Question for admins

[Sgt. Dick]

I'm with ztev0 on the 10 min map time.

Someone should be able to hit the frag limit on a rail map in 10 minutes.

[ex]

All trolling aside, I think it's a good idea. Some maps cause the vanilla server to clear at certain times. I think it would only work if it was unanimous. That prevents abuse, and like what was mentioned before... you can always switch servers.

It should also only force a timelimit hit so that it plays the next map. Voting for a specific map is a terrible idea on FFA servers.

It really has to do with the audience and number of players. Dm4 cleared out very fast today because we only had 4 players to start. I'm sure that dm4 at 10:00 tonight will be 16+ players and everyone will have a blast. Sometimes I can coax the morning crew into nades only, but there are a few maps in rotation that are not friendly to it. (lab, dm3, etc...) The ability to switch maps would help keep people engaged when they are in a certain crowd.

My real question is this: Can wallfly handle this, or would it have to be a server change? I'm guessing that letting wallfly handle it is not realistic because that means maintaining a secondary list of players, real time, that has to be accurate to account for votes including contingencies like timed out clients. He may be smart enough to do this already, but if not it's a lot of work to duplicate some server side efforts.

All trolling aside, I think it's a good idea. Some maps cause the vanilla server to clear at certain times. I think it would only work if it was unanimous. That prevents abuse, and like what was mentioned before... you can always switch servers.

It should also only force a timelimit hit so that it plays the next map. Voting for a specific map is a terrible idea on FFA servers.

Now and again I've thought of adding this functionality to the existing "nextmap" command.

Currently "nextmap" displays the upcoming maps, but perhaps with an additional parameter, it might work like this:

player1: nextmap now!
WallFly[BZZZ]: Do others agree? Need 4 more votes to end current map...


...something like that.

My real question is this: Can wallfly handle this, or would it have to be a server change?

I'd want to implement this with wallfly.

Trouble is, it's difficult (but not completely impossible) for wallfly to tell who is in-game and who is spectating.

My inclination would be to limit the voting to players who are currently in-game (and possibly who have at least 1 frag.)


Regards,

I'm not sure why being able to mapvote in ffa servers is a terrible idea.  Every ffa server I've played at that has this ability enabled has BENEFITED from doing this.  More players want to play more games, because they can change the maps at-will via vote.

Look to wormlair.com, WORM has made the servers there more than able to do all of the things mentioned here.  People can vote to change maps, one time per player per map, in real-time.  It takes at least 70%+ (I believe) of the players on the server ATM to change the map mid-game, and I'm sure this could be easily done here as well.

As far as the spectator vs. active players, I didn't realize that could be an issue.  At acmectf ffa, it's not a big problem, but acme is far less active overall than TS... That's a judgement call for you guys to make, if of course you decide to do something like this.

But ANYTHING is better than how it is now.  Nothing clears the servers faster than a bunch of shitty maps, especially IN A ROW like it is on vanilla, with no ability to change to a better map mid-game via vote.

Thank you for your consideration, both admins and players.

p.s.:  Big time agreement with ztev0, 10 minutes would be better on railz for sure.

[peewee_RotA]

I find it funny that you bring up acmectf. I was about to use it as a prime example of how map voting ruins the game. There are 3 maps that get played on that server. The server has probably 200... but only 3 maps ever get played.

Action q2 is a good example. The only map anyone ever plays on a server with mapvoting... is teamjungle.

Quake live suffers from the same thing. There are a small chunk of maps that are constantly voted for in FFA games and the majority of the FFA maps ended early by people spamming map votes.

What you get is one side of a player base dictating to the other player base what is good. In a purposed game, like TDM, it's fine. You spend time setting up rules and restrictions on map lists. A ref gives teams the chance to choose their own maps. Lots of time is spent carefully choosing maps. That's a great use of map voting.

There is definitely value in ending an unwanted map early... but map voting abuse was first experienced in the quakes. I've seen it and been extremely annoyed by it for quite some time.

[Whirlingdervish]

I find myself agreeing with peewee. :bizarro:

IF we were to add something like this to vanilla I garauntee we will get to watch the CRU/cow circlejerk run the map rotation even more than they already do, and make the server even more annoying to play on while they teamcamp a select few maps where it's the easiest to do and vote down the ones where they get decamped or pretty much anyone else's choice that they don't agree with.

making the vote threshhold a static value like 5 would be the easiest way to do it without major changes to wallfly, but it would allow a team of 4-5 players to run the show on a server with 31 available player slots, which is nothing less than a recipe for disaster considering the fact that there is already a group doing this whenever they can manage to do so.

[ex]

I guess I do see the point that only a few "select" maps get played over and over...it's less of a problem at ACMEctf though, as the players and admins are a little bit more of an intimate group...so why not do this here then?:

When a map gets voted, it can't be voted back in for 10 maps!

example:  mapvote fury passes, map gets changed to fury, map is played, then when it is attempted to be re-voted, Wallfly bans fury from choices and displays message "This map cannot be voted for another 10 maps!"

Wouldn't that solve the problem of circle-jerk map-spamming, and still fix the problem of server-clearer maps?

Just a thought.

[peewee_RotA]

I guess I do see the point that only a few "select" maps get played over and over...it's less of a problem at ACMEctf though, as the players and admins are a little bit more of an intimate group...so why not do this here then?:

When a map gets voted, it can't be voted back in for 10 maps!

example:  mapvote fury passes, map gets changed to fury, map is played, then when it is attempted to be re-voted, Wallfly bans fury from choices and displays message "This map cannot be voted for another 10 maps!"

Wouldn't that solve the problem of circle-jerk map-spamming, and still fix the problem of server-clearer maps?

Just a thought.

I have a feeling that you are not familiar with the mymap feature.

But you do bring up a good flaw in my logic. Using mymap right before forcing a map end is the same thing as voting in a different map.

[playboy]

I like that you brought up Teamjungle for aq2. I'd have to probably blame that on team server map rotations. Maplists would consist of like 6 maps: Urban, City, Teamjungle, Actcity2, urban2 and cliff2. So people are acustom to those maps and want to get better since you can ONLY play those maps on team servers.