fixing single-lobby TAW

To clarify here, anyone could join as spectator or player until the total number of participants reached the regular cap (let's say 32), then had an additional 2 spaces for spectator-only participants

There is a thread with more refined versions of this idea.

quote: Another solution is to prevent joining a running room if you are neither going to spectate nor play the running game. Then your best chance to get in a game is to go to another room. Do you know any non-Spring RTS where people can join a running game room neither to spectate it nor to play in it, but to wait for the game to end to start another one? This doesn't make any sense! If they want to play, force them to go to a free waiting room to play. When a game starts, merge its waiting list players to that other waiting room. And when a teams game ends, merge all their players into that waiting room. Then, players do not miss a chance to join the next big game by being in that waiting room.

quote: The thing we should learn as a society from just spectating what is going on around us is that increasing regulations only stifles competition and does not help.

Huh?! Competition in what? This is about waiting to play a game. There is no competition in waiting to play a game. We already have plenty of rules which make game playable (imagine: start anywhere on the map, random teams, no spectator cheat and others, killing team mates and many other rules).

People try to come up with ideas because there seem to be mostly one 32 player room. Would you like to have 2 or more rooms of 32 players or prefer always one room?

I do not think banning spectators would work much, because many people want to play in very large games. They will not start / join / play if they think it is large.

Maybe we should add random, "undercover" bots. Many (most?) players do not chat anyhow, and play inefficiently the game, so would it be a big difference? As there would be more people joining, the bots could "logout".

Brackman's suggestion is waaay underrated.

We have a one lobby problem because of UI and the lobby implementation. We have more than enough active players for multiple lobbies. More players would help, but it's orthogonal to other issues.

madez if you would like to solve it, you can.

i have an idea.. that may already have been said

what if a lobby can have thousands of players in it and launches to multiple games rather then splitting the lobby at all.. so if 60 people are in the lobby it balances and splits the games based on the best balance it can achieve but everyone stays in the same lobby.. so they cant just switch back to an old lobby as they never left.. when there are less or more players it stays the same room.. so that you dont get cascading lobby fail due to 'this rooms going to die' syndrome.. you could even make the algorithim favor players that you havent got to play with yet so you can catch up with everyone over a few games. it might eliminate player waiting wait times a bit.. idk?

but some games do - do this.. they have 1 huge lobby.. problem is those games have set match times.
it might still kind of work because if you dont start a new game because there arnt many players your already in the right place to wait for more or gain new ones when the other game ends