> Couple of responses.
> * Multiplayer > > - - simple password/nickname in MP, like in IRC? > We talked about adding some simple nickname registration like it is > done in IRC > with the tool named "nickserv". That means that you can basically > register a > nickname/password combination for the MP server. This nickname > registration is > *only* about the nickname itself, no stats are meant to be saved. > This feature > is meant to allow players to be more confident in knowing who they > play with, > that is the user named "abcdefghij" will, if he is registered, be > the same today > like he is tomorrow, where without such a feature everybody can say > that he/she > would be "abcdefghij". No opposition here. > > - - simple rooms in MP, like in IRC > We talked about the possible addition of some room system for > multiplayer, so > that players could define rooms for multiplayer campaigns, > tournament games, > 1vs1 only, LANGUAGE only and so on. This is also meant in > conjunction with a > possible ability of some kind of "server rotation" to allow a better > scalability > if we need serverpower for more users.An example of how such a > rotation could be > done can be seen in IRC where many servers do form the network named > "freenode.net". This way the server could scale better even when we > have many > more users simply by adding one extra server. Eh, I'm quite equivocal about this one. Allowing the creation of rooms can help reduce the clutter of messages on screen which has been a problem since 1.0 came out. Thats a real problem which needs addressing, but I believe creating a room system, though helpful to that specific problem, creates several others which warrant serious discussion. My main concern with adding more rooms is breaking down the lack of community collegiality in the game. I can see the use of some rooms to separate out people of language, but at the same time its a danger. For example, a new French player with relatively poor english skills might not have exposure to a native english speaker if he immediately went to a French room and never bothered to leave. I think that would be a fairly common outcome because these individuals would have no reason to go outside. The present system forces players to interact with a much larger base of individuals than they might normally be exposed to, to some degree building a better community and keeping people engaged for longer. I think we should try to promote players to join games with as diverse a group as possible, and the present system as it stands does that, albeit with some problems. Generally people are open to watch and play in most games if they wish. I fear the dangers of implementing the proposed system will be the increasing ghettoization of games on the server, where people might only play with players from their own language/culture/friends. We saw something similar to this when there was an major influx of Brazilian players on the server who refused to play with anybody who didn't speak Portuguese. Thats exactly the situation I want to avoid, because it doesn't make the game better, it just adds more parochialism. In the BR case, almost all left at once, except for the one or two who actually did try to break out of the narrow group of friends. I think this would have negative long term implications for the health of the MP community, something that has not seen much growth in the past year. Now that we have a password system installed I can only see this as getting worse, as people would simply password games based on discussions they had with people in private rooms. Personally I would be against changing the present system, though this may well be a minority report. I don't pretend the MP server is some sort of international utopia, but I think we do have something that works fairly well all things considered. If people want to implement rooms anyways, I'd suggest that we hardwire the system in a way that forces people to keep a window open in the main "room," while enabling them to go to as many other rooms at the same time. Speaking to Ivanovic, his filters system seems interesting too. But overall, I'd say that any proposal of this type needs significant discussion before it even comes close to being implemented. And I'm sure that will take place in the future. > > - - Should we support more "experimental" multiplayer content? > We talked about adding more multiplayer content that does not focus on > competitive tournament like multiplayer, like for example the rumble > add-ons and > other things like more RPG like content. In general we came to the > conclusion > that this might be a good idea, even knowing that balancing for this > content > will not be perfect. We also talked about the addition of other > factions. Those > would not be added in the default era, since it would basically be > impossible to > balance *everything* with all of them. The discussion was very > controversial and > we had no clear decision if we should allow addition of new factions > like the > Kalifa or not. There will have to be some further discussions, but > the main > direction was that *if* we add some faction, it should play > differently compared > to what we currently have and be an interesting alternative (yes, we > know that > this is not much and our normal standard...). I'm quite wary of adding new "features" of this type to mainline, partly because if we're trying to put together a more professional product adding content that is markedly inferior to the rest of the game doesn't really do us much good. I'm all for creating a content guidelines that would establish a process for adding such content into the game. The problem however is that such a criteria would be for the most part subjective, and ever increasing in standards as we continue to refine mainline product. I can see the counter argument argument that by adding it into mainline it might inspire more people to work on it, but I don't believe it will work out as such. Maybe Jetryl can chime in here, but right now we only have only three sprite artists that can consistently produce art that is fit for mainline (I might be wrong about this, but if there are more please tell me so I can start bribing them to work on the Kalifa.) In addition the unit balance all over the map. If anything I see EE as what would have happened to default if the devs weren't as discriminating about adding new units +factions. Including it now kinda seems a bit like a step in the wrong direction. I don't think these add-ons have a "visibility" problem, being on the campaign server... just that they are not ready to be included into mainline, and given our present situation, unlikely to be ready for quite some time. Noy _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
