Party llts

This is a widget called 'Autollt'. It is often ineffective at catching cloakers (I've never seen it actually decloak someone) while presenting some level of network hostility that is better left explained by esainane (I'll see about bringing their attention to this forum post).

I saw it decloaked 2x, one was me believing it would never hit [on scythe].

also just the potential to hit/belief that it will hit is most of the time enough of a deterrent and so provide more protection than non-firing one

Ive been able to widdow every anti with and without that script.

Witnessed the script decloaking a detri and scorp, but winds/solars wouldve done the job too while generating overdrive income in the process.

ive already witnessed the collapse of a front cuz some solar shuts in a key moment. (Luci offline, enemy dante 3k hp (11k -4kx2) kills luci.)

Ive witnessed teams loseing bigger sums of income cuz of the script closeing solars and shutting down connections to singus/adv. geos.


I do not recomend the useage of the Autollt script.

Useless crapshit which never worked against enemy cloaked units. However it decloaked in some cases my own units and never decloaked my units when enemy base... Should be removed from game.

In reply to Shaman's post

Is this design philosophy ZK has a real written down thing or just opinion?

In my opinion having a widget that people use in order to try gain an advantage over those not using it shouldn't be allowed. If a widget would be deemed an improvement on the game it should be implemented in the game for all. However here we have a widget with detrimental effects that only some people choose to use for the advantage it provides.

Having such widgets also creates another issue - should GoogleFrog balance cloaked units with this widget in mind or not? When striving for a balanced game, the power of cloaked units in games with players using this widget is reduced compared to games where players don't.

Yes, a lot of zero-k features we take for granted today started out as player widgets, and such a tradition should stay alive as much as possible (hence my narrow definition of cheating). As I am an upstart developer, I am currently unable to answer your question regarding balance as I do not have the experience currently. I can answer that question if future wars does gain traction.

I do not think limiting this is a good idea from a marketing standpoint though. That is assuming I have my way and start managing the social presence for Zero-K (I have not been given an explicit go ahead, but I did get asked if I wanted to try it out and expressed interest in doing so) and as such I feel the approach of "Made by the community, for the community" would be a very positive and successful message to people disenfranchised with the current state of gaming. That said, my views here could have some bias admittedly. I personally would like to see more people play zero-k so my interest in this decision basically ends at "I think this is a good balance between enforcement and development along with impact"and should a better option be presented, I'm willing to get behind it for the betterment of the project and community.

While we may disagree on the definition of cheating, I do agree on the fact that autollt is toxic for the game itself and some action needs to be taken. This is not a stance I'm dead set on fighting for though and is more of an incidental/opportunistic stance. I'd like to use such widgets developed by the community as highlights in an upcoming social media push and it would be a shame to see them disappear. We could meet half way by saying this isn't allowed in MM and I'd be satisfied with that outcome. That is something I can get behind and see as beneficial for the project. In the interim though, the definition I advocate has no maintenance cost or development cost and covers all known methods of cheating at the moment (hence I feel it's a good fit for the current relaxed state of enforcement).

Perhaps before tackling this issue, we should envision what kind of game we want and what our overall image goal is. This would facilitate a lot of our current outstanding problems. I feel we have too many factions trying to pull the project in a certain direction.

I'll use this thread to bring up the "artillery spotter" widget for firewalker / emissary shot source detection. Is that PoS still a thing in circulation?

One might argue that the performance/network impacts are enough reason to ban its use. Its also really annoying, and frequently hits teammates, distracting them since they suddenly get a warning signal from a unit in base, which is usually bad news. It just doesn't feel like a civil widget overall.

Well, banning the current version doesn't need to mean every subsequent version is also banned, if they solve those issues.

The widget cannot be made effective at decloaking things while at the same time not lose some potential damage. This happens because the beam needs to be stretched (firing at the ground and near max range) in order to maybe have something cloaked run into it and decloak. While the beam is streched it is not looking at wether there are valid targets to shoot at, only after it stops shooting at the ground, in that time before the next ground attack order it will briefly look for a valid target.
Note that to increase the effectiveness of the decloaking ability of the beam it can be made less attentive to targets in its range and more stubborn on firing its beam at the ground , increasing 'im firing at the ground' time will maybe decloak one of the scythes running trough and in turn deal decreased damage .