Agent

I'm not sure what idea you're talking about, but it would probably be best to post ideas on the forums so that everybody has the option to read and comment on them.

I guess I should've phrased better, but time is a really serious constraint when it comes to implementing new features. It does take developer time away from other tasks and even when we decide that something is a good idea and that we want to implement it, it needs to be prioritized rationally, which unfortunately means it might not be able to be worked on before other tasks that are higher priority. It's a totally fair criticism that I don't read and respond to feedback threads nearly as much as I should though.

I'm not sure if any functional design change is really needed to address this issue; it's a conversation to be had, but my personal opinion is that it probably isn't going to be necessary, and as of yet no serious ideas have been put forth. Ultimately the issue feels like it boils down to server moderation teams harassing specific players under the guise of arbitrary and unevenly enforced rules, instead of evenly enforcing rules against harassment, as well as just not encouraging harassment. Even this 3-round rule is highly subject to prejudice and uneven enforcement, and should really be removed. It's part of the problem, and encourages people to believe that people playing together is some horrible crime against gameplay. This leads to further harassment and conflict, rather than resolving it. As Madkill pointed out, any opponent can be outmatched and overcome; perspective has a huge impact. As poi pointed out, moderators haven't been enforcing rules evenly or consistently. These problems really do stem from community/staff toxicity, which I feel needs to be addressed.

To be fair, there is an AFK kicker and I'm pretty sure most servers have rules (written or not) to kick AFK players. If someone is AFK then they should be removed. If they're actively avoiding attacking a player on another team, then they should be removed since it's essentially team hampering. I feel like those types of issues are relatively easy to address with little controversy -- as long as people play the game it should be fine. For what it's worth, we do have global moderators (you're one of them!) and a very thin set of global rules including policy against harassment. We just haven't been enforcing the harassment rule as much as we should, which is something we should probably push to start doing more.

@Kaunas Yeah that's totally fair, and high-skill players definitely do have a pretty notable impact in lower player count games especially, though I do think there has been a lot of exaggeration around how skilled some of these players really are. Many of the "elite" players people complain about have way lower win/loss ratios than other players that aren't generally complained about -- a lot of this is genuinely more about stigma and the fact that some players have really high play time in addition to decent skill. It's also easier to get mad at people with good aim than people with great game sense. For what it's worth I know at least some of these players do make a conscious effort to avoid clearing out servers, especially at lower player counts, and sometimes make an effort to even play against each other. I think that's a commendable effort in any capacity. I don't think we should fault people though for having fun and an interest in winning matches.

@Ryz Yeah, the general view around mutators has been shifting a bit recently since we don't want to see core game features being randomly disabled such as team swapping or commander powers. We definitely need to draft up some guidelines around mutators, particularly highlighting that core features shouldn't be removed on core ("de-facto official") servers. In general, core servers should try to remain as vanilla as possible so that we can actually continue to balance the game, and also ensure that discovered bugs exist in the base game, and aren't specific to that server. Honestly, I suspect this has a lot to do with people only being friends with people who are, well... friendly. I certainly don't have great aim, but manage to have plenty of fun playing with or against friends (including jpj and poi and sarah and others that might be considered "elites"). I also feel like it's worth noting that when the group being complained about exceeds 2 people, you're going to get complaints regardless about stacking. For example if Sarah, jpj, and poi are all playing at the same time, no matter what you're going to have 2 of them on the same team. This often leads to people complaining about a "stack" of 2 people, be it Sarah and poi, or poi and jpj, or Sarah and jpj, even though it's impossible to not have at least 2 of them on the same team. The 3rd player is just disregarded. There isn't really anything those players can do to avoid complaints in those cases, and players or moderators may miss the larger picture when there's friends playing against eachother. For example if jpj and poi are on the same team and people are complaining, a moderator may swap jpj, causing a Sarah and jpj "stack". People will either end up complaining about that stack if left alone long enough, or the match will end before then and they'll complain the next round again. It's realistically not an issue that can always be moderated. @Jenzuj You don't seem interested in having any dialogue and seem interested in only being hostile, so I'm not really sure why you're posting. I'm guessing you're some sort of moderator for FPI? Thanks for the insight into what's apparently just an overall toxic culture at FPI though. For what it's worth, the development team does have a vested interest in how the game is played, and we have been looking into setting up official servers, but we do reserve the right to delist servers who aren't contributive to the game's beta.

There's definitely team swapping in CSGO, and I tend to stack hard with the people I play with. That's getting pretty off topic though. Not sure what you're getting at here, other than being unnecessarily aggressive.

One of the largest issues I've seen in FPI is a consistent pattern of over-moderation and attempting to address every concern by every player. Not only is such a goal unrealistic, but it's also undesirable since you're going to constantly have to address conflicting player wants/needs, and ultimately will have to interact with those players on a far more frequent and intimate basis than should ever be necessary. I've always emphasized this in the past, and perhaps I haven't been as active lately to keep encouraging it, but moderator action should really be reserved for cases where behavior is obviously malicious. Obviously malicious behavior would be intentional actions such as hacking, harassment, team hampering, and in certain cases even bug abuse. Refusing to attack specific members of the other team should certainly be considered team hampering. "Team stacking" however is difficult to moderate in part because it's not malicious -- there's absolutely no moral justification to interfere with those players' activities. Instead, moderators are trying to change the natural and desirable behavior of playing with friends. We want people to be able to play with their friends. People who play with their friends bring more people into the game to play with them, creating a more enjoyable experience for themselves and also expanding the player base at the same time. This is behavior that should be encouraged, not discouraged -- I can't tell you how many times I've hopped onto RenX because I've seen Yosh or DoctorB0ng or Sarah or anybody else I know and enjoy playing with on discord or in-game. Playing with your friends makes the game much more fulfilling, and shouldn't ever be hampered. Playing with friends just makes the game more fun. These "elite" players shouldn't have a duty to play differently from every other player purely on the basis of skill. They're not choosing to be a more prominent member of the community -- this is being forced upon them unilaterally and unfairly. They did not choose to be held to an arbitrary higher standard. It shouldn't be any player's duty to self-limit their team swaps, or to communicate with staff constantly about team swaps. No player should ever have to justify their right to play with their friends. No otherwise rule-abiding player should ever have to justify their right to play this game. Moderators forcing this upon them and then displaying toxic behavior in-game, effectively further enabling harassment while also making no attempt to address it, is just disappointing and a failure of the moderation team. Additionally, removing features from the game is not desirable. Team swapping is in the game because it's well established that people may want or even need to switch teams. We already have much stricter requirements for team swapping than other games like CSGO; in RenX you're only able to swap teams if it doesn't break the player count balance. Removing significant features unilaterally on a de-facto official server is completely undesirable, and it's a little frustrating for the development team to have to directly ask servers to remove mutators that weren't well thought through. We're not "one or two people trying hard to put us down", we're just trying to make sure the game is being played to its fullest as designed, and enjoyed by as many people as much as possible. If there's a design issue then it needs to be discussed and addressed within the development team or on the forums so that we can address issues with proper solutions, rather than half-baked unilateral ideas that only serve a single server. In the past I've chalked off "team stacking" as a server moderation issue and tried to ignore it, but it's reached a point and gone on long enough where it should be considered harassment. This needs to stop.

This. If anybody ever really wants to see this added to the game and is willing to work on such a task themselves then I'm sure it'd be added, but no such person exists at the moment as far as I'm aware.

MAXIMUM NECRO Locking this to prevent continued necroing of a 5 year old thread.

Went ahead and moved this to General so it doesn't appear in the News feed anymore. That said, lighten up folks, it's an April Fools post that clearly worked. It's not the first time, nor the last. It's all in good humor. Happy April everybody.

What Sarah said is pretty much nail on the head, but expanding on that, those same rules are also generally applied on every server, not just the official ones. Those and the obvious, no hacking/cheating.

There's no plan to integrate Black Dawn into the launcher nor the existing game client.

@Cronus

I don't believe it does actually (or at least, not as far as I'm aware), but it sounds like something that would be a fantastic addition. Adding handling for this would probably touch WebPatchSource.cs.

Worth noting: RXPatchLib is already setup as a separate library, which you could use.

Rather than writing a new launcher, wouldn't it make more sense to try to compile the existing launcher for Linux (i.e: using Mono or something similar)?

For anybody curious: .rank

The fact that you're chat banned on a server doesn't give me any confidence that your behavior has improved, or is otherwise sufficient to participate in the PUG games -- I'm slightly off topic here, but you never stop messaging me about them, so I'm addressing that here. You complain about the consequences of being banned from things, but don't take into account that it's your behavior that others actively complain about. These bans aren't arbitrary, they're necessary to accommodate a positive environment for other players.

Maybe more post-pug conversation should happen here again instead

Since certain users have continued to abuse the downvote reaction on the forums as a form of attacking other users, downvotes no longer affect forum reputation. Forum reputation for existing users will not be recalculated. This is posted in general since this isn't significant enough for the News section and is entirely forum specific.

I still absolutely hate the concept of mining a building at all, where you put explosives inside of your own buildings to ensure nobody gets in. I've said plenty on mines in previous mine-related discussions, but I'd really like to see some alternative to explosives for the purpose of building defense. Currently my favorite idea is to just add a simple interior turret that can both hurt players and one-shot-disarm C4. The turret's never destroyed unless the building's destroyed, but would be disabled at 0% health so that the turret can be repaired later on. It's far more intuitive than planting C4 in your own buildings, and avoids arbitrary pre-defined mining zones. This also removes any cost associated with repairing the turret, and reduces the significance of multiple points of entry into buildings (i.e: thinking HoN vs Barracks, where on some levels the Barracks can be easier to defend than the HoN; similar applies to Airstrip vs WF). In addition to that, I'm still a strong proponent of removing proximity C4 from hotwires / technicians completely, and converting them into a purchasable item (same slot as a beacon or airstrike), so that infiltrators can mine enemy buildings after entry or otherwise. Removing the mine limit is a huge benefit of removing team responsibility from proximity mines. If we were to go the route of re-purposing proximity mines, it might also make sense to forbid proximity mines from being within a short (maybe 3 meter or so) distance of friendly buildings. Otherwise, any player who still doesn't put mines at a door or near a door is effectively team hampering by not helping prevent infiltration.

Hid some posts... keep any personal bickering to PMs please. @Madkill40 @Akbaro

I will fix this... tomorrow most likely.