CVS test server

[Z-Man]

About the team ballancing: A flaw of the default configuration. Temprorarily, a N vs N+2 configuration needs to be legal to allow people to swap places. It makes sense, however, to immediately transfer someone from the stronger team to the weaker team if someone from the weaker team leaves; that's what BALANCE_ON_QUIT should do, but it was disabled. I'll enable it in the default configuration and see what the effect is.

Edit: of course, there is also the client bug that makes old clients WANT to be in the bigger team sometimes and tell the server so. I'll see if I can make the server filter these bogus requests out.

[Z-Man]

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[0] Poll "Kick F U bound" has been accepted.
[0] Kicks per hour of IP <deleted> are now 18.4616.
[5] F U bound left the game.
[5] F U bound renamed to ALIAS.
[5] ALIAS leaves Team gold.
[5] Killing user 5, ping 0.174551.
...
[8] joda.bot: BUG rename prevents kick

The renaming message was just a last deathbed confession It did not prevent the kick. The data structures of vote kicks are independent of names, don't worry. Even switching to spectator mode and coming back will not really help.

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[1] Your_mom: BUG
[6] Hay-Lin: ,
[5] Nazgul:  ???
[13] darkness: uhuhhuu
[11] RowBear: sneak attack!
[1] Your_mom: blue won for no reason

Whoops, I'll investigate. Maybe a leftover game object from the previous round?
Edit: Fun Right at the beginning of the round, a client with three players on it disconnected. Consumation was immediately transfered from team gold to team blue to balance, but he was already spawned for team gold. The bug is that the team change took place immediately, and it's as old as the team code itself. It did not manifest itself so far because it only happens with BALANCE_ON_QUIT enabled.

The test server's name is now "CVS Test Server: Fortress". As someone pointed out in ingame chat (forgot who it was), the "New Game Mode!" may be attracting too many noobs. My theory is rather that the noobs are attracted by a full server, but the game mode is not exactly new any more and besides, it's not really a game mode

[Z-Man]

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[10] joda.bot: BUG can't join blue (always returned to gold?)

The teams were unbalanced a while before. Because of that, no heavily unbalancing member change was permitted. You'd have to wait some rounds, then it would have succeeded.
I shortened the wait time to at most one round, and also added the much-requested "team change planned" messages so it's easier to swap members around during a round before the autobalancing kicks in again.
I the team messages up a bit some more, no messages are created for single member teams named after players, for example. And the console settings like TEAMS_MIN are now actually active when the first player joins. There was some needles shuffling around until now.
He, I'll be glad to get rid of this horrible block of code, you can have it after 0.2.8

Attached is the current configuration. Special notice to the first lines, they're what makes the server compatible with old clients. I don't reserve the server name "Fortress" and variations in any way.

[Z-Man]

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[5] received logout from 5.
[5] Breakfast left the game.
[5] Breakfast leaves Team gold.
[5] Killing user 5, ping 0.192385.
...
[3] <undisclosed player> voted for Poll "Kick Breakfast".
[3] Poll "Kick Breakfast" has been accepted.
[3] Kicks per hour of IP <undisclosed> are now 18.4549.
...
[8] nemostultae: BUG
[8] nemostultae: kick poll still going on for player that left

That's by design. Accepted kick votes lead to banning if they happen too much. If we drop a kick vote just because a player already left, you could cheat around the banning by leaving once you have a kick vote against you. I admit the message for the clients is a bit confusing (they don't see the "Kicks per hour" part, so if you want, I can try to remove it.

I changed the winzone settings a bit. It will now appear closer to the middle, it won't happen again that it overlaps with one of the fortress zones and the defender hits it immediately.

I'd like to add that there is no shame in going for the winzone. If you have the opportunity to do so, your team has earned it, for example by eliminating the enemy attackers first. It's just a shortcut to the round end.
Only if you're defending and the attackers choose not to go for the winzone, then you should not go either. Basic sportsmanship. Of course, your chances of reaching it before the attackers take your fortress is slim anyway with the current settings.

[Lucifer]

Hmmmm....... When it's 3 v 2, and the team with 3 goes for the winzone strikes me as kinda lame. (There was a good 2 on 2 fight going in our zone, and the other team's goalie went after it. His other teammtes were kinda peeved about it too, we were having a good fight)

[Z-Man]

Simply think about the other players who already died and want to play again.

[Lucifer]

I'll concede the general point. In the specific situation, both teams of players waiting to play again were into it, cheering and stuff. There's something to be said for teams that are so into it that they're participating even when dead.

[Z-Man]

Ok, I'll modify the statement: There is no shame in going for the winzone if your dead teammates encourage you and there is nobody having big fun on the grid any more.
Corollary: There is no shame in going for the winzone if it's 2 on 1. Most of the time.

[Lucifer]

How about "a generalization isn't really possible"? I think it's perfectly valid to stall the defense, even if you have the advantage of numbers, so you can take the winzone, if you're completely outclassed by the remaining defenders. I think that most of the time when the winzone appears, there's no shame in going for it, because it doesn't appear when there's lots of action, it usually appears when a stalemate is going on.

[Z-Man]

The winzone now appears later in the round. In fact, it's as good as disabled, I never saw it since the change. Explicitly waiting for it to appear is now officially lame, as it is obviously more boring to watch. Going for it when it appears is not lame a priori.

There did not seem to be a valid bug cry while the forum was gone. Joda.bot and nemo complained several times at the end of a 24 hour recording that takes one hour to play back, the only bug of that time is one where team gold won for no reason according to some astonished observers. Well, Pants snuck around the rim wall and went for the undefended zone.
Then there was the usual stuff, joda.bot complaining about seeing a /team message from Gnorty who was on joda's team at that time, BUG cries without a description, you get the idea. If there was an event you want me to take a closer look at, you need to say so.

[joda.bot]

@z-man: about the seeing text messages of gnorty ... my bad then... though I think gnorty's color was opposite to mine.
about pant's capturing the zone ... my bad too... grrr, he could have told us...

Sorry, never thought about the fact that the 24h server recording has to be skipped for 1h to get shortly before server restart.

I'll hear by solemny swear not to say BUG without a full description and only if it's really a BUG.

[Z-Man]

Np I did not have to sit and watch the playback to hit break in the right moment, so no harm done. Just notify me of the BUGS that you think were real afterwards.
The server is now on a reset every six hours schedule, so recordings should never take that long to play back any more.

[Z-Man]

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[10] nemostultae: BUG did not get option to vote on poll

This would be a clientside bug. I don't suppose there is a clientside recording or more info available?

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[4] joda.bot: BUG seeing empty grid ... after watching myself die ?

Same here

[dlh]

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[10] nemostultae: BUG did not get option to vote on poll

This would be a clientside bug. I don't suppose there is a clientside recording or more info available?

Sorry, no recording, but it seems to happen frequently. I'll try to catch it. I am using a pretty recent build (Dec 6th).

[Z-Man]

K. I'll be watching out for it, too, and maybe look over the source again. I probably did something stupid that's easy to spot if you know it's there