Introducing: The Altitude Ladder

[Stormich]

I don't mind ping, I would however prefer if players with huge ping not bomb. Also I don't have much against ping, what I do dislike is people with spikes. Spikes are a lot worse than someone with a flatlined high ping.

[eth]

Originally Posted by Beagle

Awesome work guys, but individual stats for a PuG 5v5 format seems kind of wierd. Seems to be all luck of who gets the good team.

Why is there no 1v1 Ladder? That seems like a great use for the system. Or factor in individual stuff into the stats - bomb drops, ratio, etc.

There is no duel ladder currently because we don't want to spread the already small playerbase even thinner - if our 5v5 TBD turns out a success, ball and duel will be added. Also, we can't factor individual stats at the moment as the server logs don't tell us who bombed, what ratios are, kills, experience and those sorts of things.

In response to Dio, you'll hopefully see both. We're gonna take a look at the rating system the next week, and we'll be adding autobalance hopefully the coming week/week after that as well. And in addition to that the website has a lot of **** on the to-do(such as sorting, a map-stats page, more stats on profile etc) list that'll be coming concurrently with this other stuff.

[ORYLY]

Originally Posted by Stormich

I don't mind ping, I would however prefer if players with huge ping not bomb. Also I don't have much against ping, what I do dislike is people with spikes. Spikes are a lot worse than someone with a flatlined high ping.

Yep, I try not to grab the bomb from the spawn. If you play with high ping, all bombs from other players are lagbombs and you know how much it sucks to deal with them.

[Evan20000]

Originally Posted by eth

There is no duel ladder currently because we don't want to spread the already small playerbase even thinner - if our 5v5 TBD turns out a success, ball and duel will be added. Also, we can't factor individual stats at the moment as the server logs don't tell us who bombed, what ratios are, kills, experience and those sorts of things.

So you mean my beautiful 4:1 game last night wasn't recorded? D:

Anyway, I'm glad changes are being made to stabilize the servers. Is there anyway to prevent a player from bombing when they have over X ping?

[Sarah Palin]

OK im starting to see major issues with the current equation.



My rank is fluctuating wildly based on whether I recently won or lost. I was up to #11 last night after I won 4 in a row, I logged off tonight after losing a few games with top ladder players and I'm all the way down to #97, and I'll be back up to the teens after I play some newb games tomorrow afternoon.

The fact that the formula has no way to keep track of the uncertainty of a player's skill (or to narrow that uncertainty over time), means the scores will randomly track all over the place.

Even a perfectly average player, such as tec27 who has a 16-15 record and 1525 score right now, has seen his score fluctuate hundreds of points during each gaming session.

Someone who has 100 wins 50 losses, having played against a wide sample of the ladder, should see their score fluctuate MUCH LESS than someone who has 20 wins 10 losses. Major changes in their score should only happen when they play against other players who also have very low uncertainties in their ranking, and the underdog wins, because that proves the current ratings are wrong. But if the expected player wins in a matchup between two players the ranking system is very confident in assigning scores to, that proves the current ratings are RIGHT and players should NOT see large point gains or losses.

Since the ELO system has no metric for confidence, there's no way to distinguish tec's 16-15 rating from my 10-11 rating from some newb's 2-2 rating.

When everyone's score is doing a random walk, a standard deviation or more around their true skill level, the rating at any given point in time has very little information.


Let me point out this is the case for average players as well as players on either extreme of the ladder, because the sum of the potential gain and potential loss for your next game, no matter where you are on the ladder, is 50 points.

I think the TrueSkill system is worth a look. Dunno how challenging it would be to code however.

[DiogenesDog]

Might be worth looking into the TrueSkill system that Microsoft uses for XBox matchmaking if you're worried about the confidence issue. I believe they do some stuff to address this.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/...l/details.aspx

It's ELO-based, but has some tweaks to deal with the common complaints of gamers.

[eth]

Sarah Palin like I said, we'll be taking a look at it but not until the next week. Also, your insane rank fluctuation has more to do with the extremely small playerbase right now. 150 players with a point discrepancy of what, 400? makes rank fluctuate like that no matter what you do.

[nach0king]

Level 60 only?

[DiogenesDog]

Originally Posted by nach0king

Level 60 only?

heck no.

10 chars

[Evan20000]

Originally Posted by nach0king

Level 60 only?

No, but you're much more likely to be picked to play if you're level 60.

[proggies]

Any plans to nominate admins for ladder servers?
It has been getting difficult to control the games lately when there are noobs or idiots that disrupt the game.
getting into teams can take forever when ppl refuse to cooperate...
vote kicking may be too much of a hassle when u have to do it many times

[protest boy]

Have you thought about using the New England viewscale/zoom on these servers? 110/95 or whatever it is?

[Pieface]

Originally Posted by protest boy

Have you thought about using the New England viewscale/zoom on these servers? 110/95 or whatever it is?

YES YES YES. Also, you may be aware of this but the ladder column sorting system you have in effect at the moment doesn't seem to be working as it should. When you click the arrows next to the column headers, they do some sort of strange sorting instead of what you'd normally expect from toggling the arrows there.

[CCN]

if the admin route is taken maybe some suggestions.

1. If they are found to abuse power (etc on map/team stacking) they get it removed.
2. Admins may be better if its the more quiet community members like proggies or Flight66.

my 2 cents

-CCN

[eth]

Originally Posted by Pieface

YES YES YES. Also, you may be aware of this but the ladder column sorting system you have in effect at the moment doesn't seem to be working as it should. When you click the arrows next to the column headers, they do some sort of strange sorting instead of what you'd normally expect from toggling the arrows there.

What is this strange effect? How does it work for you/could you send screenshots? It seems to be working perfectly for me.

[nesnl]

To answer a few questions:

The servers are currently set on minimum level 60. This was mainly implemented to prevent people creating demo accounts and then using them to feed points. Also, I would rather see people attain level 60 and be at least minimally confident in their abilities prior to joining the servers. However, I might change this in the future.

In regards to admins, we may look to add a few more admins in the future, but we are looking for all possible ways of reducing the affects of these kinds of people besides having to have an admin step in. If you are having problems with people currently, please take a screenshot of the problem and post it with a description of the problem so that we can see what's going on.

As for viewscale 110/95, I don't see this happening because since it is not the native viewscale of the game it creates odd artifact effect and image distortion with the graphics. I can imagine the problem happens to a lot of people. Also, since people are used to the standard viewscale, it would seem unfair to ask them to adjust to an entirely different viewscale while playing competitively.

[Pieface]

Well, when I first get to the Ladder page everything is sorted fine (by rating or rank). However, the selected sorting arrow appears to be the Win/Loss column, and not the rating/rank column as you would expect. [See first attached image.]

When I click on the arrow next to the rating column, it sorts everyone in a strange way that appears to be by no logical order. [See second image.]

When I click that arrow again, it changes the sorting order to another one that has no logical explanation (as opposed to being sorted by best/worst rating as we'd expect). [See third image.]

This isn't only in the rating column, but happens for the other column sorting as well. The weird thing is it only happens when I use Safari as my browser, both Chrome and Firefox work fine.

Edit: Looking at it now, it appears that the Rating column is sorting it by name in Safari. The other columns are sorting it in a less logical way with no apparent pattern.

[eth]

I honestly have no idea what's at fault here - it's displaying correctly in both my Safari and Maimers Safari.. what version do you have? Also - if you could PM/mail me the source of the page as well as the URL for that page I could look into this a bit more. If you don't have the newest version of Safari, it might be worth a try updating to that.

edit: The URL should show something like ladder.php?sort=rank_d or sort=user_d.

[as red as black]

need more admins!!!! It takes forever to start up games and it'd be oh so easy to just band the stupid people for like 5 minutes until the game gets started and there's no possibility of tomfoolery.

maybe put more admins, but give them limited power. like max ban = 10 minutes....

also.....is there anyway to get other stats up there like average base damage per game, average kills/deaths per game, etc?

[Pieface]

Well, that was stupid of me. The sorting's working fine, it's just that the arrows are appearing in the wrong places. So when I thought I was clicking on the rating arrow, I was actually clicking on the username arrow and so on.

I've attached the source code if that helps at all, but I guess it's only a minor problem. Safari is updated to the current version. URL's are available upon further request, though I'm thinking it's something strange with my Safari..

[nesnl]

Originally Posted by as red as black

need more admins!!!! It takes forever to start up games and it'd be oh so easy to just band the stupid people for like 5 minutes until the game gets started and there's no possibility of tomfoolery.

maybe put more admins, but give them limited power. like max ban = 10 minutes....

also.....is there anyway to get other stats up there like average base damage per game, average kills/deaths per game, etc?

We are considering adding more admins, but until then and even when we do, there will still be times when an admin is not around. Try to talk to the person and if it doesn't work just take a screenshot and let me know what's going on.

Currently, none of the stats besides which team won a game are displayed in the server logs. There may be addition of more stats in the future.

[Pieface]

After doing a hard reset of Safari (emptying the cache, etc.) the arrows have returned to their proper places. Thanks for the support though, I'll let you know if anything else comes up.

[combat]

Originally Posted by CCN

if the admin route is taken maybe some suggestions.

1. If they are found to abuse power (etc on map/team stacking) they get it removed.
2. Admins may be better if its the more quiet community members like proggies or Flight66.

Agreed, games take about 10 minutes to get organized if there's more than 10 people in the server. I think more admins could help start games faster by being able to remove people who cause problems.

[Ferret]

Originally Posted by nesnl

As for viewscale 110/95, I don't see this happening because since it is not the native viewscale of the game it creates odd artifact effect and image distortion with the graphics. I can imagine the problem happens to a lot of people. Also, since people are used to the standard viewscale, it would seem unfair to ask them to adjust to an entirely different viewscale while playing competitively.

I agree, but most people were used to an overpowered and spammable remote mine and spammable miranda shot, can you find a way to restore these to the server? In fact I was really used to playing the game with no red perks and only a couple of green and blue ones, is there any way you can bring this game play back? There's been far too much change and improvement to this game and it's taken me way out of my comfort zone.

I've also never noticed any graphical problems unless you're just saying "it's not as pretty." Which, yea, but you can hold the swimsuit competition portion of the ladder on another server.

[nesnl]

Originally Posted by Ferret

I agree, but most people were used to an overpowered and spammable remote mine and spammable miranda shot, can you find a way to restore these to the server? In fact I was really used to playing the game with no red perks and only a couple of green and blue ones, is there any way you can bring this game play back? There's been far too much change and improvement to this game and it's taken me way out of my comfort zone.

I've also never noticed any graphical problems unless you're just saying "it's not as pretty." Which, yea, but you can hold the swimsuit competition portion of the ladder on another server.

I think you misunderstood the content of my post, but then again, I think we are all used to you now having any kind of normal response but rather your posts have to contain pure sarcasm masked in some kind of superiority complex. So maybe you did understand and choose to respond this way on purpose.

Anyway, the purpose of my post was saying that I am not interested in splitting the game into different versions on different servers. This problem has been brought up many times for all the people who want to customize different things on their server. Sure, you can say people were used to a spammable remote mine, but that has changed, and not just on one server but throughout the entire game. You see, that is what you seemingly failed to grasp or purposely decided to ignore. What if we just decided to customize everything. You could guess at how powerful each weapon was when you joined a server, how fast each plane was, or even if they were going to have 10 times the health. This is the idea behind trying to keep certain things standard and applies just as well to planescale and viewscale.

I know that some of you guys who play on the New England Servers seem to think that just because you play at 110/95 that it must be better. Like you are somehow the experts on what is best for the game. Realize that you are the minority, that outside of those few servers every other game is played at the normal planescale and viewscale. If lamster and karl decide they want to adopt that standard then by all means I will accept it and we all can learn to play that way.

As for the artifacts and image distortion, you are welcome to sit there and pretend just because you don't have a problem that it must not be a problem for anyone else. For me it is like the monitor is set on a resolution that it doesn't support while at the same time it creates small ghosting of objects and planes as I move the screen around, which is most likely a result of the resolution issue (almost like pixels are trying to be in more than 1 place at the same time). But feel free to keep acting like whatever your screen looks like must be the case for everyone.

[Snowsickle]

I'm going to toss in an additional vote for some kind of automatic team system. Either pure randomization (and let the ELO/ratings update to reflect whatever point difference exists -- we're going to need a better system like trueskill for this to be effective, I think) or some kind of elaborate team algorithm. It looks like plenty of people are interested in abusing the ladder already, spectating games and -- in the event of captains games -- they respond that they aren't playing unless the team in question has an astronomically high chance of winning. Given the current state of the system this is a very effective way of ensuring that you're ranked favorably.

Also, I feel like there needs to be some kind of preference to people who are actually interested in playing. Several times earlier, I was denied a spot in the server because 5-6 players "wanted to watch" but refused to be chosen to participate in a game. Given that the servers have been full almost every time I've been playing, and a number of players will constantly state that they don't want to play, I think its only fair to potential participants that there be some kind of system in place. The ladder is a fantastic opportunity for the community to move away from the elitism and circle-jerking that ran the pro leagues; I strongly suggest not playing favorites and allowing veteran players to waste spaces in the server because of their previous notoriety.

[ADA]

enjoying the ladder games good work guys

[eth]

Originally Posted by Snowsickle

I'm going to toss in an additional vote for some kind of automatic team system. Either pure randomization (and let the ELO/ratings update to reflect whatever point difference exists -- we're going to need a better system like trueskill for this to be effective, I think) or some kind of elaborate team algorithm. It looks like plenty of people are interested in abusing the ladder already, spectating games and -- in the event of captains games -- they respond that they aren't playing unless the team in question has an astronomically high chance of winning. Given the current state of the system this is a very effective way of ensuring that you're ranked favorably.

Also, I feel like there needs to be some kind of preference to people who are actually interested in playing. Several times earlier, I was denied a spot in the server because 5-6 players "wanted to watch" but refused to be chosen to participate in a game.

We can't force people to do anything - we can't inject into altitude and then force Dude X onto red team and Dude Y onto blue team, so in the end you're just gonna have to deal with people. That said, autobalance will be in within a week or two as a system where you come to the website, see all players in the server listed, then you pick the players who are going to play and then the site autobalances said players. That is pretty much the best we can do for a while.

Also, we will try to set up a few admins in the coming days, which will help with moderating jackasses. If you're really desperate, join the IRC channel as one of us is usually online there, or send us a screenshot+complaint(altitudeladder@gmail.com).

[Ferret]

Originally Posted by nesnl

I know that some of you guys who play on the New England Servers seem to think that just because you play at 110/95 that it must be better. Like you are somehow the experts on what is best for the game.

Hi, been 7-8 years in two different major versions of the game and several more minor iterations. So yes, I am "somehow" an expert.

And I don't think you understand what "notice" means. "Notice" means that while playing, I have never noticed anyone join and say they have graphical problems, or post in the thread about the new england servers on this forum that they have graphical problems. Your previous condescending post is the first report, ever, of a problem.

[Snowsickle]

Originally Posted by eth

We can't force people to do anything - we can't inject into altitude and then force Dude X onto red team and Dude Y onto blue team, so in the end you're just gonna have to deal with people. That said, autobalance will be in within a week or two as a system where you come to the website, see all players in the server listed, then you pick the players who are going to play and then the site autobalances said players. That is pretty much the best we can do for a while.

I understand this, and I think this would be a great opportunity for Lamster to add some additional server admin functionality (assigning teams would be wonderful, I'm not even sure it was in my original server admin wishlist). However, I think there are approaches that would work. They aren't particularly elegant, but they would work.

Starttournament is called --> server looks at 10 players, runs a ladder-based balancing algorithm.

If players are on the appropriate teams, play continues. If not, the server calls stoptournament and encourages players to use the team balancing feature on the webpage.

This isn't elegant at all, and I understand that, but it's fairly close to having a legitimate matchmaker without the proper functionality to do so. If this is for some reason impossible given your implementation, correct me, but as I understand it, it should work once you guys come up with a balancing system.

Food for thought; I haven't actively been participating and don't see myself doing so seriously given some of the current issues, so do what you will.

[eth]

The thing is, we don't have access to the game itself. We have access to the logs, and then what we do is based upon the logs _only_. That is why we need to go via the website for our autobalancing system, and maybe eventually build a clientside launcher that people could install and then display this info via an overlay. If eventually forcing people on teams becomes a reality, we may be able to build a bot, but I'm pretty sure we're gonna have to stick to the log->website way for now.

Not too sure about your last comment there? We are working as fast and as hard as we can to fix the current issues with rating system/AB, but we can't code 24/7.

[porpus]

Originally Posted by eth

We can't force people to do anything - we can't inject into altitude and then force Dude X onto red team and Dude Y onto blue team, so in the end you're just gonna have to deal with people. That said, autobalance will be in within a week or two as a system where you come to the website, see all players in the server listed, then you pick the players who are going to play and then the site autobalances said players. That is pretty much the best we can do for a while.

Also, we will try to set up a few admins in the coming days, which will help with moderating jackasses. If you're really desperate, join the IRC channel as one of us is usually online there, or send us a screenshot+complaint(altitudeladder@gmail.com).

At the very least, I would appreciate upping the player limit on these servers.

As for additional work with lamster, I believe that a great feature would be to allow a mode where people on the server could chose whether they want to be involved. Once a game is ready to begin 10 players could be chosen (randomly or otherwise) and then balanced. Surely this would be the only mode as people are going to want to play with set teams, but some sort of support would greatly speed up the time needed to plan these games.

[porpus]

Originally Posted by nesnl

I think you misunderstood the content of my post, but then again, I think we are all used to you now having any kind of normal response but rather your posts have to contain pure sarcasm masked in some kind of superiority complex. So maybe you did understand and choose to respond this way on purpose.

Anyway, the purpose of my post was saying that I am not interested in splitting the game into different versions on different servers. This problem has been brought up many times for all the people who want to customize different things on their server. Sure, you can say people were used to a spammable remote mine, but that has changed, and not just on one server but throughout the entire game. You see, that is what you seemingly failed to grasp or purposely decided to ignore. What if we just decided to customize everything. You could guess at how powerful each weapon was when you joined a server, how fast each plane was, or even if they were going to have 10 times the health. This is the idea behind trying to keep certain things standard and applies just as well to planescale and viewscale.

I know that some of you guys who play on the New England Servers seem to think that just because you play at 110/95 that it must be better. Like you are somehow the experts on what is best for the game. Realize that you are the minority, that outside of those few servers every other game is played at the normal planescale and viewscale. If lamster and karl decide they want to adopt that standard then by all means I will accept it and we all can learn to play that way.

As for the artifacts and image distortion, you are welcome to sit there and pretend just because you don't have a problem that it must not be a problem for anyone else. For me it is like the monitor is set on a resolution that it doesn't support while at the same time it creates small ghosting of objects and planes as I move the screen around, which is most likely a result of the resolution issue (almost like pixels are trying to be in more than 1 place at the same time). But feel free to keep acting like whatever your screen looks like must be the case for everyone.

Despite the attitude of the some of the other supporters of 95/110, I think you need to consider it a bit more.

Despite players being used the normal view, the change is not one that significantly affects game strategies. The beauty of 95/110 is that it simply reduces the effectiveness of certain spammy play styles. The fact is that you can only be hit by players in your current view. Thus players aren't encouraged to shoot down any corridor ad hoc, instead aiming at actual planes. This wont make players have to learn two completely different styles of play, just reduce annoyances.

As for the graphical issues, I haven't seen any myself, but if they do exist I believe you should bring it up with Lam and Karl. Even if 95/110 isn't the default, they do support it and I believe they'd be glad to follow any bugs and attempt to resolve them.

[Snowsickle]

Originally Posted by eth

Not too sure about your last comment there? We are working as fast and as hard as we can to fix the current issues with rating system/AB, but we can't code 24/7.

I don't mean to offend; I appreciate the hard work going into this ladder and it's mind boggling how much time you guys have put into it. Great job on that. However, it simply isn't for me right now, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm asking you guys to cater to my desires when I'm not actively participating. I offer my ideas as general suggestions because I would like to see this thing succeed.

I didn't realize you worked exclusively from the logs; I was under the impression you recorded certain information from the server console and had the capacity to operate through the console. Thanks for clearing that up.

[DiogenesDog]

I'd also love to see 110/95 become the standard. Or 110/100. The 95 part is really pretty gratuitous since it doesn't affect the spam issue at all, it just makes aiming harder.

As for the graphics issues: Lam's mentioned this a few times, so I'm pretty sure it's a real thing. However, several patches back this was listed as being improved in the patch notes. I'm totally oblivious to this kind of thing, though, and never noticed the original problem so... hrm. Hard to say whether most of the issues have been solved or not. I definitely don't think it's a major issue for anyone interested in playing competitively though.

And note to Snow: you really should give it a try. It's not going to be good for settling how good people are, but I've had so many great games in the last two days. There's some annoying bitching that goes on because the games "count" and so people get their panties in a twist, and sometimes it takes too long for a game to get started, but the quality of the matches is way higher than in random games. So just try it for the fun games and pretend the ranking doesn't exist if it bothers you.

[hurripilot]

Just wanted to say that despite the problems I have with the ladders and the less desirable elements of human nature they sometimes bring forth, I have noticed a marked increase in my overall team play and skill level. The stress that your team puts on you to win can be quite the motivating and focusing force.

On the other hand, I really miss having people like Mat, X, Flight, etc. in the pubs. I find the ladder getting the better of me at times, and I'd like to just go to a pub server and relax with some good ol' biplane random, however, the pub servers have become over run with trolls and other irritating players thanks to the ladders sucking everyone else in. I know there's nothing you guys could ever do about that, I just wanted to air that out a bit. I got into Alti because it was a fun, challenging game that was somehow relaxing and satisfying at the same time. I'm kinda missing that "fun" and "relaxing" portion atm. Hopefully, people will come back to the pubs.

[Pieface]

I understand the stance that is being taken on the 95/110 issue, and since these are your servers feel free to do whatever you wish. Personally, after having played on the New England servers for a substantial amount of time I tend to agree that the only changes the deviations make from the defaults are positive ones. 95/110 settings tend to encourage a less spammy playstyle that IMO really makes the game a lot better. I have yet to notice any distortion problems, but I agree that if they are noticeable that should be something to bring up with the devs.

On a different note, the servers have been really unstable in the last few hours. They keep doing the same thing as the Proleagues in that everyone's ping suddenly spikes and we are all kicked. Right now the servers are unresponsive after doing a massive lag-kick and don't even appear on the list. The ladder website is also not loading in my browser. Just thought you should be aware of the problems.

There has also been a ton of problems with spectators from what I've seen so far. As an example, I was playing a ladder match and halfway through someone joined (don't remember the name) and voted to stop the tournament. All of the spectators voted yes and we didn't have time to vote no before the tourney was stopped. Because of that, we had to return to the lobby and restart the whole match. I definitely think adding a few more admins would be beneficial to the overall experience.

Don't want to sound negative, overall the matches I've played have been excellent and I certainly appreciate all the work you guys have done to create such a wonderful new aspect to the game.

[ryebone]

Originally Posted by Snowsickle

I'm going to toss in an additional vote for some kind of automatic team system. Either pure randomization (and let the ELO/ratings update to reflect whatever point difference exists -- we're going to need a better system like trueskill for this to be effective, I think) or some kind of elaborate team algorithm. It looks like plenty of people are interested in abusing the ladder already, spectating games and -- in the event of captains games -- they respond that they aren't playing unless the team in question has an astronomically high chance of winning. Given the current state of the system this is a very effective way of ensuring that you're ranked favorably.

Also, I feel like there needs to be some kind of preference to people who are actually interested in playing. Several times earlier, I was denied a spot in the server because 5-6 players "wanted to watch" but refused to be chosen to participate in a game. Given that the servers have been full almost every time I've been playing, and a number of players will constantly state that they don't want to play, I think its only fair to potential participants that there be some kind of system in place. The ladder is a fantastic opportunity for the community to move away from the elitism and circle-jerking that ran the pro leagues; I strongly suggest not playing favorites and allowing veteran players to waste spaces in the server because of their previous notoriety.

How about just limiting server size to 10? We could set up one of the servers to have a maxplayer of 10, and leave the other at 16, to compare what works better. The idea is that if you join, it's because you want to play. If not, you shouldn't be there. Practically, the only time you'll be able to join is in the lobby between games as previous players are leaving. This way, there isn't any confusion as to whether or not you just want to watch: because you can't. Not only will this prevent any inane voteraging, particularly from spectators because they aren't able to play, but it also eliminates the annoyance of spectators who don't know how to teamchat. It will also help speed up the teamchoosing process, which is by far the most frustrating thing about the ladder. Everyone get on a team, vote autobalance, live with it. End of story.

Now most may not agree with me, but I'm very in favor of being EXTREMELY strict in the laddder severs. Intentional leaving? Ban. Intentionally voting no to screw with the system? Ban. Spectators talking about wanking in the middle of a game? I'll let that one slide. I might sound elitist, but I don't understand how someone can find the password (through the forums, no doubt) and not go check out the site to read the rules before posing stupid questions like "can I sub in?". To me, that's blatant ignorance that should not be tolerated in the ladder servers.

Oh, and the next person in the lobby to ask for the rankings website should also be banned. Permanently.


Edit: I forgot to account for people's spots being taken after accidentally disconnecting. A solution may be that after a starttourney is called, all slots are reserved for those players until the game ends.

[Snowsickle]

I want to add one more thing on the 110/95 issue. This ladder is the biggest thing that has happened to altitude in a very long time (ever?). Even the leagues had their fair share of issues: no clear sense of who was in charge, no clear standards or regulations. This is an opportunity to set a standard for the future of competitive play in altitude. If moves can be made to encourage a better competitive scene with more emphasis on skill and less on spam, I would strongly encourage those with the ability to do so to make that the standard. Plenty of games have competitive scenes with slight improvements to gameplay. So far there is no established standard. TF2, for example, disables critical hits for competitive play.

My own preference is 110/95 (maybe even 90, I enjoy playing with it). I feel like people tend to blow the negatives of 110/95 (which, almost exclusively tend to be "it sucks getting used to two different views") way out of proportion. It's a very convenient cop-out; people can easily blame poor gameplay on "being used to something else". As Dio said, it merely cuts down on spam and has the potential to increase the skill required to aim effectively. I have heard it said in the past that there are some true technical issues preventing Lam and Karl from officially changing the viewscale of the game, so I don't believe it to be a valid argument that "they determined that this was the best for every situation".

EDIT: Responding to a point from a while back since Ryebone reminded me; there was an admin present when I was unable to join the server due to 6 spectators. The admin made no effort whatsoever to rectify the situation, and I'm told by certain people who were present at the time, only used his status as a method to circumvent the 16 player limit. Admin status, thus far, comes across as more of a popularity contest than a choice of responsible people.

[Sarah Palin]

There is a series of interconnected issues with the ladder now -

game downtime,
unbalanced teams,
annoying speccers ("Don't pick me I'm eating!"),
people who dodge games until they have a pwn team set up,
etc etc etc.

At the root of it is the fact that the ladder's estimate of player skill doesn't really affect the game. In a game where I lost against a team of sammiches I lost 23 points, in a game vs a team of nubs I lost 27 points. What's the difference.

So since the ladder does not appreciably punish you for having a pwn team or handicap you for playing with a bad team, everyone becomes complete ***** about choosing teams. There is also a growth of majorly unsportsmanlike conduct, basically "take the points and run" in whatever situation no matter what the ethical questions. This is not like the old laid back Alti at all.

The best thing the devs can do is push forward ladder balancing and solve the other issues (ranking, scale, size) later.