Darkcity

Neither denaying this nor I mentioned that it is not case. We can't ask user/player to no do certain events when it is possible in game, right? These cases needs to be handled accordingly. No proposal has been put in front. Thats why I always put my point of view in buckets. Gameplay disucssion was purely from the point of view of player. I plays game quite frequently with both pros as well as new players, so my comments were based on that. Logical persecptive was to answer @Gurken Khancomment that if romans has access to eles in past then they should have used it. It was my logical answer to that Product perspective was my understanding of how UI will be complicated. Attaching a screenshot of the same. If you have 2 different types of units under a player and you select them then what will you see. You can so the buildings they can build, the panel is full. Don't we need this special handling if any units can be trained by any civilization? Cosider a case where 3 or more civilization units are there. 4. I replied to @Gurken Khan how can be handle this case. 5. This was my proposal and final comment @alre. I wasn't completly opposite to idea. I totally onboard to have somethig in between, but based on observations I don't see option 2 as good idea. And, not sure where did I make false claim though. Let me now if I have missed something. I can understand if we not used to look at any disccusion in parts but thats alright. Thanks @Sevda for the code piece you shared.

@Gurken Khan Lets take an example of Sele capturing Brits Baracks. WIth 2nd case, Sele can train Slingers. Now the problem is Sele civic doesn't have slingers, so how do we support it? 2 ways. Make a model of slings under Sele. If we do this we have to support all types of units present in the game under each civilization - Not ideal & very big task, and prone to many bugs. Use sling model of brits. In that case sling can still make brits buildings. Not ideal, UI will break. This is just 1 use case i explained. There are so many use cases and edge cases where we have to figure out how to handle. Besides logically we have modify slings stats here but again effort required is high. We can have something in between. For example. If mace capturing Mauryas cc. Since maryans has skirmish cav, Mece can also train skirmish cav, and since mece doesn't have normal skirmish they get Merce Skirmish. So, if the types of unit is supported by catuptured civic then capturer should be able to train that unit, but the unit will be of capturer and not captured civic, which is the present logic and I think it is fine.

There are two options. Allow capturer to train captured civic units or not allow that. We can look at from multiple perspective. Gameplay persepective Not allow case: In this case gameplay will be as usual nothing impacted. People will know what to expect and what are the benefits of caturig the building. Allow: New gameplay kicks in, people can train any units of any civilization as long as they capture the buildings. Maybe interetsing gameplay, but few limitions are there. User will see so many units types, He will have so many questions. He opts for a civic that has some units. Now he sees so many units from so many buidlings, which one to train? Therotically speaking a game with ffa of 8 players, a player can have 8 different variation of each units like skirmish cav, will he even going to use that? People play a civic becasue they know the civic, sure some variation in units are preferred but with too many options player might get confuse. There can be other cases as well. We should test out this in mode if possible. Logical persecptive: A civilization that especialize in certain units types should have suprior units compared to a capturur that doesn't especialize in it. If Romans captures Sele elephant stables and train eles then they should be inferior in stats. If we are willing to do that then I think it should be fine logically. Certain units types are specific to a civilization that defines their indentity, should fire cav be trained other than by Iberians? It can be questioned. Product perspective A single player can have so many types of units trainable under him, depends on types of buildings captured. It will add to some level of more complexity. UI handling will be difficult. Suppose you are brits, you have ptole backs and roman barcks and mauryans barcks captured, and so on. In certain cases, no of differnet units will exceed the supported number on screen. For example on slecting barack we can show 10 differnet types of units. But now we have 20 types of units, the UI will break. The units trained under capturur shouldn;t be able to build captured civilization building. This needs to be disbaled else it will be hugh mess. For example if a roman civic captured mauryans & brits baracks and trained archer and sling. These units should not build those civic specific building. UI will break. To handle this we will need hard checks, another level of complexity. =================================================================================================== My point is allowing going with option 2 is more complex and less logical than we think. We can make some expercation for certain units and among certain civiclizations, but fully allowing I'm not in favour of. We can either go with option 1 or have some exceptions (something in middle) but not option 2.

I think the whole point of not allowing training for certain units from captured buildings is to maintain uniqueness of the civlization. For example followings doesn't make sense Romans makings eles from elephant stables mauryas making siege towers from capture siege workshop Sele making sowrd cav from gauls stables. And many more... I believe any capture building should only train units that are related to capturer. Which is the current implementation, except few bugs.

@Dizaka, @Stan` What's the expected behaviour here? Civilization A can train unit X from capture building Y of civilization B, only if unit X is supported by builidng Y of civilization B? Becasue I have seen this broken many times. To give you an example. If you are iberians and captures Embassy of Carthas, You can train merce sword cav. Which is weird because Iberians doesn't have merce sowrd cav. I will take snap next time and share the same.

I was referring to this @Stan` How come a player has such stats?

At present lobby doesn't support one on one chat, it only allows lobby messages which are visible to all players. So, if two player needs to have certain discussion or conversation they either have to host a game where no spec is allowed or create a room where they discuss while asking random joiner to leave. I think this need improvements. This can be done as follows. Solution: If a player wants to send personal message to anyone they can use @playername to send the message. In this case the message will only go player and not to entire lobby. You can always tag player with using names without @ so using @ is fine for personal message. Example, @Darkcity 1v1? (FAQ by vinme). limitation: Certain people might get toxic and can use it in bad way. Hence we can do following improvements. Put profinity check as usual chat. Allow personal messages to friends only. How to decides who is friends? This can be done using current buddy tagging. Right now you can tag anyone as buddy so it can't be considered as friend since you can mark anyone buddy. So, only ff both players tags each other buddy then they should be market as friends. You can only tag friends with @ to chat. Profanity checks will always be there. @rossenburg, @Grapjas will you be able to include this in your modes?

@rossenburg I like your solution, as it is simple and might be effective. I have some questions, comments ,and improvements about your feature. Questions......... How would you finally verify a player as smurf? based on number of reporting for the player? How would you handle collective abuse of the feature? Where certain group of players mark certain player as smurf (for fun or some other reason) even though he is not? Will smurf will have his say in deciding his account as smurf? What is the exact role of lobby modeartor in your solution? He is just a tagger or he will also have his say tagging the player as smurf? Comments.......... Try to add more functionalities than just smurf reporting. More use case a feature covers most likely to be added. Example use cases are Report for leaving a game Report for DDOS Report for in game abuse etc... Penalties suggestions are Muting in lobby Banning for certain days. This will be more effective, as player would want to play 0ad and he will login with account to play. After a while he wil be tired of making acounts and will return to original. If player finds out the original player, tag original account as smurf. This will scare most of smurfs as they don't want to loose their orginal account. (Although player concent should be taken before banning as warning) Improvements......... Creating a level of messaging and penalties for smurfs based on number of reportings. lets say x number of players has reported player as smurf then. 3<=x<=5 , kick/disconnect from lobby with notification "Your account has been reported as smurf account, please login with your original account". 5<x<=8. Ban for 1 day 8<x<=10, ban for 3 days 10<x<=15, ban for a week. x>=15 permanent ban. The decision to ban should be with moderator while kick and disconnet should be automatically. Change the color of your ! as these reporting are done. for example from a color grade yellow to red. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0AD_BOSS case is kind of questionable. @Stan` is this becasue he is using certain mod? Else how come someone has such stats? Example -ve matches?

It won't be good player experience for new players. It might stop some smurfs but it will impact all newbies. So, not sure if this will be a good solution. Also, most smurf don't care about ratings except few, so this will only go in their favour, where no ratings is shown untill he can ruin 10 games for other players. It can go as overall suggestion to 0ad on how to calculate initial rating based on first 10 (or x) rated games and there after normal rating system that is currently present, but for smurf i'm not sure about it.

I see these 2 as good solution to this whole smurf and new account problem. Second point I want to add is what stats to show for a player in 0ad lobby through which people can check whether or not he is smurf. At present we show following values Ranks Ratings No of rated 1v1s Win and lost games Win % I think here win and lost games are redundent if we are showing Win%. Instead of this we can show, Number of Team Games played or Total games played by the players. These stats will ensure that perticlular player has played many games and not a new account. So, we will see followinf stats. Total games played Total rated games played Rank Ratings (highest and current) Win % in rated games It will resolve following issues. Unrated old players will not be marked as smurfs New accounts can easily be identifiied. No one can be too good when he just played 2 total games and unrated, people will know. Good to know who has more exprience in TGs, even newbies with low ratings at present with good amount of TGs played can say that he has experience to play matches with high rated players. They are often removed from the matches which I feel bad about. @Stan` This should be small change, should be added in ticket in my opinion. CC: @borg-, @rossenburg, @Sevda, @Alar1k

I think at present we still see cartograpgy in revealed map, becasue it has following use case, "Able to check allies resources and scores". But my point is, if map is revealed than why not research cartography be default? Since player can see everything on the map? @Stan` what do you think? I think cartography is redundant when Map is revealed.

Wait what?, playing since Aplha 15 and still don't know this. Will check this out.

We can always decide on numbers that how much exp should it take to reach next rank. Most large fights breaks out after p3 hence required exp will be available then only; and in P3 player can spam champs if they want so it should be fine. Besides exp based stats increase is part of the gameplay, and I think this can be addition on top on what exists already. We can always test it out @alre. @Grapjas can we test your mode and see what changes can we make it look better and balanced? Also can you please share me link to your mod so i can test it.

I understood his concern that champ units for any civilization need to have worker model, for example rome should have sword cav that can be promoted to champ sowrd cav. But I answered to thread instead @alre that how to make units basic units more powerful. This is not overrewairding. You can test your hypothesis for that. Just to give you example of rank 3. In a fight of 100 v 100 head to head fight hardly 10 units promotes to rank 3 mostly dies. On top of that we can manage the how much exp should a unit need to reach rank 4. This can be done through test runs. Besides we are rewarind the unit not more than a champ unit. Its exp vs res. I hope that clears your questions @alre @Grapjas My only concern here is people garriosioing units in barack or stables to get exp. They can keep units garriosned unitl they become champs. So, we might need to fix this as well. I propose following solution. In phase 1 garriosn can't rank you up. In phase 2, you can rank up till 2 while garriosning. In phase 3, you can rank up till 3 but not more than that. In order to reach champ/rank you need fight.

Yes, but we need to add one more rank in promotion, that is Rank4/Champ (till now only rank 3 exists). Any units to achieve that will convert into champ or champ like stats. It is not there currently but can be added. Should be easy to implement, right? @Stan`. Then should be great. Any unit to reach rank 4 will convert into champs.

Why not just add 1 more promotion layer? on top of rank 3? So, champs will be offcially rank 4 unit. This can be done as following. Boost the stats of the units same as champ, when reach rank 4 (No need to change their unit type as champ (Citizen to champ), just give them costume of champs) or Convert them to champions (Which is not suppoted I guess according to @borg-, but solution can be looked into by dev team) I think first one should be widely acceptable. Since, these units will earn the position of the champ and can't be converetd to champs by just spending some resources. I personally don't link the idea of converting normal units to champs just by spending res becasue of 2 reasons. It promotes passive gameplays, where player will just gather res untill he can upgrade his units Not making existing champs at all. Why spend resouce in making champs (that doesn't do eco), when you can train eco doing un@#&#036;% which can be made champs. There are other reasons but I don't want to create a long list but you get the idea. Experiece based promotion should be supported. This will making gameplay intereting in many ways and its a fair gameplay. People will focus on promoting their units, so they will take fair fight rather then go and suicide. Units fighting for so long with so much exp won't be slaughtered by few champs. People will use healing better, since you don't want 1 Hp champ. Its just better gameplay, if you are microing your units till rank 4, you should be rewarded. Thoughts @borg-, @andy5995, @Grapjas, @Boudica, @ValihrAnt, ?

Anyone creating gameplay content for 0.a.d. is most welcome, infact we encourage to do the same. We would like more and more people to upload gameply videos on their yourtube channels. @zxphxryou can also request in lobby to get interetsing gameplay videos/replys from the players.

I think the current lobby can use some improvements, these improvemnts can fall in 4 buckets. Personalizations: what changes would like to see as a player for yourself in the lobby. Funcitonal improvements: What functionalities of lobby can be improved or new functionalities to be added. Asthetics/Design changes: design improvement and changes to make it look more historical and 0ad like. Other changes: Any other suggestion that doesn't fall in this bucket. This thread is open for everyone to add their suggestions. While addition the suggesstion please mentioned which of above 4 categories you are suggesting for. I will add my point somewhere later in this thread once I have done more analysis.

There are many problems on how multiplyers game names are mentioned by the players. We need to put follwoing restrcition on the game name. Character limit: The game name shouldn't be longer than 50 chatacters (atleast not >100). Some people fill in the screen with game name. Profanity check: We should check for profanity in game name hosted by the player. If someone is using profanity in it then he should have same penality as lobyy profanity usages. I think these basic changes should be there. @Stan` what do you think?.

We have other thread for the same "making siege interesting", where we are introducing following changes. Low deafult walk speed for rams, but can be increased depends on units garrsioned. Allow you to capture. Useful when you have skirmish mostly. But yeah, try this. This gameplay is always valid. and welcome to the 0ad fourms. Invite your friends to the forums if they have some concern or suggestion they would like to share. @Archon

@Grapjas it has been 3 years since doing any coding xd. Now i'm product manager so hard for me to code, all I can do is suggest some good gameplay and design changes. Although will try on weekend. If you have resources I can utilize to make patch, I can look into it. Let's coop to make these changes.

If user have tried the game and left, then thats a different issue we can look into. But here the target will be mostly new users. As an individual it will be hard to reach multiple youtubers and influencers, but if communuity help in this then we should get enough new users. My point is 0ad is running for so many years and we deserve a large active (montly active) player base. @Stan` you and the team putting effort then it should be fruitful. 0ad deserve a good community base, and with that we might more resources to help with. So, we can start with small step of marketing. If we start to see results, we can explore more approaches to get more new players. So, lets add to common lobby message follwoing text. "Enjoy 0.A.D.!! then invite your friends and other RTS enthugiasts to try 0.A.D. Shout out on Youtube and live streams, and help 0.a.d. community grow."

Phone number is too much to ask, I think email if more than enough. I think many data protection rules will kick in. We have a discussion on another thread with @Stan`. Where possibility of asking email as optional input while creating a account was suggested. Also, linking the account with an email. Email will mostly be used to recover password and not a hard requirement. Such cases smurfs has no excuse of creating a separate account, unless genuine reason. The effort for that according to stan is high. So, not sure of this will be implemented.

Monthly active player base should be the right measures, as the impact of any change will be higher for such players. Downloads are mostly misleading measure.

One thing I have noticed that 0.A.D doesn't have much presense in any content space or social media space. This is one of the reason we have such a smaller player base. Even die hard RTS fans never heard of this game. There are few things that can done to increase 0.A.D. presense and hence increase player base. Uploading match videos on Youtube: We have very limited Youtube channel who used to upload gameplay video with commentry (0ad newbie rush, Valihrant, Tom oad etc). These channels are highly inactive. hence follwojng things can be done. Just create a gmail like 0adusername.0ad@gmail.com, and create youtube channel. Top players like @borg- should create a Youtube channel and upload their gameplay videos. With or without commertry. Other frquent players can also create a youtube channel and start uploading game play videos. Player who are good at gamplay commeting can take replys from other players and uplaod on their youtube channel. Asking people to try 0ad on RTS youtube channel: There are many RTS youtube channels, where youtubers post their content and they have many followers and viewers. Followong things can be done. During live youtube stream if any, if you are watching the stream. Post the 0ad trailer and download link and request players to try this out. Commeting on newly uploaded RTS content to try out 0ad. If you follow any channal then put a request on their channel in comment to try out. There are many gamers who try new games, if you can acceoss such gamers, tag 0ad. Promoting during live streams: You can do the same youtube promotion on any other live streams if you watching one or follwing one. Promoting on gaming disucssion websites, only related to RTS threads: Many websites such as quora has many questions where people ask games they can try or RTS they can try, if you come accross such Q&A, you can tag 0ad and ask them to try. The 0.A.D community can only expend if all existing player base who likes the game are willing to take share 0ad. This requires only small effort from our side. @Stan` Can we add these sharing messages in lobby? @borg-, @Lion.Kanzen, @ValihrAnt, Do you guys wants to add anything?