ZK is on Greenlight!

Exactly. Imho, the big focus needs to be on the "first five minutes" part. Not tweaking the game itself - the actual ZK gameplay experience is ready for prime-time. And I'm not talking about cosmetics - ZKL ain't pretty but the its appearance doesn't need to be priority.

The installation process, the first run (holy crap that annoying "writable directory" message!) the thing where sometimes ZKL doesn't really show and you have to find its icon in your system tray to open it up, giving the user a quick way to get into the SP missions, the quality of the SP missions... that stuff.

When the players get into the proper multiplayer game, they're in for a solidly good experience. But right up until then?

Nope.

You might want to have a long discussion with knorke, forb and myself. We spent the entire evening and day helping newbs. Don't do it yet.

More of what I learned:

Linux users generally are more technical, but those that come from steam will have problems with all the extra work getting things working, and patience runs thin when there are hundreds of people needing help, be prepared. Any users - linux or not - that have any technical trouble will need hand holding and that requires 1 on 1 time from "staff." Hundreds of people means we need lots of staff.

Lucky: Springie is better than spads due to 2 reasons:
- Existing map boxes - no need for box setup
- Spectating unsynced users - no delaying the game - very important for a flood of newbies!

I foolishly resisted adding !start to weblobby because silly springie gives me no way to identify it, thus I can't tell springie from a human. But 1 in 1000 hosts are humans so I should have just let the issue go and put that in (like zklobby will say !start even in a human host). I wanted complete correctness and it was a mistake.

People will complain about ugliness and it's not a trivial issue. They say "I wanted to play the game and it put me in a stupid program" and some people will literally turn it off without even looking around. Weblobby looks way better than ZKlobby so be prepared, this will happen. One guy was running weblobby in a tiny shrunken window and couldn't see anything.

Single player is crucial and ZK SP = Missions, so as knorke said it had better work. Don't bother telling people to make custom battles, it's too much trouble for most people even though it's ridiculously simple for us - add 2 teams, you vs. bot. Seems simple but it's not. You want a click and play at all costs. Make sure it works.

We were overwhelmed. A bunch of very small issues that are easy to deal with when 1-2 newbies join the lobby, is a whole different story when 200 people join.

Evo Rts go live was a train wreck. please lets not do this unless we have a couple of months to get ready.

quote: Evo Rts go live was a train wreck. please lets not do this unless we have a couple of months to get ready.

Evo took over a year to get greenlit. We have the lead start.

It uses QT wrapper around the webview that hosts the weblobby.

It also has some slight thematic modifications (more yellow) and has evo filter on default.

I think that [up]Knorke is right, Zero-K is not ready for greenlight yet. Well but it already has been submited so there is not much we can do abaut it now.
In terms of ZK's issues i would like to point out that the worst barrier for any spring game is the lobby wich accualy is not bad for ZK but is not great either and imo rquires the most attencion because it is the first thing that the new player will face. Therefore i would deleate planet wars tab (because it would be too confusing) and give the buttons some tooltips perhaps.

Second most important thing imo as other said are singleplayer missions wich the new players will in doubd try (almost every new player to any game tries the SP before MP). However i must tell that all official SP missions are not that bad and indeed teach you a lot. I might add that i call that from experience because its how did i started playing ZK - from those missions.
So i wouldnt be that scared abaut missions's qualitiy.

Coming to very last importqant fix - sea warfare needs to be fixed. Badly. It can put people off in the long run as does snake balance in evo.

Also there is one more thing worth mentioning. Will the server be able to resist the great influx of players. We have seen (and we are still seeing) the conqesences of the Evo's release on Steam. People were unable to create new rooms and most players were labeled as lvl 0 newbs. And that was maby a quater of new players playing because the rest couldnt figure out how to play. Imagine if Zero K gets popular enough to attract 400 players wich would play at once on Srping server. I dont think that server would handle it since it already had issues with 20 more ppl playing at the same time.

So to the point - I dont think that ZK is ready for the Steam release both gameplay wise and logiscticly wise and also we do need to ask ourselves (mostly devs) "do we really need this".

Ps. TheSponge is right admins need to find a good reason to put Sfireman to sleep in time of release :F
Ps. 2 ME NO ENGRISH

To add to newbie frustration avoidance, a large influx of players would be a good time to reduce the team room size to 10 or 12, possibly limiting specs as well (Evo has been doing this). If juggler is on the front page it might be moot, but the last thing we want is an eternal September where all the newbies learned the ZK culture from being yelled at in large teams. Every previous call to reduce the player limit was met with "we don't have enough players", which would be a moot point.

Springies requiring a restart every few hours should probably be fixed before the Greenlight launch too.

"A box that appear the first time the lobby "

this is probably a good idea anyways. make a small welcome screen with some basic advice & links to tutorials and rules and other stuff like that.

Yeah the only problem with ZK being on greenlight now is that it might not be accepted if people don't like it enough, but if EVO made it i think ZK also should.