Haven't you gone way too far with the time extention feature ?

    Hi everyone,


    I don't know if the content of this thread has been covered already in the past (as I'm not really following this forum), however i feel like i have to make this post based on my recent experience on your CJ server.
    Before i start writing the actual post i want to point out that I'm writing this in a completly friendly manner and that I'll keep playing on your server regardless of the replies I'll see here, so please even if you don't like what you're going to read don't go all-hate on me just because i've said my own opinion :thumbsup: .
    I also want to apologize if you will read any grammar mistakes, but I'm not an english native speaker :P .


    So I've been playing on your server for about 2 months now. I used to play CJ waaay back in the days (it was like 2014-2015 (??) ) then i took a break and came back like 2 months ago just to find out that your server was probably one of the last active CJ servers... such a shame ;( .


    However this post is not about me, but about your +10 & +20 feature...


    I don't mind having +20 twice, maybe thrice, but i feel like it's a bit too much when a single map stays on for 4-5 hours. If I'm not wrong your standard timer is 60 minutes, so to reach the 4 hours mark it means that 3 hours have been added, which basically means that time has been extended by 20 for 9 times, or by 10 for 18 times (or any combinations of these 2).


    Now... I have to say against myself that I know a lot of people strive to finish maps in all of their ways (myself included, even though I'm not the best jumper alive - not even decent :thumbdown: ), and i also have to admit that hard ways usually take A LOT of time, but still, i want to say (in a very selfish manner, i admit it) that for players like me, who just want to enjoy themselves for a couple of hours after a whole day spent working/studying, spending a whole 3 hours on a single map rather than cycling through let's say 1 or 2 maps at the very least is really... frustrating and annoying, not gonna lie.


    I know that after having read this short paragraph many will be like "just devmap". That's what i do everytime i see a +20 passing the vote after it has passed for like 3 times already. I also really love the people in the server, as they're really friendly and tend to help others a lot. I think that devmapping is fine for 1 or 2 maps, but i don't really want to spend all my spare time playing alone, otherwise i would just pick an empty server and stay there (which is what i sometimes do).


    Also, i think this happened yesterday, i saw a +20 passing when the timer was at 23-24 (???????????????)... WHAT. Then immediately after the vote passed and the timer went to 43-44 another vote was casted for +20... Props to the admins for cancelling the vote.


    So my suggestion is, why not adding a counter that says "#number extentions left" instead of having a map running for 4 hours (and let's be honest, it's not like it's a different map every time, it's like Race, Galaxy, Blue and so on... - but this is another matter.)?.
    I'm not saying to limit the possible extentions to 3. Isn't 4 or 5 of those +20 enough? It would mean you would still have 2 hours + 1 standard hour, and if it was me i would still reduce it to 1 standard and 1 bonus or 1 standard and 1 hour and a half bonus.


    I think it was also said that after a map is played it can't be nominated for the next 5 maps, but with the vote feature after a map ends you can still vote to play the map that just ended... I understand this is still really fair because everything goes through a vote, but isn't this the same as saying "hey after this map is done you can't nominate it for the next 5 maps, but if you really want to play it then you can play it, whatever". Why was the 5 maps skip even introduced if you can bypass it this easily? It doesn't make sense to me.


    I really think this has to be balanced out...


    I understand that many (if not all) of you will say "everything goes through a vote, if the people want it then it's ok".
    I don't think it's ok, not even close to being ok actually.


    I'm not going to talk about the fact that your server has a database of what 40 (?) maps? And yet i still see the same 5-6 maps at most being played.
    This is such a shame and a waste of resources in my opinion.
    I remember i talked to 3xP Noob 3-4 weeks ago on a server that was not the 3xP' and asked him if the server was still running his map 24/7, and he just said he was fine with it as far as people were enjoying it. I'm sure it is an extremly enjoyable map, if not the best map to date, but i honestly can't bear playing it 6 hours - if not 7 - straight.


    I think that with your last update you gave too much freedom to the people (and I'm included, of course).
    However the server is yours, so you make your own decisions, I'm just here saying my own opinion and hopefully you will take this a little seriously.


    I'll probably edit this post a lot, when new things to say come to my mind..


    See you in game guys,
    thanks for reading,


    LLY.

    Zitat

    Also, i think this happened yesterday, i saw a +20 passing when the timer was at 23-24 (???????????????)... WHAT. Then immediately after the vote passed and the timer went to 43-44 another vote was casted for +20... Props to the admins for cancelling the vote.


    Can confirm @Noob

    Also Love the idea man. :)

    +1 for the size of the text. makes me feel less lonely by knowing that I am not the only one who could go beserk with writing a post. <insert your facepalm here>


    Anyway, ontopic:
    I recognise all the things you have pointed out, throughout the 3,5 years I have played cj I have experienced those things too.


    I think there are 3 main problems which causes the situations you mentioned:
    1. When a map is on for lets say at least 2 hours you have different kind of people who are in the server: if we take an example of 24 people you got around 8 people who have been since the beginning (having a playtime of 120 minutes), around 8 people who have joined halfway through (having a playtime between 30-100 minutes) and around 8 people who have just joined (having a playtime of 0-30 minutes).
    2. The hard ways of the maps which are getting played very often are either very timeconsuming to finish for the current advanced players, or are either not enjoyable to do (anymore), or are either a combination of those 2 things. Sometimes advanced players feel like playing the hard way in the most challenging way, so not using the haxfpsses and rpg'ing every jump but instead doing the no rpgs no rpg, and just using the 123 fpsses. When doing a hard way in the challenging way a hardway can take around 2-4 hours to finish.
    3. The End Map vote system is sometimes bugged: sometimes you cannot vote a map even though you would like to.. (mp_beast is a very common example)


    With those 3 things in mind, what happends when time starts to run out?
    There is always someone who will vote an extended time.
    Now, let's see what happends with the vote when a map has been on for 2 hours:
    There are around 8 people who have been on since the beginning, 120 minutes.
    They all care about voting since they have been on for 120 minutes, around 5 people vote yes, those are the people who play (an in their opinion) hard way and are probably 60-70% done.
    Around 3 people of those 8 vote no, those are the people who patiently are waiting for the map to finaly fucking end.....
    Then we have another around 8 people who joined halfway through who are on for lets say 30-100 minutes.
    Around 6 of those people care about voting, 4 of them vote yes because regardless what way they are in: they are probably all still trying to finish it and 2 of them are already stuck at a jump or so and they cba doing anything else on the map; they want to do another map.
    And last but not least we have another 8 people who just joined and who have been playing since 0-30 minutes.
    Around 4 of those people care about voting, around 4 of those vote yes because they just joined.


    Vote result: around 13 yes, around 5 no.


    For the record; the people who 'don't care voting' are people who either are tired of consistently voting, truely don't care voting or don't even know how to vote.
    No matter how long the map is on or how many players there are on, this is pretty much how the picture looks like regarding an extended vote when a map has been on for 2 hours.


    So how can we fix this? Well, by looking at each of those 3 things I mentioned:
    1. I think it's worth thinking about who has the 'justified interest' in voting when an extended time has been voted. I think that for the people who have been on for 2 hours have the most justified interest in voting since they have experienced the map being on for 2 hours. The people who just joined have the least justified interest in voting since they have just experienced the map being online for a few minutes.. And the people who have been online between 30-100 minutes are somewhere in between that. What I am trying to say is that I think that the people who have a playtime of around 2 hours should have more weight in voting than the people who just joined. Now, there are some mathmatical ways where you could determine the weight of the vote related to the playtime but I think it's worth discussing what exact system works best for that.
    2. Doing a hard way in the most challenging way takes a lot of time. You could ask if there is room for that in an online server or whether that's something you should do on devmap? Now, a solution for this problem is to make speedrunning on an online server interesting. But that's hard. When people feel like speedrunning a hard way they often would do that on devmap because there you don't have Connection Interuptions. Also, seeing that the number one person did the route in a time you cba to attempt to beat is often quite demotivating to speedrun anyway.. It would be more interesting if there would be a system where speedrunimprovement is more interesting than the actual time someone finished a way. At this moment I am sometimes thinking about this could practically work out but I have to say that that is pretty hard to realise..
    3. The only way to solve this problem is to tap Viruz and Fr33git on the shoulder, it's simply a bug which needs to get fixed.


    I might not have given a direct solution, but that's because this is one of those cj-problems which is really hard to solve.
    It's a problem which has always occured on every popular cj-server in the past.


    At least I hoped I brought up a useful pov to think about it..


    FrisbeeSky

    Hey,


    This problem is brought up a lot - as it should be. Firstly, there are measures in place to prevent maps becoming overplayed (and more measures incoming in the next mod update afaik). As you noticed, this system isn't perfect. The idea is to have the map votes 'weighted' to prevent the same maps being voted again and again, but it's complicated.


    This problem cannot be easily 'solved' while keeping everyone happy.


    In an ideal world, everyone would be satisfied with the decision decided by the players in the lobby - but this isn't an ideal world, this is the real world. The current vote system requires a ratio of 0.6 or more to pass a vote, so nobody can extend time unless the majority of the other players want to, seems fair, right? Wrong. This is where it gets tricky. What if 60% want to keep playing the same map forever while the 40% want to change the map? The 40% are dissatisfied. That's not fair, right?


    You say:

    Zitat von no*o*ne

    I think that with your last update you gave too much freedom to the people


    So what solution do you propose? No one can vote to extend time? Only admins can? That isn't fair either. The players should get to choose what map is played and have a say in for how long.


    I do think you raise some good points, I agree the '+20 minutes' feature is abused and perhaps should be limited to only being allowed once per map or something similar.


    You also say:

    Zitat von no*o*ne

    I remember i talked to 3xP Noob 3-4 weeks ago on a server that was not the 3xP' and asked him if the server was still running his map 24/7, and he just said he was fine with it as far as people were enjoying it. I'm sure it is an extremly enjoyable map, if not the best map to date, but i honestly can't bear playing it 6 hours - if not 7 - straight.


    I understand, the same thing happens with other maps and it annoys me too. But what should I do? It's not fair for me to force change to another map if the majority of the players do not want to. Perhaps altering the ratio for extended time votes after each vote passes should be considered (ie 0.6 for first extend, 0.65 for second, and so on).


    Zitat von Baddy

    Also, i think this happened yesterday, i saw a +20 passing when the timer was at 23-24 (???????????????)... WHAT. Then immediately after the vote passed and the timer went to 43-44 another vote was casted for +20... Props to the admins for cancelling the vote.


    Just for clarity, as Baddy pointed out already, that was me cancelling the +20's on mp_race (as it had been on ~4 hours and had 40min remaining).




    You raise some good points, perhaps @Viruz or @mirko911 could explain the more technical side of things in more detail.

    totally agree with this, when i join most of the time it's either a descent map or race/galaxy and it's really getting boring.
    I think it's best if you remove maps that have been played 2-3 hours for 1-2 days from the voting screen and replace it with other similar maps.
    and fix the voting menu nobody can vote some good maps like mp_beast :P .
    or alternatively you can the longer the map is played the bigger ratio the vote has to be yes, easy fix to extend time being used often.
    for example 100 min play time 60 percent, 150 min playtime 70 percent, 200 min playtime 80 percent etc.


    and your comment that 3xp is the only active cj server is false , it's true that it is the most populated but servers like MSG and JH are usually not empty I recommend checking those out before going to devmap. (sorry for advertising)

    Alright so I'm replying to all of you.
    I apologize if I'm not using quotes, i jut find them a pain in the ass.


    Thanks to those who said it's a good idea, also @lethalbeast I'm aware they're not the only one, that's why i said one of the last.. maybe it was poorly explained, i apologize.


    Now to Mr.Frisbee (was almost spelling your name wrong). The only reason i didn't write about those 3 factors is that i didn't have enough time, so was planning to edit the post right now, but apparently there's no more a reson. Your idea of having a "weighed" vote is pretty cool, but as a programmer myself i can already see hell from that thing being put to code, which is why I'm not expecting anything like that from your scripters. You saw things exactly as i did when it came to analyzing the problem.


    Now looks like there's been a bit of incoprehension between me and Noob so yea when i said that we have too much freedom i didn't mean that we should not have it, i meant it should be regaluted/controlled, meaning we should have rules, not 200% freedom of voting.. for instance i was playing 4 hours ago and everyone just 2 maps were skipped (i think they were 2- someone confirm please) after they just started just because they could not do the first bounce or the first gap. This kind of stuff should have stric rules i think, it's not fair to change a map just because a bunch of guys find it unplayable. We all have those cancer bounces that we hate from the bottom of our hearts but i guess all of us here can relate if i say we basically never skip a map because we hate those bounces right? just because we want to do them to say fuck u little shit cnacer asshole. Sorry for my words, but i guess it's what really happens in game; i guess you would be really bugged as well if a map were to change twice after 3 minutes in :)


    Still on what you said Noob, i didn't mean you should force votes, i just mean, if a map was just played or played in the past 5 rotations, then there should be NO way for that map to come back. Why i say 5? I think 5 was a good number since the very beginning, also there will be for sure a map that will be skipped, maybe 2 maps, because as of now that's the shit that happens everytime, just to bring back galaxy descent race ecc ecc.. I'm saying this stuff should be controlled, not removed or elitary.


    Anyways I really want to thank you because you all actually raised some amazing points! I remember pointing out some stuff on the RS CJ server and was called something like a moron because in their opinion i wanted to steal their scripts just because i said i wanted to learn the COD language as i am a programmer already....
    That kind of stuff really made me feel the CJ community was fucked up, couldn't be more wrong apparently... I've been having some cool idea lately but never pointed them for this reason, I'm sorry :P


    I apologize if there are more mistakes here than in the original post, I've been working on music for 4 hours straight su my brain is like ... meh


    EDIT: @Noob I don't think the ratio really needs to become higher, i just think the vote system should be regulated and not be as free as it is now


    Waiting for more replies :)
    LLY

    @HawK I'm not a big fan of that idea tbh. I understand it might be the easiest to realize, but it's not necessarily the best... Still think limiting the amount of extentions per map would do it as far as the extention goes.
    Maybe those 2 could be combined, meaning that you have limited extentions and to change/end a map you need a higher ratio, but i think this would be overkilling it, wouldn't it?


    EDIT: Or maybe having a ratio that decreases with time, saying that when a map starts it has the maximum amount, fading with time (for the change/end votes)

    Ok here is my post about this.


    At first I want to say, that I don't often say things about CJ Topics because I don't really know much about the CJ Community, but I can tell you my opinions about the programming stuff behind it.


    1) I haven't checked the files yet, but afaik the 5 maps cooldown only works for endmap votes. The plan was to completely remove a played map for the next 5 maps. I think it will be fixed with the next server patch [when I find some time ;-)]


    2) About weighted votes. I haven't checked it, but in general a (onlinetime * vote) should respect the online time in a linear way. Also it wouldn't be that hard to implement. (Implementing/improving the hide near players function was much harder ;-) )



    Zitat von no*o*ne

    I remember pointing out some stuff on the RS CJ server and was called something like a moron because in their opinion i wanted to steal their scripts just because i said i wanted to learn the COD language as i am a programmer already....


    If you already know some other languages it isn't that hard to learn CoDScript. BUT CoD4 Scripting / Modding / Editing Server Files is sometimes really weird. For example: if you want to convert a string/float to an integer, you just have to write var=int(oldvar). If you want to convert a string/int to float, you have to to var = getDvarFloat('test',setDvar('test', oldvar)). You'll find tons of these crazy things if you do more complicated stuff :D


    Zitat von no*o*ne

    That kind of stuff really made me feel the CJ community was fucked up, couldn't be more wrong apparently... I've been having some cool idea lately but never pointed them for this reason, I'm sorry


    You could say that over the whole community. In my opinion CoD4 doesn't have a real community atm. I think that I found a metaphor which describes this situation very good: When CoD4 started, it was a huge continent surrounded by some water. Over the years the water went higher and higher until all flat placed were completely covered with water. The regions which were located a bit higher (bigger clans), started to build dams around their places to protect them from water. And atm. you just have some islands and instead of building bridges between these islands the clans starts to build fences to protect their scripts and knowledge.

    @Jayme you should read the whole thing, however I/we only said maps should not stay on for ages and disappear for the 5 next rotations.


    @mirko911 It's nice to read that the map rotation thing will be fixed with the next update.
    I already know JavaScript and C/C++ due to university courses, however even if it should not be a problem moving from a language to another, i think the biggest problem would be to find the right applications for the right methods (don't know if they're called like this even in the CoD language), which is basically what is restraining me from starting to learn to script for CoD.


    Also that casting thing is completly fucked up :|:|:| (even though i can still understand the logic behind it).


    About the community... well i don't think I'm commenting on this because i find utterly retarded hiding stuff between each other.. I come from the music production world, where everyone shares every secret with the rest of the world, even if this were to mean that everyone could use your mixing/sound design technique, which might take ages to improve/perfect.


    Thanks for your reply anyways, was pretty good to read you're already taking actions :)

    Finnaly i also read all of these :P.


    mirko basicly said everything i want to say, map ban for 5 maps will be added with the next update.
    Lethalbeasts idea of kind of multiplying ratio with minutes the map runs is rly nice and im in in implementing this also.


    However the next update will not be there in short time, as jobapplications run, statspage update and mwr release soon.


    Thanks for the usefull argumentation and tips u gave us.

    Zitat von Viruz

    Lethalbeasts idea of kind of multiplying ratio with minutes the map runs is rly nice and im in in implementing this also.


    I actually thought a bit more about that idea once lethal came up with that and maybe it's worth thinking about wether you want to apply a lineair way ('Y=aX'-based) on that idea which is probably the first logical way when realising that idea, or apply a rooted way ('Y=X^(0<a<1)'-based) on that idea which actually might be a better idea, to explain shortly what I mean:


    With a lineair increasing ratio you would eventually get the situation where 1 'no' vote will be enough to cancel out the vote, after let's say for example 6 time extentions, versus perhaps 4 'yes' votes, where the ratio, if I 'calculated' that correctly, got inceased to >0.8
    I personally think that it's not fair that when there are for example 5 people in the server and there is one person who votes 'no' that that one person has the dominant descision, regardless how many time extentions there have been. I mean.. if 4 people are still having fun playing the map and there is just 1 person who doesn't, or if 8 people are still having fun and there are 2 people who doesn't... you get what I'm saying?


    I think it's important to ask the question:
    What is the maximum amount of people who vote 'yes', to call it still fair that 1 person votes 'no' and still give the benifit of the vote to that 1 person, regarding the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, (etc.) extented time vote?


    Also worth thinking about which of the 2 possible ways is the best way to realise this idea:
    1. By increasing the ratio in a lineair effect until a certain value. (where a maximum value needs to be set)
    2. By increasing the ratio in a rooted way. (no maximum value needed)


    FrisbeeSky

    Lemme correct one issue in your argumentation

    Zitat


    if 4 people are still having fun playing the map and there is just 1 person who doesn't, or if 8 people are still having fun and there are 2 people who doesn't


    You cannot just take the people which are on the server. There are 2 Groups on the server, one wants to extend and the others dont. But the longer the map runs, the more of the Group of people who dont want the map to be extended will leave, or not join at all cause they see "ah shit still galaxy on 3xp"
    so ontop of the 2/10 people who are against extending on the server, there are at least 3-4 people who already left / not even joined because they want the map to change.


    about how we implement this system we dont rly need to talk right now, as this is not happening in close future, we will find a way to make it acceptable for everyone. both of your ways would work