Pickup survey results are up!

[Word]

Don't mind me, I just feel a little messed around when I read stuff like "uh, maybe we all need to play better in regular games so everyone has more fun and we don't even need pickups".

But at least it finally sinks in.

[Rhythm]

Here's a thought: what about making it so pickup only runs Friday-Sunday?

It will allow pickup to be a competitive place for people to get more advanced experience with Fort, but also will encourage players to be in public servers during the week to gain attention and play with newer players.

[Titanoboa]

Here's a thought: what about making it so pickup only runs Friday-Sunday?

I like this idea

[sinewav]

It is an interesting idea, but it would require someone to manually maintain the servers and pickupbot twice a week. Perhaps something like that could be easily scripted, I don't know.

[breeze]

Here's a thought: what about making it so pickup only runs Friday-Sunday?

I'm sorry, but I don't like this idea. It punishes players that don't have the ability to play on the weekends. For the months where I was busy on weekends and couldn't play ladle, pickup during the week was the only "serious" fortress I got to play.

[J Dawg]

We Will never come to a conclusion if we try to reach out to every single player. We need to do this so that the Majority of players will have the time to play a pickup, say wednesday to friday? This way, we won't interfere with tournament sundays, as well as occasional brawl tournaments on saturday. If we did friday to sunday then pickup would mostly be popular on fridays, leaving saturday and sunday to be tournament days.

[delinquent]

Add pickup to Saturday. It's no biggie if a small number of tournaments overlap, and there are a great many players who would enjoy at least one out of two weekend days.

[*16]

We Will never come to a conclusion if we try to reach out to every single player. We need to do this so that the Majority of players will have the time to play a pickup, say wednesday to friday? This way, we won't interfere with tournament sundays, as well as occasional brawl tournaments on saturday. If we did friday to sunday then pickup would mostly be popular on fridays, leaving saturday and sunday to be tournament days.

Brawl has been put back to only sundays. So no need to look for that anyway.

[Rhythm]

I like the idea of including some weekdays, but the problem with Wednesday-Saturday, with tournaments, that only really leaves Monday/Tuesday without competitive fort, which doesn't seem like it will have that much of an impact overall.

Thursday-Saturday? Wednesday-Friday? Friday - Monday? Maybe get the pickup community to vote on it?

[breeze]

If you're going to restrict it to certain days, (which I hope doesn't happen, anyway) I think it would be more logical to do the opposite of that and have it Monday-Friday. There's usually a fair amount of public fortress going on weekends already, you wouldn't want to detract from that. Typically, more people play on weekends and less during the week, so it'd be a good way to boost competitive play and general participation during the week. In any event, I don't think this would solve any "problems".

If we only had a public option for long enough, I think it would eventually get more and more serious. However, I think Titan said it well earlier in the thread; the problem is it's difficult to get parallel servers going. Then, you'll still have people screaming at the new players. Like Rhythm said, it's really an attitude problem if you want to talk about new players.

The only real problem with pickup is the seriousness issue. There's also the problem with the time it takes to get a game started, which is basically a symptom of the seriousness issue. It's going to take some creative thinking to solve that. I know it seems strange, but no one has discussed the possibility of making it more exclusive. This would mean in some fashion that you would take the game seriously or risk getting a hefty ban or some other dire punishment . More exclusive, harsher punishments = more people playing public games, more serious pickup games.

I liked pickup due to it's finality. Once a team got to that 200 point mark, you knew it was all over. Unlike public and some other suggestions here, the game just keeps going and going (which is great in it's own way). Even when you win, it doesn't feel like you win.

[epsy]

On formulating a problem: It's important.

What is the meaning of life? 42.

We can't understand how an answer helps us if we don't have a well-defined question. I will attempt to ask what that problem is in the survey.

On the idea of a public server that transforms itself into a pickup game when there are enough players: What exactly would be different once the server transforms? What would happen if a player was to leave in the middle of the game? (Something which you're supposed to be free to do in a public game but not in a pickup game.)

On auto-determined teams in pickup: We tried 6v6 fort with randomized teams and it was dreadful. 3v3 kotf suffers from it a bit, too. As for ELO I don't seem to have the time to implement this in a timely fashion.

On the inability to run parallel servers: Once again, I recommend servers meant for public play should only have a couple more client slots than player spots in-game. Unless "Megafortress Pro Lagless EU Fortress Sexy Time"(WTF?) does 16v16 games, it still has way too many client slots(32). Same with a couple more servers, including a couple of "sumo bar" servers(although many seem to be more reasonable with it).
The default fortress configs don't do anything to MAX_CLIENTS and leave it at the default(16). It's the ladle config and servers using it that set it to 32. I've posted earlier in this thread an easy to use config that sets it to 6v6 fortress with 14 clients. It doesn't look like anyone has used it save for my own servers.
A thing that may help spread players about would be for a few servers to run a join pledge system for switching servers(i.e. using MOVE_TO) once enough players have pledged to switch.

On making pickup be open only a few days of the week: It seems like an interesting idea but I'm not sure putting it on Friday-Sunday would help fortress. Monday-Friday in fortress seems like a wasteland as it is, maybe adding pickup there would help it.

On hasher punishment leading to more public games: We tried recently, it was bothersome for the channel admins and yielded nothing for public games.

I will edit the first post to list questions for the upcoming survey so we can design the survey in a way that most opinions can be appropriately represented.

[sinewav]

These are some great observations, epsy. I think you are on to something with this...

A thing that may help spread players about would be for a few servers to run a join pledge system for switching servers(i.e. using MOVE_TO) once enough players have pledged to switch.

If used incorrectly this would lead to the same problem we have now: public games being abandoned for pickup. What if there are 19 people in a server and 12 of them pledge to go have a serious game somewhere else? The move_to threshold should be kept fairly low, something like 6-8 players max. Both 3v3 and 4v4 Fortress are still fun.

[takburger]

On formulating a problem: It's important.

What is the meaning of life? 42.

We can't understand how an answer helps us if we don't have a well-defined question. I will attempt to ask what that problem is in the survey.

[epsy]

I've edited the first post with a few items to put in the survey. Please suggest more.

If used incorrectly this would lead to the same problem we have now: public games being abandoned for pickup. What if there are 19 people in a server and 12 of them pledge to go have a serious game somewhere else?

I didn't make myself clear, I meant a system between public servers, so that players willing to switch servers can opt to switch only if they can expect a game on the other side.

[breeze]

I don't have much time for thought at the moment. I don't think you can cater to all needs all the time. It wasn't perfect before, but when the matches were serious, it was a lot of fun. Address the silliness problem in some fashion.

I know this isn't what some people want, but from what I can tell the general participation is way down. Coincidence, maybe. The regular players are the ones who...well play the game regularly, we should make the game the best it can be for them. A little politeness can go a long way for the newer players.

Keep pickup open only on the evenings of these days: Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri/Sat/Sun
I don't like this at all since everyone has such varying schedules. Also, how do you define where one day begins and ends? Certainly, someone, somewhere in the world is getting a raw deal.

More for later.