so many cheaters + lamers these days.

[Berg]

Don't point the gun at your foot
I find it best to play with friends lan parties that way if they cheat you can hit them with a chair.

[Rman Virgil]

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And this last, I'm afraid, is sorely lacking in the community of folks who do not code, map, mod, create art or any new game assets but could surely provide this assist in balance stress testing but instead would rather post trivia, pipe dreams or pie-in-the-sky notions, most of which have been posted 100s if not 1000s of times already over the years. But I clearly know that this balance beta stress-testing of fresh map designs, and the constructive feedback based on it, while definitely highly useful, important work is also much more work, to all appearances, than most are willing to do for all their affirmations of wanting to help & contribute, notwithstanding.

Is there a way to avoid this?

First 5 years of the game wasn't a prob because we had a led group dedicated to beta testing all major game add-ons created in the community. Since that ended I've used my LAN party buds to help me with beta testing. Bad timing right now in that the group is on hiatus till the end of summer so I have to shelve final balance beta testing of my 4 1/2 month long project investment till then cause non here seem interested in that task.

Perhaps the solution to the present situation goes back to what we did the first 5 years of the game's history - create a dedicated Beta-testing team with a good leader.

Everyone has ideas, but very few can take those ideas and run with them.

That's par for the course across the entire spectrum of human endeavor.

Then again, some people that do the running, get shot in the foot.

I've only heard that expression as "shooting yourself in the foot".

Don't point the gun at your foot

I find it best to play with friends lan parties that way if they cheat you can hit them with a chair.

Not only that but you can have a Keg, game groupie babes & Pizzas on hand.

- Regards, RV

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[Dalton]

Perhaps the solution to the present situation goes back to what we did the first 5 years of the game's history - create a dedicated Beta-testing team with a good leader.

What exactly did/would this team do?

[Rman Virgil]

.

Perhaps the solution to the present situation goes back to what we did the first 5 years of the game's history - create a dedicated Beta-testing team with a good leader.

What exactly did/would this team do?

They (we) followed professional standards for beta testing games in their totality, that is, not just bug-reporting.

I can only cover a few brief highlights in a post. Whole books have been written on it like:

"The Many Faces of Testing" ~ by Luis Levy and Jeannie Novak

Game Dev Net has a generous excerpt of Chapter 3 from the book, Game QA & Testing here:

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/busine ... efault.asp

The Wikipedia article on the subject is a good place to begin getting more detailed particulars (following the cross-links too):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_testing

The highlights I will mention are:

1.) The beta-tester's goal is not to play a game solely for leisure and escapism, but to willfully risk his or her own spoilage of the game playing experience with the intent of using it to prevent such short-fall results from reaching a broader audience. This is the price to be had in exchange for becoming a part of another's created virtual world and exerting a certain degree of one's own influence upon the final outcome. (This a slight paraphrase of C.E. Forman's insights.)

2.) Testing, in its own way, is as much an art as the creating of the game world itself. To play test effectively, one must come to understand the link between tester and game, and further, between game and creator, in order to draw across the third and final gap between creator and tester. Bridging the gap in the most mutually constructive manner is the goal of the beta-tester. (Again, this a slight paraphrase of some of C.E. Forman's cogent insights.)

3.) You take detailed notes and submit a constructive report based on them.

An example as expressed by Luis Levy and Jeannie Novak:

Balance testing demands acute attention to detail. At the end of the day, it’s the feel of the game (and your notes) that will help the developer fine-tune the game play. It’s a fun job—exhilarating sometimes, but a very serious task nonetheless.

There are reasons that the going rate for professional game beta testers is about $150.00 a day / $ 40K a year - it's hard work. Harder work than making a 15 second, purely self-serving, forum post by those not at all active in working on the source or creating assets or add-ons.

In a FOSS community it's all about actively respecting the values of reciprocity & equity, to my mind, and genuinely appreciating that there is no such thing as a "free lunch". While ego tunnels, vendetta politics & cronyism are as much a part of FOSS as they are in the for-profit sector at least in commercial cultures there is the ultimate accountability stress-test attached to purse strings and best practice metrics directly linked to the free-market success. In the absence of $$ rewards, titles may be part of the answer to accountability involvement but the other part is actively honoring and supporting tangible contribution with or without a title, IMHO.

- Regards, RV
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[Dalton]

Harder work than making a 15 second, purely self-serving, forum post by those not at all active in working on the source or creating assets or add-ons.

Are you saying thats me or in general?

[Rman Virgil]

Harder work than making a 15 second, purely self-serving, forum post by those not at all active in working on the source or creating assets or add-ons.

Are you saying thats me or in general?

Definitely in general. I do not single out individuals in public with such comments, directly or indirectly. Even in the private sector, as a responsible, effective, paid leader you talk to these issues with the perpetrating individuals exclusively one on one. I adhere to that same principle here.

And, btw, such a Beta Testing Team could be created at any time, requiring no permissions, no sanctions, simply the wherewithal of acted upon conviction to realize the standards touched on above and the resulting quality of their work would stand as a crux & essential achievement.

- Regards, RV

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[Nameless]

I find it best to play with friends lan parties that way if they cheat you can hit them with a chair.

Same here.

As for the OP*? Perhaps you should try finding / getting people interesting in playing WZ in localized areas??

[Crymson]

Everyone has ideas, but very few can take those ideas and run with them.

That's par for the course across the entire spectrum of human endeavor.

Then again, some people that do the running, get shot in the foot.

I've only heard that expression as "shooting yourself in the foot".

I was talking of cases where people make patches, and then for some trivial reason, they don't use them.

[cybersphinx]

I was talking of cases where people make patches, and then for some trivial reason, they don't use them.

For #1903, I mentioned what I don't like about the patch, and neither have you corrected that, nor has someone else deemed it fit for applying in its current state. Should we accept any patch in whatever state it is, regardless of what it does to the history/readability (read: maintainability) of the code?

If you think some patches are being ignored for no reason, feel free to push them again, they might have been just forgotten.

[Zarel]

Adding DRM will not help, everything must be moved to server side.

It'll raise the barrier to entry of cheating significantly.

People say security by obscurity is useless, but that's not entirely correct. "Flawed" and "useless" are two different concepts.

Security by obscurity decreases but does nothing to eliminate threats. When your goal is to eliminate security breaches, that's indeed useless. In low security settings such as in Warzone, though, reducing the number of cheaters (I'd bet even the majority of them) is far better than nothing at all.

[Michal]

I have a question about this 'server side' thing - if host quits for 'some reason', will the server be able to 'carry on', or show the victory screen?

I'm asking, because recently some of my friends won a match against host, who quit and left them with unfinished battle. Personally when I see that happen it makes me sooo proud of myself but some players may be annoyed.

And well, I was accused of cheating yesterday - I was quite surprised, because I 'took it easy' . Moving things server-side will require more skill to cheat, and then simply learning how to play would be faster.


And about the 'test team' or so - if it was located in Europe (almighty timezones ) maybe I could help somehow. I don't have experience in testing games, but I do have some with electronics (well, testing is testing, similar state of mind). Or at least I could be a 'test dummy' - to fill a player slot.