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.

Please keep it civil in here and focus on the overall issue, not individual players. Otherwise, I'm going to lock this thread.

That 2.9Wh is only for inference and does exclude the vast amount of energy, which is required to train the models. Thanks to "AI" a nuclear power plant is re-opening for Microsoft (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/energy/three-mile-island-microsoft-ai/index.html) and Google's emissions are growing, instead of going down as they planned (https://apnews.com/article/climate-google-environmental-report-greenhouse-gases-emissions-3ccf95b9125831d66e676e811ece8a18), to just name two examples.

Fair point. I took the liberty to rename the thread to "The toxic player Issue".

This is a gentle reminder that this thread is to discuss the overall issue and not issues with individual players.

What does help us for moderation are reports of violations of the terms of use, like using duplicate accounts, to one of the moderators or me via private message (best here in the forums), with screenshots/logs attached. While we catch some of them without reports as well, we're never going to be able to catch all of them, if the community doesn't support this effort. If you encounter a toxic player, please also don't encourage them to continue to do so, by further participating in games they're also participating in. You can also consider applying that to unknown players as well and only play with players somebody else vouches for. As @Meister proposed, please keep this thread free of personal accusations and focused on the overall issue.

In the cases I've seen, the users rejoined with the same internet provider.

In the time since, thanks to several people pinging me, I was able to investigate additional cases where this happened. What usually happens is: player joins the lobby with connection 1 (everything is fine) player joins the lobby with connection 2 (that being their active 0ad now and no rating is being shown) player leaves the lobby with connection 2 (probably when closing 0ad) player leaves the lobby with connection 1 (maybe when shutting down the PC) Step 2 is usually a direct response of a player having left a game (for reasons I don't know) and wants to rejoin. It's certainly not a timeout issue, as step 4 might happen hours later. To me that zombie process theory sounds somewhat plausible, however I've had no player answering the questions from the first post here yet, so we don't know if and why they restarted 0ad. If the zombie process theory is correct, then that process should be visible in the list of processes and a clean restart of the PC should work around that problem. Instead of a zombie process, I could also imagine 0ad getting confused internally and managing two concurrent connections to the lobby.

The accusations @Seleucids makes about @Norse_Harold's behavior in the past had been investigated back then by WFG staff, without finding evidence of misconduct by @Norse_Harold. On the other hand it's been proven that @Seleucids/@Yekaterina did commit serious violations of the terms of use back then, which did degrade the experience for other players. @Seleucids: Please stop repeating these accusations over and over. If you believe there has been misconduct by @Norse_Harold ever since, report that privately and with proper evidence. With that said, I'm locking this thread now, as any further discussion is unlikely to have a positive effect on the community.

What's so difficult about reporting stuff to me or one of the moderators? Have you done that? I don't think so (at least I don't know about it). We can only act on violations we know about. So stop the complaining and report violations of the Terms of Use privately to me or one of the moderators. Aside from that there is also the possibility for the community to outlaw toxic players by not letting them participate in games.

Ironically it refreshes only the ratings for all players not affected by this bug, because this bug seems to be caused by players (unintentionally?) being connected with multiple instances of 0 A.D. and only one instance would receive these updates. Even if all instances would receive the updates, other players joining is a frequent occurrence when somebody is affected by this bug and doesn't solve it. Registering multiple accounts violates the Terms of Use. Don't do that!