Fix Shipchanging on TWDT-B Bots Please

[ogron]

Dreamwin is abusing the shit out of the bots by macro'ing shipchanging himself from spider to warbird over and over and over and over

He dies in 1 ship, then hits his macro, SKIPS THE DEATH TIMER, and is back within half a second instead of being dead for 5 seconds. This shit is blatant cheating and needs to be stopped, it's absolutely ridiculous.

[IxaDor]

Gotta give him some credit though for finding an exploit in this day and age of SS

[Dreamwin]

What a tradegy! What an abuse! It's been the same for like 15 years, only thing that has changed is the amount of ship changes available.

On a serious note, I think implementing some kind of restriction in there is fine. I am more concerned about cases where a shark lays a bad mine on cram and the team can remove it by !change macros + avoid spawn time ofc. Say, 30-60 second restriction to change back to original ship is put into place solves the problem. It's not that big of a deal anyway, lol.

[ogron]

lol it's not a tragedy, and i'm not mad (we won the game, and we're done facing each other), it's just something that should have been fixed a long time ago.

it's +100 to you for being clever enough to macro and abuse it (there's nothing technically illegal about it), but it's definitely something that wasn't intended and shouldn't be allowed.

[project dragon]

If the problem is that it skips the death timer, why not make any ship transaction take the length of a death timer (4sec)? Includes !change and !switch

[Leland]

reported

[Smoking Blue]

why not just remove the spawn timer or make it shorten, so that there can be more action! and more kills! i think by halving the spawn timer, most kills will ge up by atleast 40%

[kess]

why not just remove the spawn timer or make it shorten, so that there can be more action! and more kills! i think by halving the spawn timer, most kills will ge up by atleast 40%

It used to be 3 seconds instead of 5, 10 years ago or so. But the change actually increased the level of play

[qan]

Looks like there is a "changedelaytime" available for MatchBot, which should theoretically work. It uses a timer. Because of this, I'm worried it could introduce what are called "race conditions" (where behavior is unpredictable because events happen out of order), though.

Og's asked for something to be done about it before finals, which is prudent. So rather than risk this potential wildcard which was coded at some point but is not enabled anywhere for some unknown reason, I just added a condition that prevents players from being changed or switched while they are respawning. I think it's a bit simpler. Only worry is that it might punish people who are trying to use the command legitimately, and just happen to do so while their teammate is spawning, slowing them down as they have to type yet again to the bot, wasting precious seconds. But introducing a timer could create some game-breaking conditions that are far worse than using changes to bypass a spawn timer -- itself a move that arguably could even be considered a legitimate tactic, much like wavedashing in Melee or rocket-jumping in Quake. (Rule stretch but not outright abuse, as it can only be done in a calculated way, because it uses up your limited switches.)

Anyway, just having a good ramble. Someone please check that this feature is working correctly via a TWBD match before this weekend. It would really be unfortunate if untested code caused some sort of unexpected issue and ruined finals. I don't anticipate any issues, as it's pretty simple, but those are famous last words in the world of programming.

[Smoking Blue]

It used to be 3 seconds instead of 5, 10 years ago or so. But the change actually increased the level of play

so making it even shorter might increase it more?

[Dreamwin]

Haha, changing rules just before finals, classic. Like said, I've only been "abusing" a function that has been in the game forever, and some might say I have done it succesfully. Now it is a convenient time to reduce "my edge" and change the rules just before facing Mr TWDT in the finals

As I said, restricting it in some way is by all means a good idea but the timing of this makes me laugh.

Dont take this too srsly though, GL to the finals!

[ogron]

The timing?

I asked for this common sense change to be made Week 3. I can't predict the future. I simply asked Beasty/Qan for an update.