Room signs failing to prevent novice zones from appearing
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I stand with you on this subject Rob. The devs have mismanaged their relation to the community more than once. An area which could certainly use improvement. Personally, I like to imagine the Screeps devs like some basement hackers with serious social disabilities. Most devs I know have some "deficiencies" in this department.
Whatever the case, my main desire is to temper the spirits a little bit. I feel your reaction could be qualified as out of bounds. Atlan was certainly a lot more justified to be outraged with that funny novice area which appeared multiple times. Check out the older thread, it's a real doozy.
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I agree with the players voice in this case.
It's clear in the documentation that signing a room will make it noobzone-proof if it's been signed in the last 5 days. There is no way to misinterpret those rules.
The noobzone in question will have noobs in it who will probably be bombarded with nukes/boosted creeps the second the walls go down, this is not good from a gameplay and noob experience perspective.
I would highly suggest to NOT create noobzones in established worlds anymore. If you spawn outside a noobzone you should have code which can deal with attacks, and use safe-mode effectively.
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I’d like to quote my post from that old PTR forum thread:
Every day will be safe. I think even 2-3 days is a good estimate. We’ll add this to the documentation when this feature goes live.
I clearly stated that in case if/when this rule becomes a thing, it is to be added to the documentation. It has not been added. The signing feature has been launched, but the “novice area signing rule” has not been introduced neither in the changelog nor documentation. You seem to have misinterpreted some ongoing non-finished discussion as an already established rule, and I apologize that I might be not very clear (English is not my native language indeed), but I think it should be obvious that forum contents cannot be considered as some strict game mechanic rules. Sometimes in hot discussions on the PTR forum I make diametrically opposite statements, while we are in the process of considering some complicated topics. But they only take effect when they make it to the docs, not while they are being discussed.
It’s clear in the documentation that signing a room will make it noobzone-proof if it’s been signed in the last 5 days
Could you please provide a link to the docs page containing such a rule?
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I would highly suggest to NOT create noobzones in established worlds anymore.
It will make our world half-empty very soon, since many novice players simply stop playing, and their void zones cannot be fulfilled by nearby active players with the speed fast enough to make them populated.
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We've given you the link to the documentation repeatedly, and you've ignored it.
http://support.screeps.com/hc/en-us/articles/210342985-Novice-Areas
http://support.screeps.com/hc/en-us/articles/210342985-Novice-Areas
http://support.screeps.com/hc/en-us/articles/210342985-Novice-Areas
> If you don’t want some rooms to get transformed into Novice Areas, you should take care to reserve or at least sign them.
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I meant this rule:
It’s clear in the documentation that signing a room will make it noobzone-proof if it’s been signed in the last 5 days
Where in the documentation it says something about “5 days” and “noobzone-proof”?
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> It will make our world half-empty very soon, since many novice players simply stop playing, and their void zones cannot be fulfilled by nearby active players with the speed fast enough to make them populated.
Are we playing the same game? When players time out other players move in pretty quickly. Alliances resettle their younger players. People create jump rooms to move in. There's no situation where valuable rooms stay vacate for long.
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It will make our world half-empty very soon, since many novice players
simply stop playing, and their void zones cannot be fulfilled by
nearby active players with the speed fast enough to make them
populatedIt won’t! If you adjust the spawn mechanism to make it an “intermediate room” to spawn it it will make clear that it’s dangerous to spawn there, but the rewards can be high.
If there are lots of zombies nearby they will not be attacked and it’s basically a noobzone. Just make the color orange/yellow instead of walling it off and making it a noobzone. This way established players can still get into the zone, but it’s made clear to new guys that they may be attacked at anytime.
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> Where in the documentation it says something about “5 days” and “noobzone-proof”?
Seriously, you're going to ignore the documentation we showed you repeatedly, but are going to nitpick over that bit? How about you respond to the fact that your noob zone documentation clearly states that signing should have done something?
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Also, this insistence that we ignore what you say in the forums is kind of ridiculous. Should we never trust anything you say then?
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Seriously, you’re going to ignore the documentation we showed you repeatedly, but are going to nitpick over that bit? How about you respond to the fact that your noob zone documentation clearly states that signing should have done something?
It does do “something”. We read all sign messages every time we plan new novice areas, and do our best to take them into consideration. But we never officially stated that any “5 days” or “noobzone-proof” rules do exist in the game. The fact that some players like Atavus interpret it in the same way as we do, shows that we weren’t completely unclear on this matter:
That being said, I feel it was relatively clear from the discussions surrounding room signing that this method was advisory. Simply a way to express the player’s intent to the developers. There was no reasonable way that this would represent a full proof method
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Yeah, but the fact that the majority of players agree with my interpretation shows that you very much were not clear about this. I also don't see the point in signatures at all at this point anymore since they're clearly just ignored by you.
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Here it is again: http://support.screeps.com/hc/en-us/articles/210342985-Novice-Areas
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You can't expect a tiny company to have the manpower to support you on weekends. I also think devs shouldn't give in to this kind of blackmailing, shouting and cursing. This childish tantrum we're seeing is just absurd. Please do not make it seem like one can get what they want if they act like this or there will be no end to these kind of situations.
I really like the idea of a warning period before novice area is activated.
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To be fair I opened the ticket on Friday. It was their decision to ignore it until the weekend. I also don't think it's unreasonable to offer support when the majority of the customers are actually playing.
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Also, if you look at the beginning of this thread we went out of our way to report it ASAP and before there was anyone spawned there. By ignoring the issue they made it worse.
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To be fair I opened the ticket on Friday. It was their decision to ignore it until the weekend. I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to offer support when the majority of the customers are actually playing.
Please, tedivm, you know this is not true, it was yesterday (Saturday) evening or morning depending on the timezone:
Alright, here is a temporary compromise solution:
- This novice area in question will be reset to 5 days, the next Friday.
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The following rule is added to the documentation:
If you sign a controller, please make sure that your sign message contains clear and reasonable date when exactly you plan to claim this particular room. If you don’t have enough GCL, you should explicitly comment how you plan to implement your intentions (e.g. you will drop some of your existing claims).
The eventual solution will be a mechanism to mark areas under consideration, but it’ll require some technical implementation effors.
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I wouldn't expect the devs to work 24h during Friday, or that your issue should have the highest priority. I also believe you're in different timezones. No one else has gotten any special treatment when it comes to novice zones previously either, I don't see why you should. We're all equal paying customers.
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Thank you! While not perfect (I still don't believe this n00bzone should have popped up) this is a compromise I can live with given the circumstances.
I am looking forward to an improved mechanic that will prevent issues like this from happening again. I understand your signature idea is a temporary one until you can figure out a better mechanic, but I think you should prioritize that new mechanic and get it out to us ASAP to prevent issues like this from happening again. Expecting us to come up with strings to tell you that a) we're claiming this area, b) we're dropping claims to do it, and c) the timeline to do so is a bit more complicated than is reasonable for this, but that being able to spend resources (I like the ghodium idea) to explicitly mark something as "claiming soon" will solve this issue while preventing people from claiming the whole map.
