Yekaterina

Now regarding @G.O.A.T, I don't know who they are (or if they are a lobby user at all), but I think their smurf list is more on the joke side than a serious report. I have consulted @Norse_Harold (the lobby moderator) and @MarcusAureliu#s (very knowledgeable on old players) about its contents, and both concluded that it's more of a trolling / attention-seeking / jesting act as opposed to a genuine effort to reduce misconduct. This is evident in the fact that he makes very slow corrections or simply refuses to. In the case of @guerringuerrin, it has been proven that he does not have any duplicate accounts, but GOAT has decided to list him down as WilsonWilson and Xaiki. Even after he is asked to remove @guerringuerrin from the list due to the sufficient evidences, he just changed the colour of guerringuerrin to white instead of actually erasing him. This incident suggest that GOAT is not pursing factual accuracy, but an expression of their personal endeavours. His motive is further entailed in the quote: implying that it's for entertainment and imagination rather than an investigation of any significant. Therefore we should keep calm and laugh at it rather than becoming emotionally disturbed. I cannot determine whether GOAT is tracking anyone's IP at all solely from this list, as using mainlog.html does not leave any visible traces. I also don't even know whether he used the same IP tracking method as me at all. There are more sophisticated tools like WireShark that can trace IPs. However, the chance of him being a host or a frequent player or even a lobby maintainer is high, as the lobby is the way to find player's IPs. He also has to care about the lobby games enough to risk lawsuit to write and defend such a list.

I've tried Proton VPN before but it's slightly dodgy on Linux and it does require email sign up. The speed is quite high; the bypassing ability is mediocre but the client is quite a burden. You might be able to protect yourself from other 0ad players but you are not exposing yourself to the VPN provider. Darkcity claimed that he does not know programming at all and is hence incapable of creating such a mod. I don't know to what extent he is honest about it, and whether someone else wrote the codes and Darkcity "stole" their work without citing them. Someone definitely has it though, because a moderator knows its existence. However, even after digging on the forum, I couldn't find any relevant post. This is exactly why I made this topic, and I would like the devs to do something about it. All in all such sensitive information shouldn't be so easily readable in the main logs. Albeit scrambling, hashing, encrypting or just not writing down, please just make it less readable, thank you! We can never stop those tech experts from hacking our IPs but at least it would stop an average user like me or Acero. Most people are just average users or complete noobs.

@zxphxr @MarcusAureliu#s@leopard Since there will be many players online at that time, I propose we have two games and two streams in parallel: MarcAurel plays (and maybe stream first person); leopard streams MarcAurel's game; zxphxr stream the other game.

As you wish. I would instead propose "highlights of the week" instead of one game at a fixed timing on Sunday as that one game can go wrong and the week is ruined. Players might be nervous and that could affect performance. but having a time to get together is definitely a good idea, though we can have multiple games in parallel.

Some people might want to use Sunday evening for revision / preparation for the next week. Others have religious reasons, but it varies. I'm just proposing a possibility

Why not Saturday? It's the day when people are the most flexible and allowed to sleep late

The hero lure can always happen because the hero unit has too much health so all players are confident that they won't lose it in the dance. If we massively decrease the health of heroes then the potential dancer would have to consider more about whether it's worth sacrificing hero for a slight advantage in one battle. Too many people use heroes as meatshields and harassing farms / woodlines. They are almost immune to any tower or CC or fortress arrows. In my opinion, hero units should be "noble" and "respected". It's not very heroic to dance around a battlefield and running away all the time like a coward. Also it's even less honourable to sneak into enemy base alone and kill all of their unsuspecting women; Geneva Conventions fly straight out of the window. Hero dancing can be countered by sniping or just clicking attack move again.

one day I woke up at 5:30am UK time and I saw big parties in the lobby

We don't. We can just use whatever sound effect files we already have, then make the trumpeter blast those sound effects when it is attacking. We can also give it special sounds when it is trained. This is easily doable by modifying the template of the Gaul swordsman. also it's possible to download things from freesound.

Open source platforms, to be specific

Other civs can also use something like the Gaul trumpeters. I can't hear the Gaul trumpeters playing their instrument, it would be good to have some sound implemented for them.

Perhaps we can hash the IP address as if it is a password?

It's not 100% fault proof but it doesn't need extra costs and human labour as opposed to WFG hosting all of the games. It is a compromise, a temporary one. What you are suggesting is good, but I am not sure how much will centralised servers cost compared to people hosting on their own machines. There is no absolute security as soon as you are connected to the world wide web. We can only find compromises to maintain reasonable levels of privacy and security.

Yes, inside the mainlog.html and user.cfg the passwords are displayed as a string of alphanumerical gibberish. I haven't been able to convert this string back to the correct password. I am suggesting we apply the same scrambling algorithm to the IP addresses that are displayed in the log. In other words, TLS encrypt the IP before writing it into the log.

Agreed, even so, we could still intercept all network data using packet sniffers and some other techniques. However, having a layer of encryption would prevent a large number of less tech savvy users like me from seeing people's IP. So far I haven't figured out how to decrypt the passwords.

The password of users is also stored in user.cfg and mainlog.html but scrambled. I'm suggesting using the same scrambling algorithm on the IP addresses.

Dear Devs: I would like to draw your attention to the contents of the file mainlog.html. It reveals too much personal data of the players, for example their IPs and the entire chat history of the lobby and each server. The information inside can be abused, for example one could see the enemy chat in real time or trace the real life locations of players, hence violating their privacy. I would suggest not writing these information directly into Mainlog.html, perhaps encrypt the IPs somehow so that it is not so easily readable. Alternatively, store these data in a more discreet location and delete it as soon as it is not needed. @rossenburg @Norse_Harold

What about: let the riders stay inside towers, then let the horses be tied onto the tower below. The enemy can choose to shoot the horses. If their horse dies, the rider becomes an infantry.

Very well, I drop the not allowing garrisoning sword proposal. But, what about the rider tying his horse under the tower while he climbs up a tower? Surely there isn't anything illogical about that? @BreakfastBurrito_007 @real_tabasco_sauce

Idle champions and idle heroes are not being counted as idle units. They should be. When I press the hotkey for it alt + . the idle champions and idle worker elephant are ignored. However, archer elephants are selected.

Why is it not logical? Humans (especially the riders and caretakers of the horses) can enter the cavalry barrack. The infantry barracks also should have enough space inside for a horse to stand in there. This is not a matter of logic but an act to counter turtling. Some players spam towers and fortresses in their base then hide swordsman inside. This is impossible to siege for civilisations without catapults, and is just a waste of time in general. I can argue that only ranged units should be able to shoot from the towers, since the swordman only carries a sword, how does it shoot?

Hi all, I would like to propose some changes to garrisoning units, please hear me out: 1. Allow cavalry to garrison in infantry barracks and vice versa. This would be useful and perfectly reasonable. 2. Allow cavalry to garrison in towers. The rider can tie his horse under the tower while he climbs up. 3. Do not allow Sword units to garrison in fortresses and towers. To prevent turtling, especially considering that many civilisations do not have catapults. 4. Melee units don't increase arrow count of defensive buildings. Again, to counter turtling.

The difference between open source and windows is like 0ad vs AoE 0ad is totally fair, has no ads, no pay to win, no nonsense spyware. AoE asks u money just to download it. Many simialr games even insert ads and ask u to purchase tools to win. Then they violate your privacy and spy on you But many idiots still play AoE instead of 0ad because the AoE advertisement reached them first. None of them had the common sense to search "open source games like AoE"

@BreakfastBurrito_007 on Linux 0AD can use as much RAM as you physically got, but on windows it crashes if a battle uses more than 4GB. On Linux u can multi instance: can wait for players and watch past replays at the same time, or wait and spec and the same time. Windows users don't even dream about it TLS encryption only works for Linux users. Dev work easier on Linux using Dolphin file browser which has tabs inside windows. Smoother integration between 0ad and OS. On windows u have to install visual studio to compile svn source code.

u don't even have to use a Linux based distro. There are so many operating systems out there waiting for you to try. BSD based Chromium OS Harmony OS (HongMeng) ...