Solving QW's custom content

(Apples) #81

[QUOTE=Stroggafier;207184]Yes, the main premise, as I have said a few times before, in players minds is that Ranked=Quality. But the whole arguement runs much deeper than that.

Ranked and Stats go hand in hand. Ranked means a standard set of parameters, a known benchmark against which players can assess themselves. Stats are simply the currency of that system. Remove the ranking and stats lose their value. As we know from experience, systems of currency can fail. Failure can be seen as stat whoring among other signs. Keeping the ranked system and fixing the stat system requires insight and sanction, neither of which is easy to do. So, the stat system stays badly implemented.

One might argue for the removal of ranks as an easy repair, but that is like arguing for non-regulation as a repair for institutional misuse. Most players would see that as a failed idea as recently demonstrated in other institutions.

From the perspective of the regulators, ranked pub is the vast majority of play, while, as lamented, custom is a small fringe. We might say that the fringe is trying to tell the majority they are wrong. The argument might be seen as “Candy is bad for you, so we are going to take it away”. Apparently, the majority are having none of it (not the candy, the argument :smiley: ). Also, I believe this view is too benign.

Indeed the fringe see themselves more as an enlightened few. They know that stats are bad and would like a chance to demonstrate that point. Lets make that concession for a moment. It then requires that if they are the Enlightened Few, the rest of players are the Unenlightened/Dark Masses. The argument might be seen as “Once the Masses see that tobacco is bad, they will stop smoking”. Unfortunately, some would say this arguement is less than whole, as its missing a critical aspect.

That is, the Enlightened few have an alternative (unranked custom play) and they would like to see this alternative shape the Dark Masses. Stats are simply in the way. One might argue this places the Enlightened Few into a category better described as Evangelists, which, of course, would make the rest a Flock. The arguement might be seen as “We know that Stats are evil, you will play unranked servers and be saved from these evils” This might be going too far, and so I won’t make that arguement here. :wink:

The alternative is to keep the regulations and benchmarks and to adjust the system to fit the fringe into the main body.[/QUOTE]

I think the mapper gave up long time ago about trying to enlight the masses…

Anyway, as you still can’t seem to understand that most of your points are non-avenants (as shirosae proved to you several times yet), I assume I’ll give up on getting you trying the custom content, well, lets just stop trying to get ppl on nirvana anyway, feel confortable enuff with the “regulars” (I’m not hardcore regular I must admit that I have other stuffs to do in sunday sometimes). If you dont want to play custom as it seems to be “elitist” from what you said before, you can simply enjoy your 12 map on qw and go away. As I stated in another post, you just have to dbl click on nirvana server to play customs, is that so hard? no! so if you cant be bothered to double click on a thing, quit saying that map are flawed/hard to install etc etc, I think your intelligent enuff to double click arent you?

Now I’m done here, you dont want to play custom, thats your right and I never forced anyway to do so, the only thing I can do is ask you to play custom… if you dont want to, good bye :wink: but you should also dont ask for new maps or other stuffs cuz that’ll simply never happen, I think the bold will maybe get easier in your brain.

Last but not least, as someone mentionned many times (cough szak cough) in many other threads including mines, ideas are cheap, so instead of blabla get to activision and ask them to release a patch if you are so deeply missing new “blessed” content.

/rant

peace

(Stroggafier) #82

@Apples, why did you quote my post, since you did not refer to any of it?

I never said I don’t play custom. I try to and indeed, appreciate all the work. That’s not my point. My whole argument is to show that stats are not the problem to wholesale adaption of custom maps. The problem is lack of official support (and standards in such areas as bot play).

Please, read the post you quoted. You might get a kick out of it.

(Apples) #83

Could have quoted point by point almost of all your posts above this one… but too lazy for that, you are just describing the same thing on and on… you/the “community” (can the vast pubber population who dont even bother to go on game forum be qualified as a community… we can also talk about that) want official content, it’ll simply never happen (dbl bold ftw), so either you get your ass on the move and do what needs to be done to get your official content blessing (which wont work btw), either you try custom and abandon into shadow your fantasy of official blessing, either you just continue playing 12 maps nicely and dont bother mappers with stuffs if you dont want to play the map they made. You want bot support right? why would the mapper bother with bot support for a custom content “regulars” of 10 ppl? Its easy to ask stuffs, but harder to actually support them by playing their map first.

I think I resumed my thoughts and your options here, nothing personnal as I dont know you, your post was merely around the same false topic, the point is not about official content cuz it wont hapen, but about trying custom content without asking “permission” (i.e. official blessing) to do so.

As I mentionned you are not at all forced to play custom maps till it gets official, but you can also give up now cuz it … hmmm … wait… do I repeat myself here? yeah! wont happen.

peace

(Ashog) #84

educate pubbers…

a pubber will never come to a custom maps server if he DOESN’T want to play a custom map in the first place. And it’s impossible for anyone to FORCE a pubber TO WANT a custom map. This desire must come from himself, probably due to boredness with the vanilla maps. Unless he’s bored, he’ll never connect to a custom maps Nirvana for example. You/we have no influence on it. It depends on the sunspots.

(Apples) #85

[QUOTE=brutt01d;207198]educate pubbers…

a pubber will never come to a custom maps server if he DOESN’T want to play a custom map in the first place. And it’s impossible for anyone to FORCE a pubber TO WANT a custom map. This desire must come from himself, probably due to boredness with the vanilla maps. Unless he’s bored, he’ll never connect to a custom maps Nirvana for example. You/we have no influence on it. It depends on the sunspots.[/QUOTE]

Thats why some bored pubbers (not you stroggafier but some guyz on RIP etqw forum) shouldnt continualy asking for more maps if they cant be bothered to play the existing new ones, and to go back on the ranked/stat discussion : they do not play custom not because its difficult/unbalanced/new/non-ranked but simply cuz they cant track their stats in it. Its as simple as this, the prob is the stats, linked to ranked on etqw cuz only ranked have “official” stats, make stats avi on every server and you’ll be astonished by the number of ppl who suddenly get bored of the same 12 maps and will try custom.

peace

(Stroggafier) #86

Now your talking sense, @Apples. Don’t eliminate stats, but instead embrace stats and add them to all servers. The new problem then becomes how to make those stats meaningful and possibly interchangeable. Anyone with a vested interest in their stats would surely hate to give them up.

One suggestion I made was to have a program of certification for custom maps, and it would imply some form of benchmark for difficulty (bots go a long way to provide that benchmark).

(DrFunkenstein) #87

Yesterday I did what Apples suggested a couple of pages back and connected to the Nirvana server to see how simple/difficult this is for someone who has only Vanilla Quake Wars installed.

I deleted all the custom content I had on my hard disk plus my installation of Promod and simply connected to the ICE server to see what would happen. It took me about 25 minutes to download everything needed. I had trouble at two points though. I “lost” my cursor when I got the warning screen about downloading stuff from the server. The second problem I had was that the download of the maps themselves broke off with a message saying “download failed”. I had to reconnect to the server to get the rest of the files I needed.

I repeated the whole process to see if it was an accident, but I had the same problems the second time I tried. Both problems were solved easily, but the solutions aren’t very intuitive. I got my cursor back by pressing the console key and like I said earlier, I had to reconnect to get the second part of the files.

This might be something on my end, I don’t know.

Downloading all the necessary stuff shouldn’t be a problem and you really don’t need to know where to install things. The game takes care of that. It would have been better if there hadn’t been any stumbling blocks in the download process at all, but it certainly isn’t as cumbersome as some think it is.

Dr. Funkenstein

(Apples) #88

Yeah the “download failed” things happened to me too some time ago, but it just happened when I had really big (aka the whole map pack) downloads to do, once I get it, I just have some minor dl to do (new version/map) and never got any message like that ever.

No cursor happens to me even when I just start promod from vanilla (I mean when I wanna join a promod server while I started the game as vanilla), just press ² or escape and it will work, well, it does for me.

Peace

(timestart) #89

[QUOTE=DrFunkenstein;207214]Yesterday I did what Apples suggested a couple of pages back and connected to the Nirvana server to see how simple/difficult this is for someone who has only Vanilla Quake Wars installed.

I deleted all the custom content I had on my hard disk plus my installation of Promod and simply connected to the ICE server to see what would happen. It took me about 25 minutes to download everything needed. I had trouble at two points though. I “lost” my cursor when I got the warning screen about downloading stuff from the server. The second problem I had was that the download of the maps themselves broke off with a message saying “download failed”. I had to reconnect to the server to get the rest of the files I needed.

I repeated the whole process to see if it was an accident, but I had the same problems the second time I tried. Both problems were solved easily, but the solutions aren’t very intuitive. I got my cursor back by pressing the console key and like I said earlier, I had to reconnect to get the second part of the files.

This might be something on my end, I don’t know.

Downloading all the necessary stuff shouldn’t be a problem and you really don’t need to know where to install things. The game takes care of that. It would have been better if there hadn’t been any stumbling blocks in the download process at all, but it certainly isn’t as cumbersome as some think it is.

Dr. Funkenstein[/QUOTE]

There’s some limit on the number (or possibly the size) of files for autodownload which gives you that error. Scrupus managed to cut it down by repacking megatextures into the map paks themselves but people have been requesting more maps on the nirvana server which must have pushed it over the limit again. As you said you got round this but it’s still a problem which can’t really be solved without getting rid of maps from the server :frowning:

(shirosae) #90

I don’t think that’s the problem DrFunkenstein encountered;

The too many pk4 needed problem has different symptoms IIRC - it doesn’t give an error message, it just sends challenges to the server over and over with the server never responding. It’s also not random - if you get it, it won’t ever work unless you reduce the number of missing paks to under the threshold.

Can you tell I spent the best part of a day investigating that bug for Scrupus? :tongue: BTW, I’m reasonably sure it is just the number of pk4s - I did a whole bunch of combinations of missing files, and the difference was file number - regardless of whether the missing pk4s totalled 20 KB or 200 MB.

Haven’t ever had the ‘download failed’ error myself, so can’t comment too much on what actually causes that one.

(timestart) #91

ETQWPro had stats (no longer updated). Guess what? Nobody cared - ETQWPro’s stats don’t put all the emphasis on getting XP. What players want from ‘stats’ is something that makes it look like they are making a continual improvement (by getting medals or achievements) rather than showing any meaningful information. A metaphorical “pat on the back” rather than “you keep getting killed here by someone using this weapon when you’re that class”.

As far as I’m concerned, a system that gives players the illusion of being a good player or getting better is simply a ploy to keep them playing. That’s not something I would want anything to do with - I’d prefer it if players played because they really want to, not because they need their egos stroking.

One suggestion I made was to have a program of certification for custom maps, and it would imply some form of benchmark for difficulty (bots go a long way to provide that benchmark).

Bots don’t play like real people (sorry Mal, your bots are good but they’re not human). They do some things better than humans (like aiming) while doing other things (like situational awareness) terribly so using them as a basis for judging the difficulty of maps for playing with real people is simply absurd. This is a multiplayer game, difficulty depends entirely on the people playing the map in an individual game.

As has already been said, there is not enough interest in this game from The Powers That Be (Activision) to establish any notion of official certification for maps. And pubbers won’t find out about any unofficial certification because they don’t take part in the community, particularly with the community forums gone. Even if they did, custom maps still aren’t official - not good enough for most players.

Of course there’s nothing stopping you giving maps The Stroggafier Seal of Approval, but no one will care.

Btw, STFU & RTFM before assuming mapping for ETQW works like a completely unrelated game.

(Stroggafier) #92

Sure, @timestart, I’d prefer players be honourable too…so what. The point is to make stats as relevant and interchaeable as possible so that players can interpret them more accurately.

I had aleady read and followed through the entire set of tutorials. Like I said, the mechanics might differ, but the principles and constraints are very similar to other mapping systems. Have you mapped in DII, so that you can make your judgement/demand? Or, is this a “do as I say, not as I do” situation - in which case, as you put it, STFU.

(timestart) #93

Sure, but if players just want to statwhore I’d prefer it if they pissed off to another game.

I had aleady read and followed through the entire set of tutorials. Like I said, the mechanics might differ, but the principles and constraints are very similar to other mapping systems. Have you mapped in DII, so that you can make your judgement/demand? Or, is this a “do as I say, not as I do” situation - in which case, as you put it, STFU.

I don’t have to when what you’re saying based on your knowledge of mapping for another game is completely wrong when applied to ETQW. It’s not hard to infer from this that the two games are very different when it comes to technology.

As for principles, the few things you’ve suggested that make sense have almost universally already been tried without success leaving us with the situation we have now - players aren’t interested and that won’t change.

(Stroggafier) #94

[QUOTE=timestart;207314]
I don’t have to when what you’re saying based on your knowledge of mapping for another game is completely wrong when applied to ETQW. It’s not hard to infer from this that the two games are very different when it comes to technology.[/quote]

“completely wrong” sounds like a fanboy remark. Can you be more specific?

[QUOTE=timestart;207314]
As for principles, the few things you’ve suggested that make sense have almost universally already been tried without success leaving us with the situation we have now - players aren’t interested and that won’t change.[/QUOTE]

Nonsense. What was tried, may have failed, but I am suggesting things that have not been tried also. For example, we have already established that by providing a ranked-like or stats capability, players would probably engage on custom maps. Removing stats, the other position people have taken, won’t work becasue as you say, pubbers aren’t having any of it. Since solving the custom map problem is the topic, that makes these suggestions the whole argument. The rest is mere preamble.

(Apples) #95

More trolling please…

It has also been tryed, see the promod stat that hannes have made, no one cared about it cuz it wasnt “official” stats… The main point is that ppl want to see their “official” stats, anything else is not good for them…

Trust me I tryed to get my clan in promod wayyyy before and even with some good ppl, they simply dont like the fact that stats are not official or unexistant. Give monkeys some cookies (official stat site) and they’ll be happy, anything else is like poo in their minds.

Peace

(timestart) #96

See shirosae’s responses to your posts, I don’t need to repeat what’s already been said particularly if you don’t want to read it the first time.

Nonsense. What was tried, may have failed, but I am suggesting things that have not been tried also. For example, we have already established that by providing a ranked-like or stats capability, players would probably engage on custom maps. Removing stats, the other position people have taken, won’t work becasue as you say, pubbers aren’t having any of it. Since solving the custom map problem is the topic, that makes these suggestions the whole argument. The rest is mere preamble.

I’ll concede that point somewhat. But still, there is much misinformation and ignorance among players about custom maps that won’t be changed by anything less than an official patch that includes custom maps for ranked servers. An unofficial ranking system, no matter how good, is not good enough by the very fact that it isn’t official.

EDIT: I see apples gives many of the same points.

(Stroggafier) #97

The funny thing is I agree with you guys about the stats being not good enough.

Is it such a stretch to imagine that without some kind of official sanction, unranked will simply not be adapted? No amount of brow beating or name calling is going to change that. So, if you want to expand custom map play, the best and possibly only hope is for said official sanctions.

I will repeat myself if for no other reason than to break the mantra that pubbers are the problem, especially since pubbers pay the bills.

We need:

  1. An install/uninstall function
  2. Standards that include bot play for SP or at least bot play in support of MP when players step out.
  3. Official sanction that may range from something rigourous or less so, that would include a certification process and guidelines and benchmarks.
  4. A repaired executible

What we have now may be a significant part of the answer, but it is not enough. It is not enough to say;

  • we have an automated install/uninstall, but…manually dl to fix, or whatever
  • we have bot play, but…only on one of the maps, only for some areas…
  • we have stats, but…they are not interchangeable, not based on a benchmark, created in an arena where anything can be adjusted…whatever
  • here are custom maps, but…only unranked and multiplay, or alpha ready, so please be a tester
  • etc.etc.

It appears to be all there, but somehow it is not!

(shirosae) #98

No, the promod stats are a good example of non-destructive stats that don’t influence player behaviour. That’s a good thing. The problem is that pubbers have access to XBOX style achievement stats on ranked servers, and they’re not willing to give those up.

No amount of fantasy patches for imaginary problems are going to fix that either, because the problems you list don’t exist, Activision aren’t interested, and the pubbers aren’t interested.

Why would you want to break that ‘mantra’ when it happens to be utterly true?

Pubbers aren’t willing to play on anything other than ranked servers. Pubbers want ranked servers to remain pure. These two conditions prohibit use of custom maps.

[QUOTE=Stroggafier;207323]We need:

  1. An install/uninstall function[/quote]

Already exists.

Which won’t happen, because the people who want bot play aren’t willing to test the bot behaviour on maps, and won’t play the maps even if the bots were added, developed, and finished.

You don’t develop products for people who aren’t going to use them.

Which won’t happen, because Activision didn’t even support the game when they were still under contract to do so.

The executable isn’t broken.

This makes no sense. If the http server you’re grabbing files from hiccups, you lose connection. That’s not a problem with ETQW or promod or the absolutely functional autodownload.

Which isn’t surprising, given that none of the people who want that bot play are willing to help make it happen.

Don’t you feel even slightly hesitant before posting when your list of points includes “whatever” as an argument? The stats include stuff that’s actually useful for checking how well you’re playing - K/D ratio, headshot ratio etc.

Except for the finished maps, which the pubbers won’t play on either.

Doesn’t this cause you to suspect that perhaps your summation is incorrect or incomplete?

(timestart) #99

[QUOTE=Stroggafier;207323]The funny thing is I agree with you guys about the stats being not good enough.

Is it such a stretch to imagine that without some kind of official sanction, unranked will simply not be adapted? No amount of brow beating or name calling is going to change that. So, if you want to expand custom map play, the best and possibly only hope is for said official sanctions.[/quote]

Which won’t happen, so why are we even discussing it?

I will repeat myself if for no other reason than to break the mantra that pubbers are the problem, especially since pubbers pay the bills.

We need:

  1. An install/uninstall function

This would actually be a good idea.

  1. Standards that include bot play for SP or at least bot play in support of MP when players step out.

Bots are rarely used for MP because people prefer playing with other humans. And the number of people requesting bot support for offline play is next to zero. All in all it’s not worth the huge amount of effort to get bots working. Better to focus on making maps better balanced for real players.

Standards for other things generally exist already, or would if the community forums weren’t dead.

  1. Official sanction that may range from something rigourous or less so, that would include a certification process and guidelines and benchmarks.

I don’t really see how this is necessary - people play maps they like and avoid maps they don’t like without the need for some arbiter to judge maps. By official I assume you mean “community official”, because Activision won’t be doing anything.

  1. A repaired executible

Repaired how? Regardless, any changes to the executable would require involvement with Activision to acquire the source code.

What we have now may be a significant part of the answer, but it is not enough. It is not enough to say;

  • we have an automated install/uninstall, but…manually dl to fix, or whatever
  • we have bot play, but…only on one of the maps, only for some areas…
  • we have stats, but…they are not interchangeable, not based on a benchmark, created in an arena where anything can be adjusted…whatever
  • here are custom maps, but…only unranked and multiplay, or alpha ready, so please be a tester
  • etc.etc.

It appears to be all there, but somehow it is not!

Autodownload can’t be fixed from within the game, so we’d have to make some external program to manage maps which players would need to download themselves.

I don’t understand what you mean by “interchangeable” stats, and establishing any benchmark surely requires initial data.

Maps won’t move out of ‘testing’ phase if no one tests them. We don’t have a huge QA department in a basement somewhere to make maps better so we need people to play them.

In general what you seem to be suggesting is an “end goal”, with no consideration of how we actually get there. Regardless of how we might decide to achieve that goal, it requires the involvement of uninterested parties - Activision and players from outside the community.

(Stroggafier) #100

@timestart, I think you nailed it. And yes, we first need an objective or target that the majority can agree upon, to focus and place our actions into an effective framework.

By doing that, we can get past the rank/stats/pubber blame, our belief that its all in place, and we can suspend some of our disbelief, i.e. that its impossible to do something as difficult as getting SD and AV involved.

If we don’t form a common objective, progress will certainly not happen. Even with a common set of objectives, it may not happen, but at least it has a chance.