Probably an issue caused by the walls. When using moveTo creeps will repath every time they enter a room. When pathing from within the room you're trying to claim it can "see" the walls and will attempt to avoid them. This path may then take it back into the original room where it'll repath while not being able to "see" the walls. This can kick you into an infinite loop.

Lots of possible solutions. Using maxRooms: 1 as an option when you're in the target room is probably the easiest.

What I think went well

• I think the combination of claiming for decoders, energy, minerals and collection space worked well. It lead to some interesting decisions. I ended up with a bit of a shortage of X, though in return I was able to gather from a large area.
• There was a lot more fighting between competitors for the top spots than before. It's not clear if that fighting ended up mattering. IMO it did a bit: without the fighting Genovese would have probably hit second.
• I think the score system and score gathering worked well, again. I liked that the most collected resource was worth the least. I did some 1:1 trading with @psy372 near the end, for example, to take my most scored symbol and trade it with one of my least scored symbols. That was mutually beneficial.
• I liked the walls. They lead to new interesting code to write to handle them, and made things quite strategic in the early/mid game. It's a bit painful that things such as findRoute don't have a clean way to hook into them as the block in the middle of a room.

What I think did not go so well:

• There wasn't actually that much incentive to keep newer players alive. The two I did let live near me didn't really contribute anything: if decoders were harder to come by they would have, but as it turned out, getting to 22 wasn't that hard.
• I didn't like the boosting. At one point one competitively placed player gave all of his score to another, losing his own position for his ally. I think if we can come up with mechanics to prevent this sort of thing it'd be good. No terminals work, but the top three players all had workarounds for that with rooms places very close together and transporters moving between terminals. I quite liked the idea in the "King of the Hill" thread where score is not something that's a resource and transferrable, but something that's gained by "controlling" a room. That makes it a lot harder to boost people.
• A little too much manual stuff. Not sure this is avoidable with the way that room combat works. Often it comes down to 2 hours and manual overrides as even the perfect automation doesn't quite work. I prefer automatic Screeps.

I'm looking forward to season 3. Balancing time between that and arena may be tricky.

@o4kapuk said in Season #2 is open!:

World sectors are isolated from each other by huge constructed walls on the season start, so you have to dig your way to distant players

Any details? How huge? They don't appear to exist yet.

Collecting score resources and fighting over score resources is a good CPU/energy sink. Not sure we need anything else.

Hopefully both, depending on the arena. Seems possible to make it optional without too much design headache.

@gadjung said in Season #2 concept:

@tigga said in Season #2 concept:

I still think the best way to achieve competition across all levels is to make the world non-uniform so there are good regions where strong players will want to be, and worse areas with less reward where lower level players can only have other low level players as competition.

For non-uniform world, my issue is that it leaves bigger parts of it less-usable and discourages respawning into 'worse' zones. Weaker players are not much affected by that since they don't have codebase with features that would get impacted by that. For 'medicore' players that starts to be a bigger impact.

So from good player perspective 'Center' makes sense, for weak-player there's no difference, for medicore one it's either center/close to center and then respawn into worse area after wipe, or just start in worse area and have a boring/limited play

Why would it be boring/limited? You'd still be competing against others in your neighbourhood and it would be more fair competition and more likely to be fruitful as you're likely competing for similar scoreboard positions.

@bogden said in Season #2 concept:

As far as new player goals are concerned, I think seasonal is a wonderful format to get people started in a friendlier and safer environment without totally messing up the core gameplay of regular screeps.

I think this is an interesting point. I think the opposite: seasonal should be a competetive environment compared to the tame MMO experience that most people have. MMO is friendly and safe. Seasonal should be more competetive.

The challenge is to have it competative at the high end and at the low end. I think season 1 struggled there. It's not yet clear to me whether the rules proposed will change this: eg. a strong player has little incentive to keep a weak player with a score type the strong player (or a strong players' alliance) already owns alive. The rules heavily favour pre-season organisation, which I think leaves a lot of weak or new players behind.

I still think the best way to achieve competition across all levels is to make the world non-uniform so there are good regions where strong players will want to be, and worse areas with less reward where lower level players can only have other low level players as competition.

@bogden said in Season #2 concept:

The reason I say this iteration on seasonal may be a step in the wrong direction is due to the added element of required social interactions with other players, meaning diplomacy, deal making, backstabbing, and more. Screeps is primarily a game for programmers, by programmers, and I believe that these forced social elements will further deter new players from joining the game.

Or old players from joining the season. Personally I feel a player's performance should be measured by how well their code performs, not how many freinds they have.

IMO most of the calls for co-op in the previous thread were calls for global co-op, where everyone cooperates toward a single goal and there are no winners or losers. I think that might be interesting. Team based eco-wars, which sounds like this is heading toward, sounds a lot less interesting to the point whether if the rules outlined in the OP were used I'd be at most 50-50 on participating, probably leaning toward not bothering. If a pre-made team of 5 players beats a team of 3 players by virtue of having 5 players instead of 3 that's not really very exciting. The game scales too well with player-count-on-team (GCL, CPU). It would have on season 1 as well had it gone that way and I think it's a step in the wrong direction to encourage rather than discourage this. For example: if all YP players decided to co-operate I think we'd see YP players 1st and 2nd. That'd be decided before the round even starts.

So, global coop would be ok. Some other system to allow new players to participate safely. eg. as suggested in the thread, a world with non-uniform scoring resource distribution so the top players would be forced together leaving the larger and less valuable areas to newer players. Forcing co-operative co-operation is not good IMO.

@rayderblitz said in Ideas for Season #2:

@donatzor said in Ideas for Season #2:

Paint the World

• Each player is assigned a color value.
• Either signing a controller or 'moving onto' a room position 'paints' that room/roomPosition the player's color
• mapVis shows painted rooms/positions
• Player with the most 'pixels' (roomPositions) or rooms painted wins, can score from 'most covered area'.
• Could also 'paint' with energy and have some low eng to build walkable structure as a 'claim' on that room position as well.

I honestly love this idea. It'd be so visually pleasing to have whole rooms just painted in your color alone, but it'd also be a nice take on the gameplay in general, i think. I didnt know until now, but i really want this to be a season theme.

You'd have to be careful not to make the season goal irrelavent until the last few days. Tying it to the controller might acheive that (claim, sign, wall off controller, defend). Or accumulation of score over time based on signed rooms.