Bugfarm Fortress Back, sort of

[Z-Man]

For the final push to 0.2.8.3, to squish remaining bugs that can only be squished with serverside recordings, I decided to bring Bugfarm Fortress back. It's now called "Bugfarm Newbie Fortress", and consequently, some changes were implemented:

- AUTO_TEAM is disabled, new players will not be thrown right into the game.
- Kick votes, by default, only remove players from the game for five rounds. Real assholes can be kickvoted from chat via "/vote kick <player>".
- Moderators are welcome; with armathentication, it's no longer a horrible security risk. Applications go right here

Rules for moderators:
- generally stay in the background. An invisible moderator is a good moderator.
- use "/admin suspend <player>" on those new players who obviously should better watch a few rounds. You are encouraged to leave the game yourself to chat to them, or delegate that task to the player who started to kickvote.
- license granted kick or silence anyone who even uses the word 'noob' when he refers to a new player. Yep, I mean that. People who don't know the difference between n00b and newb are either n00bs or assholes and therefore not wanted.

Of course, it wouldn't be Bugfarm without the experiments from hell. This week:
- No round limit, no score limit. Instead, matches have a 20 minutes time limit.
- Winning score is divided into three bits. You get five points for conquering the enemy zone, five points for eliminating the enemy team, and five points for holding your base.
- The winzone is back. Taking it only gives you 5 points, naturally (well, 10. But the other team also gets 5 for holding their base).
- Hole score, of course
- The round does not need end with a conquered fortress; it just kills some (one or 50%, whatever is more) of the conquered zone's team, but then the battle goes on.

(To clarify: noobs are idiots who are unwilling to learn. newbs are just new.)

[wrtlprnft]

I guess I can shut down café for the time being then, seeing that it's mostly a bugfarm replacement
The changes sound great, so do the policies. I just went there and called Armagetron a noob, though. Does the famous /me is a noob. default insta count?

Anyways, I guess I'll apply for moderatorship

[Z-Man]

Does the famous /me is a noob. default insta count?

Good that you remind me, if I ever install an auto-kick (not really in the mood right now), I'll have to watch out for that one

Anyways, I guess I'll apply for moderatorship

Granted, of course. Do you just want your forum account enabled or do you want a special login (aliased to your forum account, of course)?

[DDMJ]

Anyways, I guess I'll apply for moderatorship

Me too .

By the way, I've talked about this before but:

Wouldn't it make more sense to give -1 or -2 points for going through holes? Think about it: You sacrifice 1 or 2 points, but at the same time, get a better opportunity for getting 10 points. With the current setup, it is worth it to punch a hole in the enemy defense since you get a point for a teammate going through it.

Just throwing out suggestions.

[m¡st]

/me will miss fort cafe

[wrtlprnft]

mist: I won't take it down, I just think there will be a lot less players (at least I hope, everything else would show that arma players are really conservative with respect to server settings).

z-man: forums account would be the easiest to manage, better than remembering tons of passwords for all kinds of servers. By the way, what about recordings? I can't publish them publically right now because they contain my password. Would it be possible to scramble them when saving the configuration into the recording (I don't save passwords on HD, but someone else might) and to replace all letters by, say, a if the cursor is inside a password menu item?

[Z-Man]

DDMJ: My psychic abilities told me to anticipate that, you're already a moderator

About the hole score, it's not so much a balancing setting. It's more a statement that the server admin explicitly encourages holing.

Wrtlprnft: the scrambling is already done. While you're in the password entering menu, all keypresses are replaced by "x", and the password settings from user.cfg are vetoed and don't enter the recording (instead, the password menu stores whether a saved password was available). If you're using an armathentication aware client, of course. 0.2.8.2.1 and 0.3.0 don't do the key scrambling, but they already don't record saved passwords.
Server recordings are also semi-safe to publish. Of course, they contain the hashed and scrambled password as it went over the network from server to client, but we made it so that unless you can invert md5, that is useless. Plus, the server recording doesn't even contain the correct salt, that can only be found in the corresponding clientside recording.

[Lacrymosa]

- No round limit, no score limit. Instead, matches have a 20 minutes time limit.

That sounds good, it sure will ad a new tactical touch to the games.

- The winzone is back. Taking it only gives you 5 points, naturally (well, 10. But the other team also gets 5 for holding their base).

Not sure if I like this yet, but I'd give less points for using the winzone.

- Hole score, of course Smile

I kinda agree with Durka here, but giving negative points would encourage those "Holes are for n00bs" players. AFAIK, you get 2 points for the sacrifice, what about reducing it to 1?

- The round does not need end with a conquered fortress; it just kills some (one or 50%, whatever is more) of the conquered zone's team, but then the battle goes on.

Not sure about that one, it sounds as it leads to a different (new?) game mode, but it seems interesting.

Finally, if you need more moderators, I'm willing to help

[Z-Man]

Finally, if you need more moderators, I'm willing to help

Granted, although I admit I don't really know you enough to be sure you'll do the right things. But we'll see about that.

Hole score has been at 1 all of the time. I think just at the first experimentation day on Cafe, it was on 2.

Couple of changes:
- To issue kick votes, you now have to be logged in. That currently also applies to kick votes that will be transformed to suspension votes, I'll try to move the transformation to an earlier time.
- Kick vote abusers can thus be kept in check by just lowering their access level below what you usually get when you log on.

[Lacrymosa]

Finally, if you need more moderators, I'm willing to help

Granted, although I admit I don't really know you enough to be sure you'll do the right things. But we'll see about that.

Thanks, I'll try my best. One question though, I can't find the .txt file wrtl mentioned about the possible commands, does it come with a specific version?

[Z-Man]

commands.txt? No, it should be included in all versions. At least, as a htmlified version inside the doc/ subdirectory. But as moderator, you'll only have access to a handful of commands: KICK, BAN, (UN)SUSPEND, SILENCE, VOICE, CONSOLE_MESSAGE, CENTER_MESSAGE, and of course the /op, /deop, /promote and /demote chat command family. We should probably write a wiki page specially for those moderation commands, they're the only ones regularly entered life, and thus require good docs.

[wrtlprnft]

Actually I was talking about settings_authentication.cfg.

It contains a list of admin commands available to moderators, among other things.

[Legit]

everyone knows i would be the best dam mod ever!

[Z-Man]

Umm, no?

Another change: When a team dies and the round is declared over and its zone is still there, it will become "touchy". Meaning that the enemy just has to nick it and it will get conquered. For scoring purposes, this gives these three common scenarios:
- Attack of team blue succeeds, Attack of team gold fails. Gold zone gets conquered, blue zone holds. Gold players get all killed, some maybe by the zone collapse. Blue gets 15 points for that (plus kill and hole points, obviously), five for each holding the zone, conquering the zone, and surviving.
- Attack of team gold fails all attackers die, but the lone gold surviving defender manages to kill all blue attackers. He doesn't make it to the blue zone to conquer it, naturally. Team gold gets 10 points, five for holding the base, five for killing all enemies.
- Both zones get conquered, but team blue survives. They get five points for that.

Plus, of course, uncommon scenarios:
- Team gold is bored by gold's lame spiral defense and takes the winzone. They get 10 points, five for the winzone, five for holding the base; blue also gets five points for holding the base. That makes the winzone worth only 1/3 of a full victory. I can hear people cursing already if the server drops the winzone directly on top of them

[voodoo]

- Attack of team gold fails all attackers die, but the lone gold surviving defender manages to kill all blue attackers. He doesn't make it to the blue zone to conquer it, naturally. Team gold gets 10 points, five for holding the base, five for killing all enemies.

hmmm, don't you think blue players will run away from their zone and it will turn into a half field deathmatch ?