Team fund for auto-donations

[testman]

How hard would it be to implement this:

1. Give player an option to decide what's the minimum amount of credits they want/need. Credits beyond that minimum become available to other players
2. Implement a "team fund" counter, that shows the sum of how much all players have gone beyond their own specified amount
3. Implement a "withdraw" function into game menu, which allows player to instantly transfer from team fund to his own credits count
   • Either try to take equal % from each player that has available credits or
   • take credits so that every player with available credits is left with equal amount
4. Set default minimum amount to something very high, like 5k, so that only players who opt-in and serious hoarders can give their credits away

It's basically reverse-donations, and it's way faster than asking in team chat for donations and faster than using either CLI or GUI for giving donations.

Would this be a good idea?

>inb4 get out with your communism

[j0g32]

I like your idea but it might be difficult to manage these funds; maybe i am not sure if I understood correctly:

Are you suggesteing that basically every player has a limit of say 5000. Any credits of plaeryer A beyond that could be "auto-donated"/withdrawn upon request by any player B withouth  player A's explicit approval... ?!

[Madkill40]

F5 > donate <playername> 

Why over-complicate it?

Heck, I'd rather have Ctrl + V > Donate >> Team / Player 

If >>> Team >>>> All / Specify

If >>> Player >>>> Select 0 - 9 [Top 10 Poorest Players on Team List] >>>> All / Specify

[testman]

11 hours ago, j0g32 said:

Are you suggesteing that basically every player has a limit of say 5000. Any credits of plaeryer A beyond that could be "auto-donated"/withdrawn upon request by any player B withouth  player A's explicit approval... ?!

Yes.
That's why the default value should be ridiculously high, so that it's practically an opt-in system.
But have it very-high-limit instead of completely just opt-in, because AFK players, sneaky bastards and people who shoot tunnel exit with MRLS the whole match can hoard quite a lot of credits without intention of using them. Therefore team gets a chance to use those credits for some better purpose.
I think 5k would be the right limit, because it is way more than you can possibly usefully spend, unless you were planning to buy Mammoth tanks for your whole team, or if you were planning to use Mendoza as suicide bomber 5 times in a row.
Someone could take your overflow credits without your explicit approval, and you could take someone's overflow credits, and none of you would waste each others time.

7 hours ago, Madkill40 said:

F5 > donate <playername> 

Why over-complicate it?

Because some people have very interesting selection of symbols in their name, and I don't want to lose 20 seconds just typing in the name or attempting to find the bastard on esc-menu list.
I mean, if I have the credits to donate, and he wants the money, shouldn't he be doing the busywork instead of me?
Which means more action for everyone, since I don't have to stop mid-battle to donate to someone who is at PT waiting for donation.

Yes, I make a lot of typos, and those typos can cost me precious seconds in the middle of the battlefield.

Or I could just hoard credits and watch people wait for their tanks while we lose our base.

[Fffreak9999]

The F5 donate works on partial names, negating 99% of the issue when it comes to special characters

 

[Axesor]

Team fund sounds nice to me, but thats all. Setting maximum amount of credits is additional annoyance. Donating to team fund should be one time operation, not automatical. Donating and withdraw needs to be very clear, and intuitive. Amount of credits in the fund needs to be on the screen.

Iam sometimes running with 10k+ credits, and wanna donate to team somehow, so Iam used to often ending up with spamming tanks for example, which is not very safe... and donating money to the individuals is annoying. Adding team fund would be very nice move.

Edited December 4, 2016 by Axesor

[Madkill40]

13 hours ago, Testman said:

 

Because some people have very interesting selection of symbols in their name, and I don't want to lose 20 seconds just typing in the name or attempting to find the bastard on esc-menu list.
I mean, if I have the credits to donate, and he wants the money, shouldn't he be doing the busywork instead of me?
Which means more action for everyone, since I don't have to stop mid-battle to donate to someone who is at PT waiting for donation.

Yes, I make a lot of typos, and those typos can cost me precious seconds in the middle of the battlefield.

Or I could just hoard credits and watch people wait for their tanks while we lose our base.

Hence 

"Heck, I'd rather have Ctrl + V > Donate >> Team / Player 

If >>> Team >>>> All / Specify

If >>> Player >>>> Select 0 - 9 [Top 10 Poorest Players on Team List] >>>> All / Specific"

Would make for a good addition

[TheOlsenTwins]

Another option could be to donate for a specific unit to be bought. (mayb up to a percentage, possibly default 50% donator/ 50% player)

Could be done from the donate menu: Donate for meds/mrls/gunner/ion...

If someone uses the buy menu after that, you see that some units have already been paid in part and you can get them by paying the other part...

[RoundShades]

To be fair, an easy way to implement this, is to literally have reverse-donations. As in, have a "request" button, as well as "donate" button.

How is that different than asking in "Team Chat", do you ask? Well, we have that obnoxious Menu donate screen. That could be made to make request, to show requests to donors, and to quickly double-click to donate. It already has a list, after all. The list just needs to populate the donation command for you, like it kind of already does, but be given more info.

It could also have an option to start auto-donating to requests after 1.2k creds stored.

[Madkill40]

8 hours ago, YagiHige said:

To be fair, an easy way to implement this, is to literally have reverse-donations. As in, have a "request" button, as well as "donate" button.
 

Player295 is requesting 350 credits! (F1 : Give / F2 Reject) [Countdown of 20 seconds]

You cannot make another request for 2 minutes!

 

I actually really like this idea, this seems like a more improved system of donating credits to team mates.

Edited December 6, 2016 by Madkill40

[testman]

TL,DR: Go to "donate partially"

While I agree that above idea would be a great improvement over current donation mechanics, it would still have some issues in certain situations.

For example:

You are part of the glorious Brotherhood of Nod, you are fanatically devoted to the cause and the best way to destroy opposing GDI base is with stank rush.

You and Pussydestroyer69 have 1,5k credits each and you both want to get stealth tank (900 credits)
Player420balezit wants to also join in, but is broke and therefore he makes a donation request for 900 credits.
If any of you donate for dude's stank, you have to wait 300 credits before your own.
If you buy your stank, you are left with 600 credits and don't have enough to match dude's request.

Here come the options:

• Either game denies you donation (you can't donate unless you have more than what is in request) or
• game allows you to donate *all* your credits. You get left with 0 and dude's is partially financed. (somewhat risky to have that option in game IMHO)

In second case, both you and Pussydestroyer69 can donate, but then you are both on 0 and Player420balezit is left with 300 credits too much.

With my proposed system, there would still be an issue, since timing would have to be correct.
if both you and Pussydestroyer69 set your overflow limit to 1k at the start of the match, Player420balezit would still have to be the first to withdraw your overflow credits before you guys buy stank, otherwise you both go below and dude can't withdraw anything.

However, with a bit more of code wizardry, there could be third option, which would probably work best for everyone:

• Donate partially
  Game would have to keep track of how much was already donated, and keep the donation request going if it's not met or timer runs out.
  First come, first donate. You donate first, you donate 600, left with 0. Then Pussydestroyer69 donates, but only 300 is taken away from him.
  That would still require a bit more of donator involvement than my proposal of automated communism, but still way less than in current donation system.

Sorry for TL;DR essay

 

 

[Madkill40]

10 hours ago, Testman said:

Here come the options:

• Either game denies you donation (you can't donate unless you have more than what is in request) or
• game allows you to donate *all* your credits. You get left with 0 and dude's is partially financed. (somewhat risky to have that option in game IMHO)
• Player sits out the stank'ing because their request cannot be met by anyplayer on the entire team and somebody else with more credits who requests less credits joins the stank'ing instead.

Fixed.

Tip: Lets not go overboard and over-complicate @YagiHige's idea.

However, let's just throw in a Hyperthetical-X,

Lets say the donation request has a timer of 20 seconds;

H-X 1: 4 people hit F1, the timer of 20 seconds ends and the game automatically divides up the credits from the 4 players and gives them to the requesting player which makes your player requesting 900 credits happy, however this costs the team time [if you consider other requests] and thus is impractical when instead...

H-X 2: One player who can afford the request hits F1 and the requested amount is immediately donated from Player A to Player B, now another player can put in a request a lot sooner and the credits can be dished out.

H-X 1 - encourages the poorest player to ask for credit handouts.

H-X 2 - encourages all players to be reasonable when asking for credit handouts.

Y'know?

This isn't the first discussion on this particular topic, but it's going down the same path as last time with Testman's post. 

H-X 2 all the way for speed, convenience and practicality and simplicity of original idea.

 

We've already got a 'Donate' Button, can we have a "Request" option in the V menu? Christmas prezzie from the @yosh56?

[testman]

I agree that H-X 2 is better solution, and if there was any implementation of "Request" option, I would love to see it being the one that functions as described in H-X 2.

However, like I pointed out in my above post, there are still specific situations where this is not an optimal solution.

Having "Request" option would be great improvement / addition to current donation system, but to have system that would work well even in some unlikely specific situations, we would have to "go overboard and over-complicate @YagiHige's idea".
I am not saying that it should be now. I'm not saying that it should be any kind of priority at this moment.
Once every other issue in Renegade X has been dealt with, then we can maybe open up this discussion again and ask "Ok, how could credits requesting work better?"

For now, having a system that instantly transfers requested amount would be great solution.

Edited December 7, 2016 by Testman