Admins, what is the great masterplan?

[I hate naggers]

Feel free to post here, respond to the thread title and ignore ryu/ganz/equinox shitposts.

This is what i think is the best for w2 and the course of action i'd take:

[[ Keep the tournament/icon policy as it is, icons as rewards are a great idea, distinction and encouragement. And with ~tora~'s $$, things may get more alive than usual. It's also a good thing that social media (well, facebook) informs people about stuff, special props to burnt and smeagol starting the facebook events ]]

1. Polish & debug the anti-hack while consantly informing and slowly forcing people to get the AH client
2. Implement an effective ban for notorious hackers, which we have tons, given the size of w2 community. Hardware ban sounds perfect
3. The 'command' hostbot is doing great I believe, anyone 'can' host. However, I would add a constant autohosting bot, with game name like "New players welcome", hosting compstomps such as 2v2, because...
...4. As soon as all previous points are done, a massive advertisement should happen. These are cool things, worth mentioning and showing off. However, what's the number one thing that stops people from playing? Lack of games. Nooblords log in, can't see a game on the game list and log off, or they SEE a game and get booted. A juicy "New players welcome" would definitely have their interest.

And that is how i see the war2 revival. Thoughts?

[[TD]Medivh]

This is quite the best plan we could put into effect.
I completely agree with CLAW, things around here now are being so sad
Never seen the server so dead ( could even be due to vacations and summer season )

Actually , the thing i couldnt help but notice admins are so absent this period, except for burnt who logged on about everyday to take care of the situation and write down some announcements about the tournaments.

So, i would add another point to claw's ones which is establishing a shift of admins in order to always have at least 1 admin in the channel at every hour of the day.
If the problem consists of schedule issues , then i would suggest to name admins who live in different country, or just like one from South america , another for North america and an european one.
This should even balance out the situation. ( in addition iL and whoever else is the main admin of the server)

What i'm saying is that Ru should never be left without an admin.

[~ToRa~]

Good points, I agree with everything Claw said.

As far as advertising goes I see some of the administrators have already advertised on some existing gaming platforms. I would probably like to expand upon this in the near future.

I also think it would be good to hold a new players tournament. Maybe once or twice a month with a similar cash prize as the professional tournament.
Or another idea would be to have a 2v2 tournament last Sunday of every month. However all professional players must pard a new player the entire time.

[Certified MENSA Genius Brain (smart)]

Yeah I think all the stuff posted so far sounds really good.

[mousEtopher]

Great game plan, but it's less knowing what needs to be done and more having the resources to actually do it, don't you think? Points 1-3 involve complex programming, and right now we have two volunteer programmers working on them during weekends and spare time.There's just no telling when these goals will be realized, if ever. (I wonder if a WC2 kickstarter would get any love...)

Is there anything we can be doing in the meantime? I personally think streaming is a great way to advertise and build interest. It'd be great if more people started doing it on a regular basis, especially if we could get someone to commentate. Of course each person making an effort to play more + not being snobbish about maps/teams is probably the best thing. And advertising wherever you can, other forums/games and whatnot. I recently got a guy from tetris who used to play SC interested in playing, we actually played a couple games with Smeagol the other day.

[I hate naggers]

So, lance, what do you think about the plan now that the burnt case has been solved?

Is there anything we can be doing in the meantime?

Personally I was/am thinking about a short video with 4-5 major points - a chop guide for absolute newbies. Aiming for circa 5 minutes.
Oh, and "highlights" videos - best actions cut from tournaments replays with commentary(?) - after the tournament.

I agree that person to person advertising should be done 24/7, but i'd hold with major ads until requirements from original post are met (facebook paid ads, reddit, gaming forums and communities)

[{Lance}]

Original plans have been reinstated.  Suggestions for hostbot are what I am seeking.  TVB is already in the works,  compstomps game types have already been added to and simply needs to be turned on after I am done testing with it.  I'm currently also testing a move player to X slot for tvb games that are requested by players.  Autohosted games will only allow people to start the game so that it doesnt have 5 people trying to move each other around, etc.  Same with kicks/bans,  no one can kick someone from one of the autohosted games,  it only allows that to happen if you request the game and you are the "game owner" as far as the hostbot is concerned.  Game titles are not something I've given much thought into yet other than the obvious map settings, etc.

[I hate naggers]

Suggestions for hostbot are what I am seeking.

Do you have access to war2 memory in your stealthbot scripts?

[{Lance}]

In theory yes,  but I do not have a framework built that could access it.  VBScript itself does NOT have memory access functionality, but it can be added by wrapping an object in an ActiveX DLL (COM automation object) and calling functions to access memory that way.  Although I'm not sure what you would need to do that for.  What need would there be for such a feature?

[I hate naggers]

What need would there be for such a feature?

to count players in bot game and autostart when it reaches a certain number. It would be very simple that way and better if players have no access to ban/kick commands anyway. Why make it all hard with the start cmd if it can be eliminated. Just a thought, it was a breeze in autoit, if it's a lot of effort then not worth

[GaNzTheLegend]

What need would there be for such a feature?

to count players in bot game and autostart when it reaches a certain number. It would be very simple that way and better if players have no access to ban/kick commands anyway. Why make it all hard with the start cmd if it can be eliminated. Just a thought, it was a breeze in autoit, if it's a lot of effort then not worth

I think the start command is better. That way you can determine on the fly if you want a 1v1 2v2 etc or if someone wants to watch or whatever.

[{Lance}]

This is already possible using using several commands.  /games as well as iL's new JS status page.  Wouldnt need to read memory for that   But anyway, the "start" command already functions for this purpose really.  Quite a few players have figured out that anyone in the game can send the "start" command to the bot if it's an autohosted game.  Games that are requested however,  only the "owner" can "start" the game, kick/ban,  just like a normal game as if they had hosted it.

I dont think autostarting the game when it reaches a certain limit is a good idea though.  It wouldnt give the players much time if any at all to set teams,  especially in the melee type.  I do plan to change the autohosted games to TvB though to make setting teams easier.  Right now noobs have a hard time doing that when it's not really that difficult.  They often end up just playing a FFA.

I think changing the type to TvB will give noobs an easy team game (although yes they may be imbalanced) but at the same time the more experienced players will know that they can arrange the teams simply by entering in the order they want the teams.  Having an autostart feature wouldnt make something like that possible.  I think the current "start" command is the best method.

I have been considering using a shorter HostBot username though.  EF_HostBot is rather long.  I do have another account called efhb that could make things easier.  But its name isnt quite as obvious.  The GameBot name though would stay the same.