serious no-staff problem

[godisdead]

Give falconeer or someone like him a chance, it has to be better than the two hours or so dev a month the game currently gets.

[RageRitual]

H.M.S. Stargazer is alive? There are no events. All we have is MMR, and every once in awhile we have a DT/CUP.

[SpookedOne]

there was a brief resurgence of event hosting after bumping event prize money from 50k to 500k few months back

[SpookedOne]

there are some good points in this thread and i wanted to add some of my own exp for context.

i've been in twdev on and off for about 16 years now. i first joined around 2008 and did bot development under wingzero. i quickly progressed through the ranks from dev, to senior dev, then eventually head of botdev. the biggest issue then and now is distrust of devs.

in 2010, i was developing staffbot features which sometimes would throw server errors. errors appear in red similiar to warnings you'd get from a mod accept that only sysops can see these. after being in dev 2 years or so and even replacing wingzero as the head, i still wasn't trusted enough to be "officially" granted sysop from mmgod. i say officially because any senior dev (then and even now) would have access to the bot configs which contain all the logins, sysop password, recycle password, etc... needless to say it makes development work extra difficult and is a huge hit to morale. i resigned shortly later that year.

fastforward to now. i rejoined mid 2023. for the first six months, i'm not able to run the bots locally due to no test server, test database, or logins to live one. this means i am unable to develop until qan can trust me enough to grant me bot, server, and database logins (remember bot logins require sysop). finally, i'm granted a few logins to use with and i get to work. the hurdle to getting bots running from my local machine is still not over however as there is still a bunch of configuration todo. this takes a few weeks but finally able to get to work. but consider this, with me having 20 years of java experience and existing familiarity and repor with twdev and it still takes me months to get started, what hope do we have for any new dev?

i spent the next couple months from december to march 2024 working through our backlog and implementing a few features for mmr. i setup some new repositories for modernizing our tech stack introducing jupyter notebooks for doing twd analytics/modelling and started work on a separate lib for new rest (web) api. i started planning some features for streamlining the onboarding process for new devs as well which included moving configs directly into the repo (minus login details) and simplifying our logging framework to make it easy to track errors. however, i wanted to ensure i could enact the policies needed to bring in new devs and so found myself asking for sysop yet again, this time from qan and getting rejected, again.

i think ultimately the game will go stale and die without active devs. there are plenty of older (and uglier) games that have active users due to continual tinkering on the code base and a healthy feedback loop from it's users.

[RageRitual]

I fully understand them not trusting people, as it would be really easy to abuse the power needed to get things done. However finding a way to delegate stuff'n things to other people should be a PRIORITY so things get done. Here is just a few problems I am seeing and I am not even ON staff these days:

- Waiting for someone to *putfile a map or some shit (which is hilariously easy to do) can take weeks if not longer.

- Nobody ever takes help calls, even easy ones.

- Forget doing a ?cheater call, that is pointless.

- The few rules that are enforced, are only enforced on certain people. Either enforce them properly or get rid of them.

- News updates. Last one on TW website Jan 11th, 2002! Steam has nothing posted from staff in the Trench Wars Zone area. In fact the only place we ever see any news in on discord.

- MMR is incomplete. I appreciate the effort Qan has put in for this, but MMR has killed TWD, and since MMRB was never finished basing is dead. Basing is half of the competitive community and we have no place for it anywhere outside of DTB/Basingcup.

- We need one proper website that has everything in it not many websites, some with bugs over a decade old.

- A bot coder to regularly work with bots might allow the community to do so much more when running events.

- Repel ignores and Warbird ghosts are brutal since the change to new server. This was not a problem with the dinosaur computer that used to run the game. Clearly not a hardware problem. Could we not just run this off someones piece of shit windows 95 computer in a basement somewhere?

- I know costs are a problem. Why can't we allow some sort of optional subsciption fee. We can use this to pay for server costs and maybe help outsource some things. Not something Pay2Win but I'm sure the community could come up with some ideas for what it would give you if asked. Maybe only allow someone with subscription to captain teams or have their usernames show up a different colour (if that is possible), or have their help calls take priority or allow x amount of event requests granted per month, shit like that.

This game is almost 30 years old, and yes I understand is run by people that do not get paid, and I appreciate the work that has been done to keep it running. Having only 1 or 2 people be able to do everything that needs to get done means shit don't get done. Learn to delegate. Time for a change or let the game die.

[Falconeer]

- Waiting for someone to *putfile a map or some shit (which is hilariously easy to do) can take weeks if not longer.

This was the problem in DSB too. Beer Hunter took like 10 months to putfile a simple file, and refused to give me total and complete access to the server even though I was the only one developing things. It's a motivation kill to have to wait for someone to do a simple 5 minute task for months. On top of it the people in charge in some cases, or at least DSBs case was a person who had no coding experience or dev capabilities. I can at least code some java and I've made tilesets and done graphics in the form of LVZs for the game. But if the main person in charge can't do a 5 minute task and on top of it they are a priest who sits around praying for people to do zone work for them. Yet can't put in 5 minutes themselves? Like fuck that.

The positive thing about trench wars is at least qan can code and built or added to a lot of the things himself.

My issue with not trusting people:
A) If you're no longer active then you kind of make the case already that your opinion has less weight on who to trust. You're not active. Why should your opinion carry the same weight, you're already 1 foot out the door.

B) You can't ever tell if you can trust someone until you trust them. Back up your shit (files/server), and trust them.

C) There's no reason to not trust someone unless they have actually done something untrustworthy. TEXT does not qualify as untrustworthy. They actually had to be in a position with access and deleted files, or banned people etc. Someone who typed a bunch of trolling crap 10 years ago when they were a pub player doesn't count toward making them untrustworthy. It's just text, and 99% of people, including people in charge have trolled at some point or another. Stop pretending you're better than everyone else. Everyone put in the same 25 years into the game that you did. Everyone is entitled to at least one chance to contribute.

D) There have been literal billing ops who took down other peoples servers maliciously, yet they were billing ops forever and their past crimes excused. That's just mind blowing and insane to me. Yet someone who typed a bunch of text you don't like can't get access to develop for a server. Grow the fuck up. If mr. destroys communities by taking down severs can be billing op, I should be granted access to develop for a zone no contest.

Legitimate people who want to dev, don't care about position or "power" in a 2d game, only those highschoolers who circle jerk each other in league with their niche groups of friends have delusions about power in a 25 year old game. The true developer wants access for one reason. So they can develop unhindered, not based on someone else's motivation to putfile something for the work I am doing... the best person who will putfile that file in under 5 minutes is the person who made the fucking file. Not some guy who would rather be playing rocket league or some shit and invested nothing into the creation of that file.

I could probably consolidate the website and work on the database too, but I would need access.

[renzi]

- Nobody ever takes help calls, even easy ones.

Yesterday I logged on for the first time in about 4 months and had a help call answered in less than 10 seconds 🤷♂️