Please add another teams all welcome

It's weird to have a 16v16 room and a 4v4 room and nothing in between. With another 16v16 or maybe a 10v10 room perhaps people will start populating those "potentially big rooms" (not bound to small teams) instead of making a 10-player waiting list on the one and only glorious lobsterpot.

On a side note I do think 32-player rooms are slowly killing this game and 20 is the absolute maximum HOWEVER at this point I think it's worth trying anything to depopulate the main cluster.

See that's the thing. One evening I didn't feel like 4v4 so I didn't join the small teams but I would join a 6v6+ room. All things considered, I don't think adding another 16v16 lobpot(and a 10v10 small fry) will cause any damage so it's still worth a shot.

I imagine that being able to split the room when it is overflowing would be a positiveg. I hate to see players who want to play stuck waiting.

But many people, myself included, want to play the biggest lobpot possible. I prefer 16 vs 16 and I am willing to wait one game for that instead of joining 10 vs 10. If there was another big lobpot room, it would never have another 32 players (unless Zero-K gains suddenly a lot more popularity), it would be rather like 5 v 5. The best solution would be to raise the limit and allow 20 v 20 lobpot, but some CPUs of some players would not be able to handle that. Altough, people have faster processors than they had like five years ago, maybe it really is the time to raise the bar? I presume graphics is not the problem, just CPUs...

The problem is the engine if I get it correct.

"Failed to allocate memory"



I enjoy all game-sizes usually, from 1v1 to 16v16. I often don`t enjoy a specific team or map, but thats it.
One size is not a replacement for the other, and 16v16 is a spectacle that no other rts i know gives you. Why terraform is beloved because of it`s uniqueness to zk, but clusterpots are called degenerate is beyond my scope.
You really just need the right maps for such a giant game. And sadly we have 2 or 3 in the pool that fit really big game-sizes.

Inculta and saltscape are okay, they are played regularily and very rarely crash.

Anyway, I agree that the average clusterfuck IS retarded, but it seems to be what people want to play. I don`t understand one-room-culture either, but I believe working against it is futile...
Adding a second host sounds fine, it does not seem to have the potential of any harm and MAYBE people will take it.

I realize I'm still very new to ZK, but I thought I might be able to contribute from that 'fresh' perspective. For those who have already considered this aspect, please grant me the indulgence.

My opinion is that katastrophe captured a core concept well which explains players' attraction to these overly large team games. Spectacle does enter into the equation, and ZK does that better than can be expected from any other RTS game currently available. Firstly, nearly everyone loves a spectacle. Many deny the curiosity and fascination surrounding the witness thereof. The truth is as obvious today as it was to the ringleaders of the 1920's traveling circuses. The sidelong glances of passersby at a traffic collision attest to that. All told, I believe the raw truth runs deeper.

Second--and possibly more effective a draw--is the nature of ZK being a multiplayer game combined with the spectacle. This is a shared experience. This is the same effect I believe we see in people who travel to witness large sports events, gather in silence around tragedy, or experience the solemn peace of nature with friends. Any of these events might be a spectacle alone, but the dynamic changes significantly when there are others to share it with. It could be argued that even total strangers have a fundamentally different experience when together as opposed to individually.

This is what humans do and have done for ages. They seek out associations (lizard brain say same is good) that they can relate to or apply to their own lives (see monkey eat fruit - monkey happy fruit good, monkey sick fruit bad) that reinforce behaviors and builds group resiliency through community bonding (Grund throw spear well - I also want throw spear well - village all learn throw spear well - village prospers).

That isn't to say it doesn't go haywire from time to time (Ku Klux Klan, Nazi Gestapo informants, Uyghur genocide in the PRC, ad nauseam).

It is my opinion that if the prior can be encouraged while simultaneously discouraging the latter, the whole of ZK can only see improvements from this forward thinking approach about the needs of its community.

quote: Perhaps more to the point, I for one would be unwilling to further compromise the game experience of everybody else for the sake of the minority who want larger and larger and more degenerate cluster games.

You are twisting my words Aquanim. What I wrote was suggesting, that maybe it is not about compromising the game experience for everyone for the sake of minority who want bigger (in your words more degenerate) games, but maybe that almost everyone now has PC that would be able to run even 40 v 40. If it was either 10 people waiting in the lobby, unable to join, or 2 people having lag, I would maybe consider allowing more people into the game. It is essentially only about this. Maybe I am wrong and more people would have problems running 16+ v 16+ games, but that is why I posed it as an open question.
You just used a straw man.

I am neither twisting your words nor constructing a strawman Silent_AI. I am pointing out a part of the problem which you did not talk about. Namely, that when considering whether to increase the maximum size of the teams room the developers need to not only consider whether the engine and people's computers can technically handle it but whether it is a good idea for the health of the gameplay and of the community.

quote: But many people, myself included, want to play the biggest lobpot possible.

Many people, perhaps, but not every person. I do not like being accused of strawmanning simply because I made a statement representing the views of people who do not have the same wants you do.

I want to try a technical solution.

• 1. Check the size of the waiting list when the game starts. If there are at least 12 players, split them off into a 6v6 or larger with a new room with the same map and host settings.
• 2. Reduce the size of the big teams room to 14v14.

This is a system of tradeoffs and constraints. Fundamentally, if there are 40 people wanting to play a huge teamgame but the game only has reasonable performance up to 16v16, then the options are some mix of:

• Most of them play a 16v16 while eight people miss out.
• Everyone plays a 10v10.

It doesn't matter where you put the player limit. If you allow games up to 20v20 then the issue arises when 50 people want to play. We hit a limit at some point.

The problem with two 10v10s is that this situation is inherently unstable. We've assumed (and it seems like a good assumption, even though it doesn't hold for everyone in the room) that everyone wants to play the largest game possible. Individuals can put themselves in a better position by switching games if their game is smaller or of the same size. I think we had two 12v12 rooms a few months back as an experiment and this dynamic was observed.

If we're to get to a situation like two 10v10s rather than a 16v16 and eight people missing out, then I think we need some technical help. Hence the waiting list split system. It is important that the system not have any avenues of abuse by which people can make large improvements to their own incentives.

For example, if the 40 players were split into two 10v10s rather than a 14v14 and a 6v6, then something has been "taken" from the players that were there first, and they are liable to kick up a fuss. We tried this ages ago and it happens often enough to disrupt the room. There is a decent chance of at least one of the rooms being force-exited in an attempt to play a larger game. With what I wrote above, the people in the smaller game have two choices:

• Play the game.
• Leave and hope to get into the big game next time.

The players in the 14v14 are not available, probably for longer than it takes to play a 6v6. Kicking up a fuss doesn't impact the running of the main room.

The numbers are open to compromise and optimisation. 6v6 may be too small to make viable rooms from people expecting a huge game. 14v14 may be too large to make good waiting lists. We would try to tweak the thresholds such that most split games are played, and then ideally they would seed a room from there. Maybe the size limit of the rooms could even change dynamically, but they would have to do so before the game starts to reduce confusion, and only to create a split-off game.

On limiting games to 8v8.

• I think the benefits have to be large to offset the loss of large-game-spectacle that many people enjoy.
• Seeding a new room manually is difficult. The benefits of 8v8 may be large enough if we had a waiting list system to auto-seed. It would be worth trying this temporarily when such a system exists.