Chaos/Prem, EG, and Powerball shared arenas

[»Maverick]

I've noticed inflated populations of mainly SSCU Death Star Battle.

Entr0py has given answer to my questions why this is happening at the DSB Forums:

 

What is happening is' date=' we each share arena listings from our zones in each of the

other zones. The population of the people in those arenas gets counted in our

zone, even though those people are in the other zones. It's the same story for

them.

 

As a result, the pop numbers get inflated, and players get quadruple counted

(they get counted in all of CZ, DSB, EG, and PB). Nobody knows how to fix this

bug.

 

My first thought when doing this was that it would eff up our pop stats, which

I've been following very closely for the past several months. Do you have any

ideas of how to correct for this population double-counting?

[/quote']

Edited November 15, 2011 by Maverick

[PoLiX]

If that was all you needed, coulda told you that.

 

This has been in the works for years, but never came to fruitation until recently. EG, Powerball, and Chaos hooked up arenas with listings so that our players could hop around the zones with ease. So far it has actually had a positive effect for the zones. There is the pubs, and a select arena or 2 from our zones. DSB has been recently hooked up, but not sure of the plan with them tbh. I know EG and Chaos have been both looking at moving to ASSS, and this is just kind of a step/test in that direction also.

 

The only thing it hurts is people seeing the zones with larger populations. But in reality, they do esc+a, and see all the people are in other "arenas". That already happens in the zones during league times, or special events anyways. The public arenas pretty much die off, and everyone is in a subarena.

 

But right now there is EG:0, EG:Lounge, EG:egfl2011 (? was EG:baseduel2), CZ:0, CZ:4v4squad1, PB:0, PB:replay, and DSB:0

[»Maverick]

Alright, thanks

[Cheese]

one problem with this is that you have to redownload each entire zone inside each other zone, and then dsb files will end in chaos folders and etc

[Dr Brain]

I've added 1000 to the population of HS until CZ, DSB, EG, and PB stop this insanity.

 

Don't worry, unlike their artificial pop, it doesn't show up in your nice stats, Mav. That's because you use the ASSS ping protocol on ASSS zones, so it was an easy hack to make it only affect Continuum.

[PoLiX]

Well, get use to seeing HS overpopulated perm. We don't plan to remove the arenas, and there is currently no way to not count the population as a whole.

[Dr Brain]

There are ways. Just no one has had a reason to look into them, since lying about population was a good thing for them. Perhaps this will give people a reason to look into alternative methods.

[PoLiX]

Unless you know how to modify subgame, and get Priit to host it, then there is not an alternative to it working this way. Unlisted arenas isn't what we're looking for. We've already got/had that setup.

[»Ceiu]

Bots can use *sendto to operate identically to what you have now, except it'll only count as one extra player instead of 20-50.

[Avast]

This is a dumb idea to have every zone on each others arena list. For reasons I already stated in ss/dying thread.

[PoLiX]

Bots can use *sendto to operate identically to what you have now, except it'll only count as one extra player instead of 20-50.

 

And subgame can just have the arenas, so you do "?go name" and it sends you. But won't list the arena with the population which is what the purpose is. It isn't for "boosting our zone's pops", but for treating our zones like normal sub arenas of each other for players to hop around where they please.

[Avast]

Yeah but you went through the trouble do that, when it already exists by pushing esc, q and selecting a new zone. Obviously if i like EG i will not enter DSB no matter how often i see the arena on the arena list. Unless I want to troll DSB'ers, in which case DSB bans me for trolling and now does this idea to gather more trolls? rofl. The whole reason i dislike the idea is because you did such a big thing for a minimal reason "so players can hop around like they please" while maybe EG and Choas have nothing better to do. DSB has a shit ton to do before they start wasteing time on big things for minimal reasons. Nobody will dev DSB but they can waste time with shit.

[»Ceiu]

If someone _really_ wants to go see what's happening in another zone only based on population, they can just esc+q and look at the zone list -- which will do exactly what ?arena does, except better (since you won't have super-inflated population counts).

 

Providing the ?go EG or ?go CZ is a convenience feature and by quadruple counting your population (and bots), you're only going to make the game look far worse off than it is. Think about it: A player enters Chaos because the zone list says there are 100 people. They enter and see 15. Five of which are bots and another five are spectators (with the remainder of the population consisting of the plethora of bots in the other arenas). They see the number of actual players as 1/20th of what the population reports. Now look at a zone like HS or HZ that isn't part of this cute little numbers game. Those zones typically will have a population of 20-40. According to the scale you guys have provided, that's roughly 1-2 actual players. Any player who has adjusted to this scale will assume the zone is dead, even though the population is actually larger than what the other zones are reporting.

 

All this is going to do is confuse players and make the player counters absolutely useless and, likely, serve to further reduce population. And for what? A feature so people can ?go EG rather than ESC, DOWN ARROW, DOWN ARROW, ENTER? If you're going to provide such a feature, at least do it in a way that doesn't completely break another -- important -- feature (*sendto).

 

Edit:

Forgot a word. Oops.

Edited November 14, 2011 by Ceiu

[Mistarbob]

If you're going to effectively merge all of those zones into one, you should have the zone listing in the continuum client reflect that. Instead of:

 

SSCU Death Star Battle - 150

SSCU Extreme Games - 150

SSCX Chaos - 150

SSCX Powerball - 150

 

it should really say something like:

 

SSCU/X Network - 150.

 

 

The problem with the way it is now is that is breaks the very reason for having a population indicator; I don't want to join a zone with 5 people AFK in spec, and I'm just going to be irritated if I do so because it said there were 300 players. The idea of jumping from zone to zone without having to exit the game is neat, but falsely reporting hundreds of extra players across various zones is too big a price to pay for that functionality being implemented smoothly. It IS an actual problem if the population indicator does not accurately represent the actual number of players; if this functionality is going to stay, it needs to do so either while still representing the correct number of players in the respective zone entries or by means of completely merging access entries of the participating zones into one. As it is, the population indicator is simply broken.

[Dr Brain]

So EG can find a host for 50-60 bots, but they can't find a host for EG besides Priit? I call BS. Especially since they have very few players these days.

 

There's still no excuse for PB, since they're already running ASSS.

[»Lynx]

I just don't see the point? This feature has removed core functionality, making the feature worthless.

[spidernl]

I guess people just don't like seeing how their "awesome population boost plans" by faking their own population count indicator aren't working.

And now they don't want to revert the changes and face the fact that their population is incredibly low.

[JoWie]

With a little effort the issue could be fixed

[PoLiX]

So EG can find a host for 50-60 bots, but they can't find a host for EG besides Priit? I call BS. Especially since they have very few players these days.

 

There's still no excuse for PB, since they're already running ASSS.

 

As far as EG, that is because they are temporarily hosted on a player's server at work, and are about to move to Junky's dad's house on a pc.

 

They're in the same boat as we are in Chaos with keeping bot hosting up. In our case, ours seem to go down perfectly right before the Premier League matches every week. And our host is MIA with no response except restarting things. We have 2 PriitKs to deal with essentially.

 

Here is a simple fix for you guys. Don't like it, remove the zones from your list. The module is almost complete for release, and soon any number of zones could peer this way if they wanted. It is more focused on zones moving to ASSS so they can move an arena at a time (as EG currently, and Chaos is debating again), but can also be used where zones share common players already (IE: EG, Powerball, and Chaos/Premier).

[Avast]

No one that posted here really thinks this is a great idea, correct me if you do. But I just see Polix drooling like a child so far.

The no one else really approving this aside. It does have an issue with inflating pops, which ruins another feature of the game.

If people were indifferent or might have liked it before, they definitely don't like it because of the "bug" that inflates the population.

Fix the bug?

Either display proper populations, or show all zones as SSCU Network as was suggested by Ceiu and MistarBob.

 

As usual you just do what you prefer and ignore everyone else Polix. Must have learned it off Entropy? Is this going to be fixed. Or are we sticking with, it's to hard not worth it?

Edited November 15, 2011 by Avast

[PoLiX]

Well, if you look at the zone's forums/in game - EG players don't care/like it... Powerball players don't care/like it... Chaos/Premier players some don't think it does anything to help the pop (not the point ultimately)/don't care/like it/couple love it for hopping between PB and Premier pracs.

 

All 3 of the zone's head sysops like it, or else they wouldn't have done it.

 

You act (as always) like this is all me. Need to learn everything isn't always about 1 person, and that most the people who post on this forum don't play these zones. Besides myself, not a single person in this discussion actively plays one of the 3 main zones involved (again, DSB I am not sure what the point was there just yet).

 

I don't drool over it. I just know why they did it, and I don't see any issues with it. I support the idea of them trying to work together, especially since Chaos/Prem, EG, and Powerball have quite a few common players. Many were calling for the zones to just merge anyways. That has quieted since we've done this.

[Dr Brain]

EDIT: stupid avast. See apology below.

[Avast]

LOL i think brain still has me blocked. Sorry Polix I thought you did the changes not the Sysops. But still can you fix the pop bug, and will you? There is no reason sharing arenas should also mean every zone has 150 pop Edited November 15, 2011 by Avast

[»Maverick]

Dr Brain, I think PoLiX was reacting to Avast's post.

The last post on page 1 was made by Avast.

[Dr Brain]

Could be, I have him on ignore so I don't see his posts. I apologize if that was the case.