Why did the FFA Hangout server disappear?

[Pokrew]

Seriously, that server was a refreshing experience in the MBII community, why was it shut down? And was it due to the admins or the devs? Is there any good reason why MBII shouldn't have a server of that kind?

 

[Tylenol]

If I remember correctly it was related to the server running on modified binaries, something that the Devs don't exactly enjoy. As well as a personal design opinion from one of the Devs stating that "an FFA mode like that would contribute to the death of MB2"

The owner was personally contacted, so the server wasnt forcefully shutdown for the record.

 

[Liniyka_xddd]

u cant have fun

 

[Bob-Billy]

Sad , FFA was a good reason for old players to return since open became extremely boring

 

[k4far]

What was the risk of modified binaries anyway for the game, developers and players?

 

[Pokrew]

u cant have fun

Fucking true

Sad , FFA was a good reason for old players to return since open became extremely boring

Indeed

 

[Pokrew]

FFA held no real threat to MBII...I myself used to get bored of it after a while and bump on some regular Open server...the devs are too conservative

 

[Pokrew]

What was the risk of modified binaries anyway for the game, developers and players?

Making this thread I expected some answers to such questions

 

[DaloLorn]

Making this thread I expected some answers to such questions

Without going into the whole argument of "devs should/shouldn't have complete control over how the mod is played", one answer is "it doesn't quite work".

You see, some of the things done by the server owner (or whoever was modding it for him) resulted in bugs, either due to incompetence on their part or due to limitations inherent to their method of modification. The server wouldn't work correctly without official developer assistance, which means the team would have to choose between having to explain to people that no, this bug was not something they were meant to fix because it was in an unsupported version of the mod; or spreading their already limited resources even thinner by helping with the server.

As such, the team's historic aversion to FFA - while undoubtedly a notable factor - cannot take all the blame for the server's removal.

 

[Tylenol]

What was the risk of modified binaries anyway for the game, developers and players?

Idk much about development but I'd assume they didn't like someone messing with in the code that they (by law) own

 

[Archiiv]

Without going into the whole argument of "devs should/shouldn't have complete control over how the mod is played", one answer is "it doesn't quite work".

You see, some of the things done by the server owner (or whoever was modding it for him) resulted in bugs, either due to incompetence on their part or due to limitations inherent to their method of modification. The server wouldn't work correctly without official developer assistance,[...]

I don't consider that to be true, the server did work even though it had its flaws/bugs. If we take the example of the 1.5.1 patch from 1.5.0,
server did broke but was back up again the same/next day without any official support ( i doubt they even knew of its existence at this point in time ).

which means the team would have to choose between having to explain to people that no, this bug was not something they were meant to fix because it was in an unsupported version of the mod; or spreading their already limited resources even thinner by helping with the server.

I think open minded people could find an easy solution to this, adding in the server title 'non-official modified server' and a disclaimer when you joined the server that "its not supported by the official mb2 team and that bugs are present" ( or something along those lines ) would have been quite enough without any action taken by the devs except talking to the owner.

As such, the team's historic aversion to FFA - while undoubtedly a notable factor - cannot take all the blame for the server's removal.

I agree that it can't take all the blame and think another notable factor is the fact that the server was modified by an ex dev team member who's not 'appreciated' by some of the current ones which really shouldn't be taken into account when that kind of decision are to be made but probably did to some extent ( and i'll let you wonder on the extent ).

I don't agree with any of the reasons that were brought up here and on the discord for the removal of the server and was not convinced by any of it.
Not that it make a difference.

 

[k4far]

open minded people

You think there are any open minded people here? Even if that's true they are not majority and that makes everything narrowed to a vision of one or two or they are just too tired to bother even if that's not the case it takes effort to do things and nobody gives a shit with amount of work that already exists to babysit rogue server owners. It's much simpler and faster to just get rid of you.

You will be most likely told that you should have contacted the developers prior to using modified binaries to have your happy sunshine outcome you are expecting here according to your post above. Have fun.

 

[Defiant]

We had a short internal discussion about this, in the interests of transparency here is my actual reply on the matter. I'm on mobile right now so can discuss more later.

Servers need to be on a level playing field. Firstly because if we allow things like this then we start a race to the bottom. Which server owner can make the most outrageous change which is fun for about a week and then everyone realises its crap and quits altogether because no other servers are populated. Second, the whole gameplay and balance goes out the window if you have more than 80 points and the entire point of giving people somewhere to practice goes out the window because the best builds will be builds which you cant use in the real game, at which point its the same effect - players will go to where its easiest to win, everyone will realise that wookiee or SBD with all abilities trounces everyting else, get bored and quit. It's the same reason why even hardcore MBII servers arnt actually hard core. Start with 3 points and get more by getting kills ect. How many years has it been since a server that utilised that existed. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and everyones got to play by the same rule book.

 

[Archiiv]

Servers need to be on a level playing field. Firstly because if we allow things like this then we start a race to the bottom. Which server owner can make the most outrageous change which is fun for about a week and then everyone realises its crap and quits altogether because no other servers are populated.

I understand your fear about every servers starting to modify their files in order to be more fun to players, in order to bring more players.
I think its unrealistic, it would mean that no one is actually playing the open game mod right now for the funness of it but only because that's all you can have atm, it would also means that there's something inherently wrong with the base open mod. I don't think its true, i think the game still need balancing but i don't think there's something inheretly wrong with it.

Second, the whole gameplay and balance goes out the window if you have more than 80 points and the entire point of giving people
somewhere to practice goes out the window because the best builds will be builds which you cant use in the real game,
at which point its the same effect - players will go to where its easiest to win, everyone will realise that wookiee or SBD with all abilities
trounces everyting else, get bored and quit.

I personnaly think the n/a hangout server could have done without it ( change to build points, health etc ), it was indeed more fun for a player like me that is used to a limit for my build but i can see how it wouldn't help unexperienced players get better at their beginning.

Would you say having only the timer and the respawn changed ( even if it bring bugs to an unofficial server ) to be FFA and not having any others change to any other value would seems alright to you ? ( for beginner aswell as experienced players )

I'm gonna repeat myself but i still honestly think that FFA server are the way to learn the game and the basic mechanics ( and i'm not saying open mode is not, its different, its team and objectives oriented ) As said on the discord, it would help you hone your solo skills in prevision of your implication in a team.

 

[MaceMadunusus]

another notable factor is the fact that the server was modified by an ex dev team member who's not 'appreciated' by some of the current ones

False. No one involved in that server was ever on the development team. One of them applied to be a developer and had their application denied but that was it.

I don't agree with any of the reasons that were brought up here and on the discord for the removal of the server and was not convinced by any of it.

It doesn't sound to me like you are open to being convinced.

I will say this as I said before on discord. Movie Battles II is an asymmetrically balanced, objective based, time limited, last man standing shooter. Those are some of the design limitations the team set when the mod was created and we need to stick to that. You take one of those away, okay fine. You take 2 or more of those away and you take away our identity.

You are not wrong in the sense that we could use a better way to learn the mechanics, especially with other people, not having to sit out in a round, etc. However, we are working towards that with Tutorials, and additional game modes found on the roadmap: Trello We can achieve that same thing without resorting to doing what is uninspired/uncreative. CTF, Conquest, Conquest Domination, Balance of Power, Payload, all have things you claim to want but are within our design limitations. The design limitations we have fosters creativity within the development team and helps keep us on track. Lose that and we lose ourselves.

 

[Archiiv]

False. No one involved in that server was ever on the development team. One of them applied to be a developer and had their application denied but that was it.

My own fault for misunderstanding, i'll restate this way:
" another notable factor is the fact that the server was modified by a member of the community who's not 'appreciated' by some of the current devs. "
And i do think this played a role in the fate of the server when it shouldn't.

It doesn't sound to me like you are open to being convinced.

I think i'm open to be convinced, i'm just not convinced by the many reasons that are being put forward.

I will say this as I said before on discord. Movie Battles II is an asymmetrically balanced, objective based, time limited, last man standing shooter. Those are some of the design limitations the team set when the mod was created and we need to stick to that. You take one of those away, okay fine. You take 2 or more of those away and you take away our identity.

Correct me if i'm wrong but isn't the duel mode actually taking the identity of the game from your words?
Its not asymmetrically balanced unless you count the 2 force power that are different from jedi/sith, there's not objective apart from practicing your own skill in dueling, it is time limited though most servers expand on it, and its not a last man standing mode. So the game mode is actively taking out 3 of the design limitations but we can still safely assume that it is MB2 at its core.
The n/a ffa hangout server was practically this same game mode but included gunners on top of it.
We can argue how it was done was far, far from being perfect especially regarding the number of point added to build system and the value of the health, forcepoints, etc... but still had room to improve given time ( the server was still in its infancy, barely up for two weeks if i remember correctly ).

You are not wrong in the sense that we could use a better way to learn the mechanics, especially with other people, not having to sit out in a round, etc. However, we are working towards that with Tutorials, and additional game modes found on the roadmap: Trello We can achieve that same thing without resorting to doing what is uninspired/uncreative. CTF, Conquest, Conquest Domination, Balance of Power, Payload, all have things you claim to want but are within our design limitations. The design limitations we have fosters creativity within the development team and helps keep us on track. Lose that and we lose ourselves.

I'm glad we at least agree on that and look forward to what you guys can do to solve this problem. I do think this is a major problem for some/many of the new players and is stopping the community from growing.

 

[Defiant]

One of them applied to be a developer and had their application denied but that was it.

That person was not directly involved with the server but did provide technical assistance which only sped things up. I am satisfied that the people running the server had nothing but good intentions.

FFA wont work for us - the whole balance is based around firstly teams - a good example is there is no counter for the deka on the imperial side, but there are a couple of options on the rebel side. And secondly around reinforcements. Some classes are intentionally weaker than others, but you get two or three deaths with them to compensate, winning by attrition rather than being able to go toe to toe. How many times do you want to get wiped out by a deka or a SBD or a CR3 clone as a soldier before it gets boring?

The waiting between rounds has been something that needs attention for more than a decade. Tempest fixed it for duel mode in 1.5.0, however the current open mode there's not a lot we can do about it, but we have been talking about having a map dependent grace period to allow late joiners to get in without waiting 5 minutes for the next round, but its very conceptual and far from a done deal to ever be implemented.

Im eager to get the new game modes in, hopefully at least one in the next 6 to 12 months, which will likely work by having no lives, and a class specific respawn time with reinforcements lowering this time.

" another notable factor is the fact that the server was modified by a member of the community who's not 'appreciated' by some of the current devs. "

There is nothing personal in this at all. We put a lot of time into making these design decisions and have a long term view. Ultimately we have to protect that vision and I don't think it's unreasonable to not allow something that isn't a MovieBattles server advertising its self as such on our own master server list.

Correct me if i'm wrong but isn't the duel mode actually taking the identity of the game from your words?

No. The ability to disable classes exists in open mode. Until 1.5.0 duel mode could have been created with existing server settings, it would just have been more annoying and stopped us adding things like mid-round joining. Personally, I wouldn't of allowed time to be spent on creating a duel mode because it isn't part of the core game, but decisions have been made in the past which we now have to support and keep going. I'm not saying duel mode was a mistake or is unwanted, but we can certainly learn lessons from how it has impacted and shaped the community and use that to understand how things like adding an FFA mode would affected the long term future.

 

[Archiiv]

There is nothing personal in this at all. We put a lot of time into making these design decisions and have a long term view. Ultimately we have to protect that vision and I don't think it's unreasonable to not allow something that isn't a MovieBattles server advertising its self as such on our own master server list.

I don't think that is unreasonable at all, especially if you guys think it wouldn't actually help the mod even though we can disagree about it.
I was mostly concerned about the way and the rate at which it was handled from my own perspective ( and others i'm sure ) while knowing about bad relations between some people.

The waiting between rounds has been something that needs attention for more than a decade. Tempest fixed it for duel mode in 1.5.0, however the current open mode there's not a lot we can do about it, but we have been talking about having a map dependent grace period to allow late joiners to get in without waiting 5 minutes for the next round, but its very conceptual and far from a done deal to ever be implemented.
Im eager to get the new game modes in, hopefully at least one in the next 6 to 12 months, which will likely work by having no lives, and a class specific respawn time with reinforcements lowering this time.

Sounds good to me. I guess the only thing left to do is to wait and see.

 

[Defiant]

I was mostly concerned about the way and the rate at which it was handled from my own perspective ( and others i'm sure ) while knowing about bad relations between some people.

The problem is that we don't necessarily know the owner of a server. I think I would like to have server owners volunteer this I formation to us to facilitate better communications between us as developers and them as the people hosting the game. Maybe it would have some benefits like raising features to us directly or being able to provide advanced notice of new releases or being able to ask for crash logs/look out for certain bugs we're struggling to pin down.