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Modded Mondays

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CZrankSilent_AI
20 months ago
(edited 20 months ago)
What if every Monday, the Teams All Welcome room would be set to one of the mods instead of the vanilla game? There are some interesting mods made by people who spent a lot of time designing them (I believe Shaman spent years of his free time creating Future Wars). It would be refreshing to play something different and it might motivate others to create something as well. Many very active lobpot players never play any of these mods, which I think is a shame. It could be enriching for the vanilla game as well - if a lot of players came to like some new feature/unit/strategy, it might make it to the base game. By those mods I meant Future Wars, Unit Level Ups, Zombies, and such.
+4 / -0


AUrankAdminGoogleFrog
20 months ago
It is an interesting idea. I've been thinking about tweakunit days. From http://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/257355#257355
quote:
What if we kept base ZK essentially stable but spiced things up with wild stat tweak events. Maybe assaults would have 20% more HP and speed, or light turrets worse, cheaper commanders, or a crazy buff to an underused unit. A sort of "weekend event" schedule of quick mods was one of the ideas I had in mind when I made Quick Stat Tweaks. Most ideas would be pretty easy to configure and set on an event autohost.
  • We could have a backlog of these things and routinely run them perhaps every second week.
  • If an idea comes up that can't be easily quick stat tweaked, then it's good motivation to make it tweakable, then run it in a month or so after the next stable.
This would create some variety for players and make game internals more accessible to modders

The main task of quick stat tweak events would be social. Someone has to collect and polish the ideas (probably best if most of them eventually come from players, for engagement), announce that an event is happening, and keep an eye on it to ensure its working. We would also have to gather feedback. Do people need a normal teams room during the event, what about the coop or FFA hosts? Just silently making a new host with some tweaks on it won't do anything.

See http://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Quick_Stat_Tweaks

I could see this having full-blown mod showcases sprinkled in once it gained momentum. I would start with simple tweaks though.
  • Stat tweaks are closer to the base game so they are a good way to gauge interest. Unit Level Ups is a very different game so I could see the teams room "revolting" if they feel like it is forced upon them. I'd start small and slowly ramp it up until a full mod showcase isn't unexpected.
  • Maintaining stat tweaks is much easier as they will be as technically stable as the base game. A mod that changes a lot of things needs more testing and more oversight in case something breaks.

Also, for anything to happen, infrastructure probably needs to be a bit more stable. Autohosts aren't great as retaining their mods and options (see eg noelo on the casual 1v1 host). I don't think this is an intractable problem, but someone would have to look into it, or we would need a group of people dedicated to overseeing the event. The main blocker is people to do the social work.
+5 / -0
USrankDave[tB]
20 months ago
A group of us are testing some different ways of reworking the area cloak mechanic. No idea if devs will actually adopt anything, based on what has been said, I'd say it might be unlikely, but should be fun regardless!

I think we are starting in about 2 hours.
+2 / -0


unknownrankShaman
20 months ago
quote:
I believe Shaman spent years of his free time creating Future Wars


This is a true fact, though I am not completely alone in production of FW. I've spent over 2 years now on it. I've even made a bit of infrastructure lately (automated builds).

quote:
The main blocker is people to do the social work.


I'm currently trying to organize a weekly playtest to scale up balancing efforts and find out about flaws in the game design.
+2 / -0

GBrankPresstabstart
20 months ago
(edited 20 months ago)
Yeah I don't think this is a good idea. There is only one thoroughly developed mod for Zero-K (Future Wars) that I know of that is (somewhat) balanced that would be suited for this. There's also More Units Mod, and a few but iirc they're not properly balanced for teams. Zero Wars only works with one map and 2-6 players, so that's also not an option. As of Unit Level Ups, over time zero-k version updates have meant things becoming bugged or not working (i.e. lance doesn't fire) and some of the perks don't work. It also has no semblance of balance. You could configure mod options, but you won't get anything up to the level of quality needed for the autohost rooms.

Let me propose a similar idea, events:
- Events are like separate mini-mods. For instance, making mexes gain more metal the time that they're alive. Or metal decay- mexes decay over time. Or volatile units- units release a massive explosion as they die, etc. Things that change the game, but not massively.
- Players can call an '!event' vote for a random event before map start, or '!event <eventname>'
- every 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 matches, the autohost will start an '!event' vote automatically
+5 / -0