Stam and Tolis' Academy

[Stam]

The ST Academy

Tolis had a perfect idea of making an academy server for new players, but he couldn't do anything himself and that's why I took charge. I've been working on this for a week, and I think I am done as to the mod side. For those who are curious click here for the code. It is now halfly released for testing. Go in it and do what you would normally. As long as I know it's bug-free, but just in case you see anything weird or odd simply take a screen and send it here with the GMT time of when you took it, so I can take a look at the logs to see what happened! When testing is done, I am going to let only new players join, so that they have their very own place to play without other "veteran" people banning them like in ledows. In the meantime I will be filling it with tips and tricks for powerups and planes. Also I'd love if someone could make a better lobby for those who might use "/parallax false"! Have fun and a nice day!



Password: testing

People who helped with it:

Xalri for making a patch for the server to log level changes
Tolis for being uplifting and making these lists
ManiToBa for helping with testing and being a really good person
Nick for helping me find out in which level you unlock each perk/plane
Jaxx for testing
Evel for testing


-Stam

[Kafka]

You have not allowed for players to call a /vote ChangeMap (or any other votes). Not sure if those permissions were left out intentionally for the testing phase, but currently the only thing that can be "tested" is your lobby.

[don quijote]

Stam is the best! We have to spread the word

[Stam]

Did you notice the message when you joined the server? It clearly says run the command /match <gameMode> to start a game.

EDIT: Anyway I saw that you tried to test it yourself, so I gave everyone access to run /changeMap just for now. I'll put it back as it was later on. Also in my opinion you can't actually test anything on your own. Even if you can I've already done that. My point was to actually start games in that server like ladder, just to make sure all the stats commands work as they should!

[Fluffy]

Isn't there an easier way that is already a thing? Like you know, setting max level to 20 or something?

[Stam]

Yeah thats what I am going to do, but as I said this is for testing the code I wrote, I just want some of you guys come and help me start some matches in that server to make sure it works fine so that I can remove the pass and let only newbies join

[biell]

This is a great idea. A few suggestions below.

I think something like this should catch people's eye when they are choosing which server to login to. You will never develop a community around this server (like ladder has) because the players will all graduate after a month (or less). I think the name of the server should sort it to the top, starting with the word Academy, or using the space or other low ascii value character in front might help. Putting the server name in parenthesis would work, and make it stand out. It might also be good to keep altitude open when you aren't playing with someone spec'd in the lobby. Having a player there might help draw interest, and it would help sort it to the top.

If you started using the gettext library now, then the community could help with translation later, after you started to stabalize all the messages you wanted to send to people. You could use the GeoIP library to default people's language. This isn't perfect (ala Canada) but it will get you pretty close by default. If you don't have a language, I would default former Soviet republics to Russian probably, and everyone else to English.

It might be nice to congratulate players for doing the right thing too. This gets more advanced. But, some examples would be congratulations and ataboy's for : players in ball when lots of passing occurs, being near the base when a bomb hits or dying near (so in support of) the bomb carrier, etc. Obviously this is very advanced and involves keeping track of who has the bomb, running logPP a lot, and it can never be perfect. In alti+server, I offer a "Nice Teamwork" message when 3 or more players are involved in passes which end up scoring a goal. This was done in an attempt to reward what I consider good behavior. I don't see that message as often as I would like.


P.S. I think this is why you wanted to send people a message after they were done downloading maps. Did you seem my response on keeping state on teamChange events and resetting the state on mapChange events?

[Stam]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll look into it later on when I finish with another update. As for the messages after mapChange, I've been using another tactic that xalri's mod offered unintentionally, it logs a perkless loopy after mapChange for each player, think of it as a clientAdd for changeMap. So what I do is whispering to the player the messages I wanted after those!

EDIT: Your GeoIP link is wrong :P . I've already worked with GeoIP though.

EDIT 2: How am I supposed to send them messages in their own language when you can only use english characters in alti?