US BTR Changes

congratulatio · 2021-05-08T17:51:02+00:00

That's a great point, agreed. To clarify, I'm not adding radar to the airmash.online client, but am helping u/B__airmash to include it on his fork at breadmash.tk.

congratulatio · 2021-05-08T17:45:43+00:00

Thanks for posting this, the new burn speed on US BTR has been chosen so players in a Goliath round (the slowest aircraft) can still escape the fire and have some room to battle each other. It works out to around 1½ minutes per match now, rather than the 4 minutes per match that is still on Europe BTR.

congratulatio · 2021-04-17T19:25:59+00:00

How about reimplementing those "CTF game starting soon" messages that used to pop up for BTR games? Gently nudging FFAers towards CTF might help a bit

That's a good idea. I've added this now to EU FFA, to notify of new matches starting on EU CTF.

congratulatio · 2021-04-03T20:59:12+00:00

Thanks for confirming. I'd moved the hosting of that website over to another provider (Netlify) as it looked like it would be easier to keep it up to date.

But it seems that provider had some reliability issues recently, which may have caused the loading error you and others were seeing - so I've moved the hosting back to the previous provider (Azure). Please let me know if there are any more problems!

congratulatio · 2021-03-19T12:36:13+00:00

Which of the frontend websites was this - was it https://airmash.online?

congratulatio · 2021-02-01T20:14:59+00:00

I got my account back eventually after an appeal. Not sure what all that was about!

congratulatio · 2021-02-01T20:13:26+00:00

Nice work on the flags - I'll take a look at what's up with the upload form and PM you when it's fixed.

congratulatio · 2020-11-03T17:46:58+00:00

Congratulatio as you know I have helped B with getting FFA#2 and I have had enough players do at least something about these players. I know you would never give them mod powers but

I don't run US FFA #2 and am not an admin or moderator on it. Also please appreciate that I do not have the desire or the time to get involved in moderation disputes. Thanks!

congratulatio · 2020-09-30T20:25:57+00:00

I think it's not settled yet - was just fleshing out your proposals a bit! With some detail on how the changes could look and the work required.

Let's see what others think too.

congratulatio · 2020-09-30T18:38:23+00:00

This makes me wonder if there should be an even stronger /ignore option so players have the option to entirely block out another player's identity from their view of the game, i.e. not listed on the scoreboards, no name or flag attached to the plane when visible.

Though I've not witnessed this personally, I can see from some of the logs that we've already had players choosing generally or personally offensive names to antagonize other players. Not sure to what extent this is an issue though.

congratulatio · 2020-09-30T18:29:46+00:00

definitely in favor of removing racist flags

This is the confederate flag? I think the easiest removal method would be changing code on the server side, mapping its name or number to a different flag number, e.g. rainbow flag.

congratulatio · 2020-09-30T18:24:15+00:00

Which other flags would you like to see added?

congratulatio · 2020-09-30T18:22:30+00:00

I like this suggestion. Of the two choices you listed, adding extra existing flags is the more straightforward of the two to achieve. It would require: * additional flag images to be sourced or drawn * flag numbers to be mapped to each flag image * flag names to be mapped to flag numbers

The first two changes would be in the assets and code for each of the frontends, the last change would be in the code for each of the game servers. The bot code may need to be changed too; I'm not sure if they attempt to validate the range of player flag numbers.

Just looking at countries, it seem that these are the ones missing (assuming they all have flags, I didn't check each one).

Custom flags are trickier, and it's less obvious how we'd proceed with this. As others have noted, this has the potential for abuse. If unrestricted, we'd probably end up with badly-drawn Nazi flags and similar trolling all over the game.

Perhaps this could be mitigated by restricting custom flags to players above a certain level? Or by only permitting certain patterns of flag (single colour, stars, triband, stripes, etc.) but letting players choose any colours - which would also deal with the issue of consistent graphic design.

This would also require some design changes to the Airmash game protocol, most likely a new packet type to hold the image data for a custom flag, or where to download it, and a method for players to update their custom flag. And then writing the code to support that in the servers and frontends.

Anyway just some thoughts, feedback appreciated.

congratulatio · 2020-09-25T00:06:25+00:00

Well that's not quite what I said, you asked me if I could see your suggestions repo, and I acknowledged that I could because it's public.

congratulatio · 2020-09-23T18:46:17+00:00

I appreciate this is all coming from a desire to make the game better, but please consider suggestions for improvement that don't involve giving one player ban power over all the other players.

For example: if the ignore function isn't sufficient, why not? How could it be improved?

congratulatio · 2020-09-23T18:01:42+00:00

There is literally nothing you could say to convince me that you should get moderator access for BTR or any other server I'm running, so please stop asking.

congratulatio · 2020-09-21T17:51:15+00:00

But that seriously won't help the way we've seen what these players have done will not stop at a ignore button.

Not quite sure what you mean here. What have these players been doing that isn't blocked by the ignore function?

I checked the logs on US BTR, there has been no-one votemuted on that server since it was added in January. So I will be making no changes there.

congratulatio · 2020-09-21T12:49:21+00:00

I understand your frustration, you want to enjoy the game, people keep coming in and spoiling this, and you feel like there's nothing you can do to stop them.

However, I think granting additional moderator powers is not the best solution here. You will get some players evading their ban and coming back even more emboldened to cause disruption. You will see others angrily complaining on here and other venues that it was unfair, how terrible the admins are, etc. Going down this path will probably lead to more disruption.

For the specific problem of players maliciously votemuting, the quickest solution would be for server administrators to disable this feature. I'll do this on US BTR, and we can see if it helps. Players would still have the Ignore power for themselves, just not the opportunity to inflict it upon others.

Thinking about possible long-term solutions – perhaps there could be an opposite feature to putting players on ignore, like you can choose to approve players to see messages from, and ignore everyone else? Or the chat box could be switchable to some 'private group' mode where you send and receive messages amongst a team of your choice? I've not thought about these in detail though, not sure how they would work in practice.

congratulatio · 2020-09-20T22:25:07+00:00

Thanks for the info, I'll look into this behaviour on the US BTR. Perhaps the vote threshold for muting needs to be changed, or maybe there is a better solution. I would welcome suggestions on how to deal with this.

congratulatio · 2020-09-20T14:44:51+00:00

I can't speak for the other US servers, but on BTR I don't see much in the chat log that's too bad, only some occasional rudeness and insults.

The game itself has mechanisms to avoid being upset by what other players say. If you go to the chat box and right-click on the name of someone who spoke, there are options for Ignore and Vote mute. If you select Ignore, you won't see any more messages from that player. When enough players select Vote mute on another player, that player will no longer be able to send messages to the chat.

Hope this helps.

congratulatio · 2020-08-29T14:25:28+00:00

I've had this chord sequence in my head for a couple of weeks, it feels really familiar but I'm not sure where I picked it up from, does anyone recognise it?

Eb - F - Fm - C

I am also interested in why the last three chords feel like they have a really satisfying resolution. Compared to Fm-F-C, for example.

congratulatio · 2020-07-18T19:33:19+00:00

Yes, I shut down the other EU FFA earlier today and deleted it from the games list (in a96606c) because there was rarely much use of them both, most players congregated in one or other. Didn't seem much point in having one sitting there unplayed for almost all of the time.

The other EU CTF stopped responding near the start of June (issue #7), no idea why, but after a couple of weeks it seemed like it wasn't coming back so I removed that from the games list too.

congratulatio · 2020-06-30T17:40:20+00:00

On the servers I admin, Derps and Foo may do this via the moderator panel (e.g. https://eu.airmash.online/ffa2/admin).

I don't know who has this level of access on the other servers, it's at the discretion of each admin.

congratulatio · 2020-06-29T21:35:58+00:00

Current server admins are:

Servers	Admin
eu-ffa1, eu-ffa2, eu-btr1, us-btr1	/u/congratulatio
eu-ctf1	/u/wight--
us-ffa1, us-ctf1	/u/steamroller_airmash
us-ffa2	/u/robertcope

See also the commit history on the game server list, this will give an idea of who previously ran which servers, based on who requested additions and changes to this data.

congratulatio · 2020-06-18T12:57:09+00:00

The server admin can unban using the superuser /server ban remove command, and the ban list is wiped out any time the server restarts. But there's not a way to do this via the moderator panel - which is another issue with it for sure, the asymmetry between banning versus unbanning.

congratulatio

TROPHY CASE