Pickup Improvement! :)

[FoFo]

Actually i really like pickup how it is now , i think admins improved it and did good job , the only thing who s not really good is that, in my opinion , random captain thing is a problem , sometimes , people plays pickup for the first time and are picked as captain straight away , when this happens , the new guy takes ages to pick and often pick unbalanced team (very umbalanced) , i think we could change that , if there s a way to do that.
I liked the warm up thing , but it affected the serv if you can do that again without all the slides there were it would be great.

[-*inS*-]

without all the slides there were it would be great.

excuses...

[vov]

people plays pickup for the first time and are picked as captain straight away , when this happens , the new guy takes ages to pick and often pick unbalanced team (very umbalanced) , i think we could change that , if there s a way to do that.

Ask him nicely if you can take the captain role yourself. Problem solved.

[epsy]

Don't bitch at them if they refuse though. I just don't want to see that happen.

[Sinn]

I give bonus points to Word for best answer

[dariv]

IRC is buggy recently. Twice in 2 days I type !add fort6.eu and get no confirmation, then see the last message was 30 minutes ago. Apparently I'm being d/c and by the time I find out it's too late. Highly frustrating.

[AI-team]

there are 324923849023904092 IRC clients out there

[INW]

IRC is buggy recently. Twice in 2 days I type !add fort6.eu and get no confirmation, then see the last message was 30 minutes ago. Apparently I'm being d/c and by the time I find out it's too late. Highly frustrating.

It isn't the irc client. That used to happen to me a ton when I had horribad internet.

I am almost positive it is your service provider.

[Hoax]

No but he would be notified

[dariv]

I don't think it's my internet since the disconnection happens when I'm already in a game (with no connection problems there). At least the time of the last post on IRC corresponds to the time when I'm in a game.

[ElmosWorld]

Happens to me from time to time. Sometimes with notification; sometimes not.

[-*inS*-]

I just had an idea.

Ok so pickup is basically killing normal fortress, we can all agree on this, most people would rather play a 6v6 even teams pickup match than a random 9v9 - thus they play pickup games over public games.

The problem with this? It stops new players from playing fortress. Pickup requires the use of IRC which can't be expected that any new player will find. Thus we see the same old people in pickup games (which is quite a small collection).

I propose we eliminate the IRC component of pickup. Have a server where you can play public fort, !adding within the server by joining the game. Then once there are 12 players in the server, pickup mode begins, the server op's two captains and kicks the rest to spec for invites. At the end of the match the server will reset, throwing everyone out and people rejoin to add again for the next match.

Now when people can still use the server for normal fortress matches and play while waiting for 12 people, rather than waiting on irc, and eventually the game collapsing as people slowly leave. Also this will make pickup a lot more popular as most players don't even check irc for a match, they just look at the browser and decide where to go. Players go to servers where others are, especially late at night when not many people are online, if people saw that there was 8/12 players for a pickup match they would join to play, even if 4 extra players never joined, it would still be a nice game of normal fort, which rarely happens nowadays.

Not sure about the feasibility of this idea as far as developing goes. It seems somewhat similar to the "ready" mode epsy made.

Thoughts?

[Slov]

yeah I agree it does stop new players to join fortress. So does GID etc.
I don't think that would help much tho, let's just agree to use pickup a bit less (in evenings?) and be more patient with newbs.
I haven't seen a new face in fort scene since Dariv started playing lol..

[matchbox53]

I just had an idea.

The problem with this? It stops new players from playing fortress. Pickup requires the use of IRC which can't be expected that any new player will find. Thus we see the same old people in pickup games (which is quite a small collection).

I propose we eliminate the IRC component of pickup. Have a server where you can play public fort, !adding within the server by joining the game. Then once there are 12 players in the server, pickup mode begins, the server op's two captains and kicks the rest to spec for invites. At the end of the match the server will reset, throwing everyone out and people rejoin to add again for the next match.

Now when people can still use the server for normal fortress matches and play while waiting for 12 people, rather than waiting on irc, and eventually the game collapsing as people slowly leave. Also this will make pickup a lot more popular as most players don't even check irc for a match, they just look at the browser and decide where to go. Players go to servers where others are, especially late at night when not many people are online, if people saw that there was 8/12 players for a pickup match they would join to play, even if 4 extra players never joined, it would still be a nice game of normal fort, which rarely happens nowadays.

Not sure about the feasibility of this idea as far as developing goes. It seems somewhat similar to the "ready" mode epsy made.

Thoughts?

Well insa your ideas somehow are at process but i doubt they will help much .

We do have a problem that newbies cant join pickups because they are serious matches and thus expected from there is to know how to grind to say the least in addition on how to use irc .

Eliminating IRC is really hard because if we all those settings go inside the server well it will make the server go lagfest mode which is not been seen before. It will also be hard to implement pickup rules like baning an ip for 24hours and other things it will require the admins to remember the ip's etc.

Epsy mode was a great idea i actually supported it until it made the server go into bad mode its probably because the commands can be alot of lines that makes it execute harder or w/e but i think epsy is working on fixing it.

The only way i see to help the newbies is either to allow newbies to join a game or i have already changed my mega server into 7v7 i hope it can help somehow people will also play there and that will give a chance for newbies to play their learn the basics then they can head for pickups.

I remember when pickup had 4v4 and somehow i used to play one match and then i would get banned for a whole day after it but g5's mega fort was always there for practicing.

[vov]

MB, insa: That is all scriptable*. Even the ip-bans, or, more friendly, forcing spectator for a day.
Also, scripts dont lag as much as you think, they take very few resources and work almost independent from the server itself**. On my crappy homehosted test server a scripted sty+ct server lagged surprisingly less than one of them nice new 0.2.8.3.2 servers on the same game settings. Scripts have only one major weakness: crashy crashy! But heh, even the pickup bot crashed
I think that IRC wouldn't be necessary then, but it'd have some downsides, too (without IRC: "Where do we get a sub now?", "I need to talk to an admin", etc.). Maybe just redirect new players to the pickup site when they ask. Be friendly to them and they will have fun. Honestly, I'd prefer the current IRC solution.


*Yes, it may even work.

**Another way to a script solution would be a bot that could work in exactly the same way as the current IRC bot. Also, this bot would be completely independent from the server, except for being logged in as Moderator on it for being able to op and ban/suspend.