Gameday and You. or, a word on etiquette, community and gameday.

- I just wanted to say that I appreciate your work with all the gameday stuff. Fine job! -

A Boojum Snark said:

Rules and procedures be aside, I point you once again to the topic title... "etiquette" and "community" is what this was about, but it seems to have strayed off into the land of what's wrong with the rules and how things should be done better. It seems most of you have missed the point or tried to shift the cause to something else.
This was about trying to get people to be friendlier, act better while testing, support authors more, and the like. Perhaps I'm just too naive and expect people to behave like myself without realizing they won't/don't/can't.

Click to expand...

But dude, people aren't being unhelpful just because they're evil bastards. For people to have good etiquette they need to be in an environment that promotes it. And the gameday system is directly related to that.

For instance, normally the older members would be around during gameday tests and be role-models for how to behave. But if the older members are frustrated with gameday and don't participate, the role-models are gone!

The problem with gamedays is most of the well known mappers dont need it anymore, or see the problems in using it.

One gameday I spent half of it arguing about why Scorpio couldnt change his map from a3 to a4 when a4 was on the server aready, another week i spent listening to pirate music, one week there was a map with a broken gamemode that took 25 minutes to switch off, and another week the teams were stacked 6 maps in a row.

!scramble function needs to be a !balance funtion and some things need to be changed. idk what kind of etiquette you expect when half the people playing dont use these forums nor really care about the maps.

The level of maturity has nothing to do with it, if a map is terrible, there is no point in playing it, if a map is gimmicky, there is no need to play it, if a map doesnt have a skybox the mapper clearly didnt even run around in it on his own

you get back what you put in.

idc how much time people put into their maps if they didnt bother to even check and see if their skybox was there or if cubemaps were built.

Whenever I do attend a gameday, I don't speak unless it's to do with spies, or ubers or anything. If I feel the need to comment on a map, I'll do it on the thread. Which sometimes means inaccuracies if I don't have a notepad nearby.

I personally think we need a note system of some kind, much like

ctf.killingjoketf2.com

even if it's purged every week or so, it's a quicker, easier, ingame method to give feedback. You can never ensure an author can make it to gameday, yeah they can watch the demos, but to do that multiple times just to pick out what people are saying? Something like this would make the feedback process easier for players, mappers and pubs alike.

EDIT: This in turn may bring more people to use gameday, if the feedback becomes sufficient enough through things like this, as well as impromptu tests.

EDIT2: Also: if ease of feedback increases the amount of feedback, it'll generally be good in all ways.

Personally, I find it much easier to give feedback either during gameday, or during/after an impromptu test. Also, if I only make it to a couple maps on gameday, rather than the whole thing, I'm much more likely to leave feedback in the threads of the maps I did play.

Staying for the entire six (or more) maps though, thoughts on the early maps tend to get washed out by thoughts on the later maps. Even for those, after three hours of playing TF2 I often want to just get away from the computer for a while, so my post-gameday feedback is sadly a little sparse usually.

Firstly we have to admit, not everyone is an amazing mapper, nor will every map submitted become a hit. A lot of people are testing their "first" map here. This does become a pain at times. Then there are some people whom don't take this seriously as well, which is frustrating and sometimes even offencive. But at the same time it's also hard, given the direction of the community, to justify a certain level of quality control that culls/victimizes the very people we're trying to help. I also have to admit that, even the odd gimmicky map (whale race) is fun to play every now and then. I would fear the day when we all take ourselves too seriously.

Flame said:

idk what kind of etiquette you expect when half the people playing dont use these forums nor really care about the maps.

Click to expand...

I agree with this completely. Psy suggested locking the server for "us" to use. It kinda makes sense since they are "our" servers, that exist to "service us". But i also can't help but feel that locking out the larger TF2 public also limits our return data regardless of the crap that comes through the gameday system, or the players that come through the server. Even if through most of the game, people talk crap, it's still useful observing them. I don't know where i'd be without the player data i get from demo's.

As i started saying earlier, it's almost impossible to get a full server of players to respond to my map properly, and i can appreciate how frustrating this is for some people when this happens. When i tested cp_axle_a1, how ever many months ago, most people wouldn't shut up about how it "isn't detailed", getting constant mic spam along the lines of "OMG, an orange map??"; "Arn't these things pure gameplay?? We should skip this one". These player's just don't "get it". But it's still necassery to have them there to gage their reaction to the layout in the early testing. This is also largely the reaction of players from outside our community, with attitudes which are much more difficult to influence in regards to etiquette.

Ultimately, i still stand by my earlier statement that we need to tackle these issues before any map hits a gameday session (by targetting the map thread). If more maps can reach a respectable level of gameplay/visuals then more people might not consider it "just a stupid laugh" every time one of these events goes ahead. It's not hard to see why a lot of people "can't be arsed" when there are a load of disfunctional "first map" maps, but that's the wrong attitude to take here. You don't tackle cancer when or after it starts to spread, you tackle it as early as you can, preferably as soon as you notice it. Hopefully avoiding collateral in the process.

We can change the system, it is an apparently warranted action that could potentially increase the efficiency of feedback, and/or change the community approach to gameday and feedback. When people start realising it's about the feedback, people might start to have the proper attitude about this whole thing. Unfortunately the feedback gets lost somewhere betrween playing the maps and the next forum visit. For example, 32 players played ctf_sabotage_a2 last Wednesday, i even bumped the thread the morning after. I still havn't got 1 response.

Obviously some people are more helpful than others in this respect, but if the forum feedback improves it's my belief the gameday quality will increase as well. Even if we had an incentive like "forum member of the week/fortnight/month" thing going on. We might get more wider community involvement in regards to our maps and the feedback process.

grazr said:

Even if we had an incentive like "forum member of the week/fortnight/month" thing going on. We might get more wider community involvement in regards to our maps and the feedback process.

Click to expand...

Something similar to this may work, if we get the incentive for people to use the gameday, and give feedback.

Hell, have a forum member of the month, and give him/her a two week free VIP or something.

Something to aim for, that the staff decide based on etiquette and helpfulness and the likes. It could encourage posting more quality, less crass.

I wonder whether, if we leave everything the same but all of us make a huge effort to set a slightly different tone to our forum posting (positive and repsectful, without the bite), use comms constructively and set and example in game, this could all be sorted?

Personally, I'm after feedback from people with a clue on gameday - so i have no objection to passwording one a week. You could make it so that all the maps tested are voted on (sm plug in out there already) - and the winner each gameday goes into the server rotation for the rest of the week. Slowly, we'd see a rotation building of the current best new maps in development.....and they wouldn't need repeat submission to gameday - as they would already be getting regular testing by the public.

This also has the attraction of sifting through the masses of maps submitted and finding a consensus on what's worth a download. It's rough and ready - but it would work enough to be worthwhile.

As to other community vibe stuff and etiquette - it is of course vital that we listen up and take note here - seriously, keeping our comments respectful and our forum presence positive is the best thing any of us can do - any problems will slip away. There's plenty of places to be negative on the net. By the very nature of the site, anyone coming here has at least a few things in common - lets give each other a chance to spread some manlove and it will only be a matter of time before everything feels pretty good to everyone 8)

*I must add, it feels pretty good to me already ; but then i'm an slow old git sometimes

grazr said:

Even if we had an incentive like "forum member of the week/fortnight/month" thing going on. We might get more wider community involvement in regards to our maps and the feedback process.

Click to expand...

Colt Seavers said:

Personally, I'm after feedback from people with a clue on gameday - so i have no objection to passwording one a week. You could make it so that all the maps tested are voted on (sm plug in out there already) - and the winner each gameday goes into the server rotation for the rest of the week.

Click to expand...

Both of these sound like great ideas to me.

Being friendly is actually pretty easy, tact is a little more tricky. Joe public can't be expected to provide this level of maturity unfortunately, which is why the latter idea sounds good to me. However that level of courtesy should really be expectecd of people who sign up and expect feedback for their map. Reciprocation should be implicit in this engagement, and I think that the former idea is a nice way of emphasising that.

I'm pretty new here (been a member for a while but not started mapping and posting till recently) So I've been fairly oblivious to alot of this. I can say however that I'll always try and be positive and friendly and try to give the best feedback I can. Oh and I'll try to make it to a gameday soon, being in a funky timezone makes it tricky though.

As I said earlier, it'll probably be better if we are passwording the server on gamedays, since the gameday will likely consist of forum members who are going to contribute to the feedback process anyway.

Anyway, I'm all for making gamedays a better experience, even if I probably won't be able to play most of the time.

I'm for grazr's method of rewarding feedback. How this would work perhaps mods and admins can think of it even though I think sure grazr's idea of being a sponsored member for a week/month is pretty decent. Or maybe we can make those members a "Contributor" by getting a certain amount of thanks or whatever, and get a custom title. Things like that.

One thing that I think is essential.
Remove the "No-Updates" rule.

It's screwed me over too much. Just this week I entered a map into gameday, found out a day later that it was missing the skybox, updated the version and asked around a lot (including admins) if a) they could overwrite the version that was on the server or b) if I would be breaking the "No-Updates" rule if I renamed it a1b. As such, I was never answered and got left out of gameday because I didn't want to break any rules and ended up doing something else wrong (by keeping it as a1a).

:/

Just putting this out there, since only those in-favor of these seem to be speaking up:

-I don't like the passwording idea. In a test, I want a cross-section of players that includes people not from the forums.

-I don't understand why we would remove the no-update rule. That circumvents the real problem, which is that you have to submit a map over a week before you play it.

-99.99% of the time a reward system is started, it turns into a dick-waving contest. No thanks.

A Boojum Snark said:

You never asked me. Or at least not until the night before when it was too late because I was out and then you went to bed.

Click to expand...

I asked you four times, thrice through the chat when i'd seen you were responding to other people, and once directly after asking you through the chat and not getting a response.

I did try my best to contact anyone with access to uploading/overwriting because I didn't want to get you angry or annoyed that I needed to update my submission.

Sorry for not telling you directly earlier but I didn't realise you wouldn't have minded if I'd just changed it to a1b. I thought you'd get mad that I was breaking one of the big obvious rules :/

on the flip side of that dont tell people to upload your map if you havent even tried playing it yet, just lazy and unprofessional

though i can upload as well so find me if its late since im on til about 2est anyway.

I think I need to address the primary problem with the password introduction that so many people want...

In simplest terms, the server will not remain full. Best case scenario is that the we actually reach 24 people on/before the first map. By the second map you'll start to have people leaving, with maybe a few replacing them. By the last map I would expect the numbers to have dwindled to at least 6v6, if not lower. I mean...face it, this is a group comprised mostly of mappers, not gamers, as such most people will play a reasonable amount then leave, we need the other random people joining to maintain the test.

I am basing this on several things, first and most important, while typing this a notice came up that we need more players for gameday, I mean honestly...without the server being passworded we still don't have enough players.
Then think back to the times there are updates, frequently the server is passworded so that we can actually get in and try the update out. This is a time when the number of people wanting to play is huge, and even then, after about an hour, with a password people start to leave.

I don't know...personally i think better testing would come out of a server full of people new to the game then 6 people who know what they are doing <_<

Flame said:

on the flip side of that dont tell people to upload your map if you havent even tried playing it yet, just lazy and unprofessional

Click to expand...

Forgetting to pack a skybox texture that you completely forgot was custom isn't exactly lazy and unprofessional considering you can't catch that error by yourself without knowing about it before-hand :/

And regarding passwording the server, I think that would be a bad idea. Gameday generally gets loads of random people which I think is a good thing. It means you get a wide load of people joining the server. And if they micspam or grief or whatever, temp-ban them.
Impromptu tests should be passwordable though, because there you aren't expecting a large crowd anyway and it's not a big server event and you've specifically asked for time for testing.

I see gamedays as a chance to play all the maps and show them off to a large audience, and impromptu tests are for genuine testing of balance and bugs.

That's just how I see it though

Dr. Spud said:

-I don't understand why we would remove the no-update rule. That circumvents the real problem, which is that you have to submit a map over a week before you play it.

Click to expand...

I think the no-update rule was intended to try to fix that problem, and it failed. The problem still exists, and the inability to update only hurts the gameday system more as a result.

It would be fine if a person could submit a day before gameday, but that's not the case, and barring a sudden stroke of genius, it won't be the case in the immediate future. Until such genius occurs, I think it's fair to say the rule should go.