Dunedan

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!

I just retrieved the confirmation that this bug happens unrelated to being in a game or not. So just loosing connection to the lobby and rejoining it, might trigger it.

I just created a thread in the bug reports subforum dedicated for this problem: Let's continue the discussion about that bug there, so this thread can be used for discussing the mod instead.

There have been reports that rejoining games isn't possible sometimes, as the rating for the player rejoining the lobby doesn't show up (https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7185). There was already some discussion regarding this topic in the following thread: Analysis of logs for cases where that happened to players showed that in these cases the players show up as connected with two different instances of 0ad to the lobby server. As we can assume they didn't do that intentionally, it's still not clear how that can happen. Workarounds which would fix this problem as well would be https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/5320, https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/4203 or patching Slixmpp to let EcheLOn keep track of all connected resources of a player, however these would just be workarounds, without addressing the root cause. What I need for further debugging to find the root cause are: whenever this problem happens to you, ping me in the lobby whenever this problem happens to you, reply here with the following information: operating system kind of internet connection (landline, mobile network, satellite, ...) list of installed mods reason why you left the game in the first place (crash, loss of internet connectivity, ...)

In the cases I've looked into that's not the problem. A connection to the lobby server stays alive the whole time during pregame, as well as during the game itself. Listing possible cases doesn't help. I'm interested in the actual cases which result in that problem.

The cases I looked into so far were all caused by being online with multiple instances of 0ad. So unless that was done intentionally it'd be interesting to figure out why that happened. I believe it might be important to learn why rejoining a running game is necessary in the first place. Is that because 0ad crashes or because the player looses the connection to the host?

Same problem happens for 0 A.D. as provided by Debian/unstable since the most recent OpenAL update. cc @vv221

sanafur claimed in the lobby that he's using a gaming mouse: Wouldn't that mean we should see 3 identical commands in the replays for each action?

Please do reports privately to me or one of the moderators.

Every host is free to mute/kick/ban participants of his games as he likes (with the exception of doing so in rated games to gain an advantage).

It's a team of moderators prosecuting violations of the Terms of Use. It's not just me. Everybody is treated by the same standards, however moderators are just humans and might miss violations. If you feel some behavior should've been punished, please report that privately to a moderator. You posted Hindi text containing profanity. Just because it's not English doesn't mean it won't be prosecuted.

Please ping me in the lobby whenever somebody does have this problem.

By the way: The best chance to get bugs fixed is to make the developers aware of them. I might be wrong, but as far as I know that hasn't happened before today. Since when is this problem happening on a regular basis? Why wouldn't you get your rating after joining the lobby? Is there a common pattern for players affected by this? Locaction, network conditions, operating systems, active mods, ...?

There is 6 year old a ticket for that: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/5320

Please mind that this mod violates the Terms of Use for the multiplayer lobby: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/raw/branch/main/binaries/data/mods/public/gui/prelobby/common/terms/Terms_of_Use.txt

That won't help. As 0ad got removed for a while from Debian/testing, it isn't available in (K)Ubuntu 24.04: https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=0ad Probably the best solution is to install 0ad as a Snap or Flatpak package: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/GettingTheUnixRelease#ubuntu

No, @Atrik is just making up numbers. Wait until you learn about other mods, like "autociv" for example. I believe it'd be very beneficial for mods to focus on a single area of improvement, instead of putting everything the author can think of into a single mod. This way it would be much easier for players to get exactly what they want and publishing the mods on mod.io would be easier and less controversial as well.

How would you ensure the names of the mods shown would be legit? It wouldn't prevent cheats, but would make them less trivial if you need to recompile the game to make them work, instead of dropping a bit of JavaScript in a directory. Please report players cheating by using mods or other means. Without reports there is little we can do.

That's what https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7166 would solve. In my opinion cheating is degrading the user experience way more than giving hosts the option to disable unsigned mods. We're not talking about a single mod here. Such a change would prevent all unreviewed and unsigned mods to be used, if the host of a game decides so. There are for examples instructions on the internet to create mods just meant for blatant cheating. The first post in this thread proves the opposite. You can only enforce something you know about and the use of certain mods is not known to other players.

I created an issue to add an option to only allow signed mods: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7166

What does that mean?

It isn't? Undisplayed mods wouldn't work that way either, unless the player uses a recompiled version of 0ad, which is a much higher hurdle than just installing a mod. So you're arguing that preventing some cheats is pointless, because there are still others? In my opinion the best way to have an even playing field is to contribute useful features directly to 0ad. That way all players have access to them. Also splitting "harmless" features and features which might be considered cheating into separate mods would also solve this issue.