Map Generation Issue

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    • Map Generation Issue

      Good Day my fellow gamers, roleplayers, enemies, allies, and those I have yet to be acquainted with. We all play this game because we love the mechanics, and the game itself, and we are a good community because of that. Known by everyone and spoken by none, a huge issue has appeared over the Map Generation Limit for the larger and longer running maps.

      Due to the Servers Bytro Labs running having a limit (nothing has infinite power, and Bytro has pretty powerful servers to run all of our games) on the amount of servers it can successfully run at once, Bytro has had to impose a limit to the number of maps that can be run at any given time. This limit protects our great game from crashes, and user created DOS attacks from opening too many servers. Unfortunately, there is no fail safe on the user side, and as a result, all of the community have been screwed over by a small percentage of themselves.

      Observe...

      Notice how there are a large amount of servers, with at 96% Vacancy? That is only one player playing. Nobody else can join, because the server is password protected, and the match creator declined to share the password with any players. As a result, now the servers in Bytro are clogged with "Bullshit" rounds, that aren't ranked, but a place where players are just casually taking their time to conquer the who world with no resistance.

      While the amount of matches that this image shows is not many, If I continued to scroll down, and this is just the 25 player map, I guarantee you, that if you look at the 25 or 50 Player Maps, you will find that almost 50% of the matches are personal rounds, with 10 people in them at best, whether its a Premium Round, or Password Protected, or both, this spamming of empty maps by the community serves to ruin the Call of War experience for all of us.

      As many of us have seen, 99% of the time, we receive an error upon attempting to create a server on the limited maps, due to this server spam.


      I can continue to whine about the issue, but I am going to move on to my proposed solution. Rather than just limit the amount of maps that we have open, you can edit the system to also protect the rest of the community, by making it so that maps that do not reach a certain amount of players by a certain in game day (Day 10 for example) are automatically thrown out. This will put pressure on players who think they can just hold casual games, and force them to run actual games, as opposed to just lazing about alone in the match. This would make the opening of actual maps possible for players who wish to play Public Games, run Roleplays, or even play a private game with 10 or so people, without having to make it public.

      Thank you Bytro for making a great game, and thank you my fellow community members, for helping keep it great! If you have questions, comments, concerns, feel free to share them. I am open to critizism.
      PhantomNiqht
      RPU Website Manager

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Bluephantom956: Fixed some Grammar ;) ().

    • I am not saying that personal matches are bad (so long as they actually fill 50% of the slots with players of their choosing), just make it so that those BS matches are closed if they don't exceed a certain amount of players.
      PhantomNiqht
      RPU Website Manager

    • RadRoofer wrote:

      Perhaps make password protected games cost gold?

      With the exception of Alliance Wars, Alliance Games, or Player-League games.
      I feel that would cause a lot of people to quit playing. I think having the system regularly purge matches that don't reach a certain amount of players by day 5 - 10 would improve the community Significantly. Making Passworded Games cost gold makes it impossible to hold Roleplays with people who don't have the budget to support Bytro with money, and would put a strain on the rest of the community.

      It isn't a bad idea though, it just isn't practical.
      PhantomNiqht
      RPU Website Manager

    • In the last six months, I have played four 50-player Pacific map games, and none of them have taken less than 55 days to play to completion. In my personal experience, the 22-player European map games take far less time since they have fewer players and less than one half of the the provinces. While I see that the "personal" games serve a learning function for new players and even experienced players who are test-driving a new map, perhaps these "personal" learning games should be limited to the smaller maps.

      In periodically reviewing the list of new games for a new game to join, I have also noticed that the same players will often start/create multiple new games at the same time, often with a very low participation rate from other players. Perhaps the number of active games created by the same player should also be limited at any given time.

      Cheers.

    • MontanaBB wrote:

      In the last six months, I have played four 50-player Pacific map games, and none of them have taken less than 55 days to play to completion. In my personal experience, the 22-player European map games take far less time since they have fewer players and less than one half of the the provinces. While I see that the "personal" games serve a learning function for new players and even experienced players who are test-driving a new map, perhaps these "personal" learning games should be limited to the smaller maps.

      In periodically reviewing the list of new games for a new game to join, I have also noticed that the same players will often start/create multiple new games at the same time, often with a very low participation rate from other players. Perhaps the number of active games created by the same player should also be limited at any given time.

      Cheers.
      That is another great point! The funny thing, is that Bytro Labs already has people who are supposed to test-drive the new maps. They are called Frontline Pioneers, and they get access to the map before all other players, to make sure the map is well balanced for the scenario, and whatnot.

      Not only would it be great to put pressure on people to invite people to their match, or have it get deleted, it also would help to limit the amount of games that player can create, as MontanaBB said. There are countless ways to fight this Map Spam, and so far, the Community is Disarmed because of a few people who aren't considerate and max the server out.
      PhantomNiqht
      RPU Website Manager

    • I would also suggest that the game developers should fix the known bugs with the "start when full" function for new game creators. I recently created a 50-player Pacific map game, using the "start when full" option, and it was one of the best and most competitive games of all those in which I have played to date, because it really had 40+ active players at the start, more than 3/4's of whom were experienced players. The problem with the "start when full" option, of course, is the known bug that causes random game delays once the complete roster of 10, 22, 25, 50 or 100 human players join the round. In my case, the game did not actually start for almost three days after the 50th human player joined the round, causing all sorts of aggravation among the players while they impatiently waited for the game to start. As a result, I am sure that we lost several active players who would have otherwise enhanced the competitive environment.

    • Perhaps off topic but related in my mind...

      Are the maps published for perusal?

      I ask this because I am considering starting a "personal" 1 player game just so I can document where all the resources are on the map and what the actual level is.

      To me, this should be public knowledge and it annoys me that I may have to actually run a private game to get a sense of what the starting resource levels are for each nation. If a map is fair / balanced, this should be available for all to see. If it has a slight imbalance, it is fair for all to know, not just the guy who has researched the map.

    • I agree. Though I am good with excel I was not looking forward to populating the spreadsheet once I built it. Maybe they could provide a data export, should take a programmer about 5 minutes or less a map to spit out a comma delimited text file.
      "A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week." - General George S. Patton, Jr.

      "Do, or do not. There is no try" - Yoda

    • I see the problem, but in my opinion your proposed solution is too much unspecified.

      Often it happens, that players are leaving games which you are going to win, becouse they dont want to undergo their own destruction.

      I have actually played some long term rounds of great personal value which had been left by all other players and I really want to play these rounds to a real victory.

      So these games I dont want to get kicked off

    • F. Marion wrote:

      Are the maps published for perusal?
      Not to my knowledge. I wish they were. Because when you are not playing an active game on a given map, there is no way (of which I am aware) to review particular characteristics (resources, victory points, geography, etc.) for that map. That's problematic, for instance, when you are playing a game on a given map for the first time and you are trying to decide what country to play.


      And, no, all countries are not equally desirable. Most countries have varying advantages and disadvantage, which vary from map to map.

    • I completely agree with this. They should publish a Stats Table, including the starting resources for each country, its starting military, and then whether or not it is playable (So they do it with the AI Countries too).

      If these resources are made and placed in a table, it will decrease the spammy matches
      PhantomNiqht
      RPU Website Manager

    • Bluephantom956 wrote:

      They should publish a Stats Table, including the starting resources for each country, its starting military, and then whether or not it is playable (So they do it with the AI Countries too).
      And if Bytro Labs does not have the time and personnel resources to do this, several enterprising volunteers could compile these lists for each map, starting with the most played ones (22-player European, 50-player Pacific, 100-player world).

    • The next start I have, I will take multiple screen shots of the Province list, sorted alphabetically. Than I can put the data captured into a table for publication in a thread, with the added info of units. If we each do this (One thread per map), we should be able to complete the list in a reasonable time.

      Do you want the military as assigned to provinces or just a total count of each unit type?

      Also do you want the terrain type of each province?
      "A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week." - General George S. Patton, Jr.

      "Do, or do not. There is no try" - Yoda