Auto auto hosts and the mighty Player Juggler

Back with more infrastructure improvements in the quest to cut your game waiting times and improve satisfaction :-)


There are now specialed managed hosts - they have a star in the lobby.
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• TEAMS - makes 2 team games,pick maps based on player counts

• 1v1 - for 1v1 battles,picks 1v1 maps

• FFA - for free for all - they pick ffa map based on player count, balance ffa

• COOP - for Chikens and CAI fights - pick chicken maps, balances for 1 vs bots and add its own normal chicken if players dont

All of those managed hosts auto balance on !start and are prefered way to play now.

Please use them instead of hosting your own, because only those participate in another addition:

The Player Juggler
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Player juggler is a way to merge classical matchmaking with normal battleroom based gaming.
Its a system that moves waiting people together based on their preferences.

Each person can set his/her prefences on home page.
Juggler takes into account things like player preferences, current battle, elo, clan to make suitable changes.

How to use it?

• First go and set your personal preferences. If you set something as dislike, juggler will never move you to disliked battle type.
• Next join the managed autohost of battle type you want to play - say FFA autohost.
• Wait,every 2 minutes juggler checks available people waiting on other managed autohosts (including those that joined running battle late) and if sensible games can be made from the people, it moves them together into games.

For details about inner workings check: http://code.google.com/p/zero-k/wiki/PlayerJuggler


Other minor additions
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• !map (no params) on autohosts picks next suitable map (managed only)
• TEAMS autohosts give extra comms to smaller team
• major springie rewrite with lots of changes

Sounds good!

I thought that Planetwars sets maps marked as chickens as 'Chicken worlds'? IE a map suitable for Chickens is considered suitable -only- for chickens?

So yeah, I'm a noob - but how do you remove the normal chicken from coop host, that seems to be there by default? I added a CAI and the chicken still stayed.

"I think many people play chicken on normal maps for fun."

Honestly, I think chickens is better on regular maps, and should be balanced for them. The limited expansion and porcy nature of chicken maps makes them more limited IMO. You should have to fight the chickens for territory to expand your mexes into.

We need options for 'Either' in 1v1, FFA, and Chickens, for maps that can do both those things, or there needs to be a 'team games' tag as well.