Beginner Pub Servers

[lekky]

Servers
 + Conversion/Creation of newbie-friendly sandbox servers running specially selected accessible maps (which would be included in the distro) for new players to learn the game on, or at least become initially familiar with. With good enough promotion of these servers, they should always be populated with new players and hopefully attentive admins who can make sure disruptive pro's don't just connect to decimate the gameplay. These servers would have shorter respawns, etc... to encourage players to stick around and play a few rounds.

Seems like a good idea, and something server admins can get behind straight away. Like the terrible speed server, but actually we know why its there, and what its for. I know when i first played games recently, i looked in the server list for any beginner servers first.

How about removing the "speed", and adding a few "Beginner" servers. Low respawn times and some newbie friendly maps as DrRickDaglessMD says. The non-beginners may frequent these servers, but should remember their purpose and why they are there. Somewhere where new players can go and get a decent stint each round, wont be made fun of or laughed at, and even feel free to ask questions and get them answered!!

As non-newbies we should encourage players in these servers, and offer ourselves up for support (and not try and demolish everyone). I think such a basic thing as naming them Beginner servers will help massively.

Anyone think its a good idea? I've renamed the qehs pub servers to Beginner Pubs and Advanced Pubs as a quick trial. What maps would be good to place on the servers maplist?

[sk89q]

The significant problem with this idea, in my opinion, is that there's nothing to stop good players from connecting and, as Rick said, decimate the gameplay. There's no way for an administrator to be available 24/7 to police the server. I have seen many "beginner" and "newbie" servers for many other games but they don't actually work out so well -- you end up with a lot of non-beginners joining.

However, I suppose from a technical perspective, without involving jitspoe modifying the game library, there could be a separate service running to track the game (i.e. through STDlog) to judge how players are doing, and give warnings to players who are doing "too well." Judging of skill could be done against the lowest denominator, within reasonable bounds. Algorithm wise, one could average the K:D ratio among the current active players and find the standard deviation for a certain player -- if it's too far, we give a warn (maybe a public one, so we let the newbies know the problem is being taken care of), and then kick them should they continue to be too good. Flag captures would have to be taken into account as well. (Also, as a plus of this, you subtract human bias from the equation and negate the possibility of an "abusive" administrator.)

It would be nice if the MOTD actually lasted long enough for you to read AND it was in a readable color -- it could be used to explain the purpose of the server.

[P!nk]

Post removed

[sk89q]

You missed the previous sentence:
"Judging of skill could be done against the lowest denominator, within reasonable bounds."

Setting a hard coded limit might be bad because "beginner" is relatively vague, so I propose a moving target, within reasonable bounds. No complete idiot can kick everyone off and pros can't hijack the server temporarily. But even if I didn't say "within reasonable bounds," because I said "to the lowest denominator," one person could join, suck, and kick every good player off.

And whether it was per game or per map wouldn't really matter.

[lekky]

get onto it sk89q, sounds like something you thrive on

In the meantime I was kinda relying on more experienced players to act maturely, we know the server is for beginners so there should be no name calling etc like we may do on "normal" pub servers, noob play is expected!

Was playing on the servers last night and I think the name certainly helps new players feel like they don't have to wrorry about getting any abuse.

[peeej]

I'm a newbie. Played last night for the first time. I would pick a beginners server. I couldn't imagine experienced players would get much fun getting everybody so easily. They need a challenge too. I had noe clue which server to pick. I think I picked one in PL bause I thought it was in europe. Good fun even if I am crap.

[DrRickDaglessMD]

sk89q, awesome idea. It seems like you've thought about that a fair bit and I agree with your approach. Perhaps 1 S.D issue a friendly 'try a harder server for more of a challenge' message, then 2 s.d's for a kick (a reasonable difference - we want SOME variance in skill levels on the beginner servers, or there won't be any challenge, plus new players need to learn some things from other slightly more knowledgable players).

Thanks lekky for trialling this out, I think it could really help introduce the game to new players.

- Dagless

p.s. im just curious how the process might work - will it be a parallel process which reads the STDlog, does the performance calculations then issue messages/kicks using an RCON password or something?

[XtremeBain]

BoB threatened to kick me from eR33t if I made a cod4 server before I made a public PB2 server, so I'll probably make a beginner pub and a passworded pub server once B20 is available in linux.  I still think that a beginner pub server would require quite a bit of active administration.  I don't think that Global Login accounts should be enforced (sv_login 2) on these so called beginner servers because not all players will take the time to make a profile for a game that they're just testing or starting out at.  The problem is that this leaves the door open to experienced players who want to come in without an account, play under an alias and destroy new players.  I'd like to have an admin presence on the server as much as possible, but I don't think I could find enough players that are in the beginner skill range that have the knowledge of server administration, or that I trust even with a restricted admin login.

One idea would be to make a quick in-game command like `reportabuse playerid/name short message` that would dump a few things to a separate log file like name/ip/globallogin of the offending player, the reporter, timestamp, and a brief excerpt from the console log.  Then this stuff can be displayed on a quick web interface for the server admins (like Blitz, BoB, myself and maybe a couple others) to see, or possibly just generate an email.  It also wouldn't be too hard to write something that would send a console message to all players ever x minutes to educate them about the reportabuse command, or even just some helpful tips or websites to visit.

I remember when there was that 'X HIGHSCHOOL' server around and how pissed I would get when I'd get kicked 1-2 rounds in, just because I was good.  Maybe these guys had the write idea, or maybe they were just trying to protect their k:d.  I've been coming up with different ideas for tiering up the pub and competitive communities for a few months now.  I think that when I/we go ahead with such ideas we need to clearly define a progression path for new players, so that people don't feel like they're going to always be stuck in the lowest tier.  This is easiest in the competitive scene, but new players who have gotten good from playing on small simple maps with a lower elim, might not want to stop into the next tier which plays larger more complex maps with 60 second respawns.  Especially if it means they're going to be at the bottom of the skill range *again*.

I think that these speed servers are one of the worst things ever to happen to this game (I think DaveW is to blame?).  The CTF mode and the maps we have were never designed to be played with 1-5s respawns, and a lot of the spawns are confined to a small area or better, a straight line.  TDM should've been in this game years ago for those who want to get their constant action fix.  If that were the case, today we'd have many more dm maps (not ctf maps with dm support, I mean maps that have been designed around dm) would have probably been made.  The popularity of CS should be some kind of indication that people don't really mind waiting a couple minutes before here and there when they die.

In the absence of TDM, a very suitable alternative would be some koth-only servers with settings that cater to koth gameplay.  Even though I've never played pbcup_pbsanctuary in koth, I'm betting it's one of the best maps that we have for koth just because it has spawns through out the base and it would take about 5-6 people to effectively spawnkill a team.  I'm not sure if carpathian has koth support, I think it would be a good candidate as well with it's 2 flag complexities removed.  It's not too hard to make some koth ents, so it might be something I'll give a shot.

Lekky: just curious, what's your elim and maplist like on the server?

Edit: wish I could make a post that wasn't a monster....

[lekky]

I think I set the elim time to 9 seconds, but having read your post, it might help players development to move it to 15, or double that at the least? I've put some small well-made maps on such as coi, but the server just emptied due to downloading time, so atm the maplist is full of maps they more than likely already have. But once b20 is in place, I think it would be a good idea to collate the well made maps, that promote good gameplay and stick those on. Getting new players to play those maps from the beginning will hopefully increase the general quality of pub maps in the future. (At work so i'll post the actual list later).

I also set the sv_login to 0, I noticed many players attempting to join and then getting kicked due to not having a login. I believe msot of them were non-english speakers too (eg Brazil).

I really like the idea regarding sending helpful messages to the console every so often, and really easy to implement too. I'll get something up tonight with regards to that (*makes a new thread). Would we be able to implement the in-game command without jitspoes help? Thats also a good idea, but in the meantime I think i'll simply send a message giving an email address to report any offenses to.

[sk89q]

sk89q, awesome idea. It seems like you've thought about that a fair bit and I agree with your approach. Perhaps 1 S.D issue a friendly 'try a harder server for more of a challenge' message, then 2 s.d's for a kick (a reasonable difference - we want SOME variance in skill levels on the beginner servers, or there won't be any challenge, plus new players need to learn some things from other slightly more knowledgable players).

Thanks lekky for trialling this out, I think it could really help introduce the game to new players.

- Dagless

I only spent a few minutes thinking about it, actually; the idea is far from complete. Was hoping to bounce an idea around

p.s. im just curious how the process might work - will it be a parallel process which reads the STDlog, does the performance calculations then issue messages/kicks using an RCON password or something?

Yes, that's exactly how it could be done.

There's only one thing to note: there's no way to private message a user, RCON or not. I was playing with adding code to do that to the game (hence my futile attempts at compiling on amd64 / FreeBSD). I was able to get it working on my Windows box (both a privmsg and a dialogmessage [message to all but in dialog style] command), but I don't quite trust my C++ skill at preventing buffer overruns. :B

========

@Lekky's new reply: I think 15s works. The wait is not bad and the time is not too short. I've been using 15s on my server for a long time and people seem to like it there the best. You can get flags captured still at 15s, which is a problem with lower elims.

[XtremeBain]

I was able to get it working on my Windows box (both a privmsg and a dialogmessage [message to all but in dialog style] command), but I don't quite trust my C++ skill at preventing buffer overruns. :B

What do you mean by dialog style messages?  Like the old server-side menus that were in quake 2 (like the default F1 dialog or even the old scores, or the join and misc. menu that PB2 used to have)?

[sk89q]

Nothing amazing. Just the white text instead of the player message text in the top left corner. That way, you don't hear a "beep" when a message is issued. Can the client code even do dialogs on the fly? That'd be pretty cool, but then the code would have to make it into the official binary.

[XtremeBain]

It wouldn't need to be in the official binary, you can have the server tell the client to draw a menu/dialog and the client usually uses invprev/invnext to cycle through options, invuse to select something and invdrop to close the menu.  They have these all over q2 mods like RA2.

[sk89q]

But how does the client know to draw a menu? Are there already existing commands in the protocol that do this?

[XtremeBain]

There are commands in the protocol to do this already.  These are how HUDs and the scoreboard are drawn in Q2 and in older versions of the PB2 standalone.  Now all of this stuff has been made client-side for obvious reasons.  I know that the functionality was left in PB2 because I was testing a little spectator/camera mod with a B19 server that had these kinds of menus, and they still worked fine.

[sk89q]

Oh, how sexy.

[jitspoe]

I like the idea of beginner servers, even if it's a simple matter of adding "beginner" to the hostname of a couple pubs.  People will at least know what they're getting into.  If they're experienced, then they have no right to get frustrated with confused newbies allowing the enemy team to capture the flag.

I don't think the respawns should be set low, though.  Getting spawn camped isn't going to help new players at all, and they will come to expect low respawns as the standard.

[b00nlander]

yeah, I have to agree on that. 
concerning the spawn times: you could fill the rotation mainly with DM maps, which has instant spawns (KOTH as well?), and the new players will learn that DM = quick spawn, CTF = 60sec spawns.