anymore. I've also opened a bug report for ejabberd, so hopefully it won't be possible in future anymore to set such invalid options: https://github.com/processone/ejabberd/issues/4337.

The lobby is back online now. I'll post some details what went wrong later on.

The problem tracked here persists for way longer than a minute, sometimes up to an hour or so.

No report from somebody without a rating yet, so yeah, worth keeping that in mind, even though I believe it's unlikely to be a contributing factor. Who knows, maybe a27 will already fix this issue.

The issue isn't related to ratings, but caused by the XMPP server seeing two distinct connections from a client. There tend to be more reports from players with rating, as in that case rejoining a game doesn't work. Rating or not is however not related to the underlying issue.

While I'm not aware of this specific case, feel free to reach out to me if you're interested in details. I'll do.

All the cases I've been able to look into so far, including the one from today, didn't involve a changed IP-address.

I just happened to catch a player while they had the problem and was able to ask some questions: OS: Ubuntu 24.04LTS 0ad installed as snap package no second pyrogenesis process running, as verified via "ps" installed mods: Feldmap and autociv, disabling them didn't help using WiFi at home and landline connection to the ISP Having more of such detailed reports would be helpful, as a pattern might emerge.

As you've already noted I don't comment publicly on specific cases of moderation. Everybody affected by moderator actions will however get a detailed explanation of what he did wrong when asking for it privately. I can assure you that each and every moderator tries to be as objective as possible. If anybody believes a moderator doesn't follow the rules for moderators as documented in https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/121838-moderation-of-multiplayer-lobby-irc-and-forums/, please let me know. Players affected by moderation actions may feel that they are treated unfairly, as they're often not aware of how other players are treated for similar violations of the terms of use. In addition, other players might not be prosecuted for similar violations, because no moderator was made aware of such violations. That's why I can only repeat that it's important to report players which violate the terms of use to one of the moderators! There are also players which will use the missing public reaction from moderators to claim they're being treated unfairly, while knowing that they're not. How violations of the terms of use are sanctioned depends on the severity of the violation and the number of violations the player already made in the past. For example for first time violations of low severity a verbal warning or a short mute might be issued, while repeated violations or violations with a high severity might be sanctioned more extensively. If players decide to continue to violate the terms of use over and over, without showing any will to improve, we might even need to issue a complete ban from our services. That's a situation we try to avoid, but unfortunately sometimes have to take to foster a healthy community. Usually that only happens after a moderator talked multiple times with the offending player, tried to explain why their behavior violates the terms of use and tries to get them to change it. (That's of course only possible if the offending player is willing to talk.) Our goal after all is to have a welcoming community and that only works if certain behavior isn't tolerated.

I won't go into detail regarding the issue with Geriatrix, but rest assured that I have a quite different view on the situation than he has. Rules are enforced equally, so if you believe somebody is breaking the terms of use and isn't held accountable for that, please report it. Moderators don't see everything, so we rely on reports by players as well.

My stance would be: less quantity, more quality. As of Alpha 27 0ad will ship with 157 (!) maps. While I believe a big map pool is good, 157 is too much in my opinion. I'd prefer something like ~100 maps in the base game. An easy step to decrease the number of maps would be to eliminate duplicates. For example there are three "Azure Coast" maps and three "Corinthian Isthmus"/"Isthmus of Corinth" maps right now.