Why did Rofle think that making private lobbies a supporter-only thing was a good idea? It makes no sense. I’ll show you two screenshots of a player being uncooperating (which kinda goes against PvE
Here you have two players with two different play styles (one who actually knows and cares about what they’re doing and another one who dies at round 11 due to snipers). If we would have been in two different lobbies, this wouldn’t have been an issue, but because there’s no way of preventing them from joining me (because I live in Brazil, where we’re dirt poor and don’t use pounds). It really didn’t have to be this way.
So I suggest that custom lobbies remain a patron-only feature, as it’s not ‘necessary’ to enjoy the game, but private lobbies are.
There are also a gajillion more issues with public lobbies. Such as hackers, people who don’t speak english (so no way telling them that amount of hits are proportional to amount of score), trolls, people who abuse chatting and probably more.
I think the best way to implement this would be to hide private lobbies behind some sort of level limit. I do agree though that it could be a good thing though. Or, the lobbies could pair people with people of a similar skill level, instead of private lobbies being available for everyone.
Each lobby instance uses quite a few resources and so a private lobby is basically reserving server resources just for you (or some friends). We don’t want many if any of these, since we’re hitting limits with literally one gamemode (zombies), how would we possibly add more unless we keep people together as much as possible?
Making private lobbies supporter only makes all sense when you consider it from a resource standpoint. Patreon supporters give money to pay for those resources, and with enough people, to pay for more.
People supporting the server is a good thing, and giving them a reason is all the reason I need. It’s supporter-only for that reason primarily. The resource constraints are just a necessity for some kind of constraint on lobby counts and by extension private/custom lobbies, which makes sense to pair with the supporter rewards because it allows it to sort of pay for itself.
As it stands, at peak zombies count we likely could not run any other gamemode. At less busy times there are other tasks that can be run that would otherwise be disruptive, which means even in a quiet period there is still a need to ensure there are spare resources. Even more so when we consider any new gamemodes to add. If you truly believe that everyone should have access for free, then simply become a regional supporter and all private lobbies in that region could be open to all, that would fix the issue so long as you are a regional supporter.
Couldn’t you implement a feature where the players get redirected to the another lobby with the closest round, or if there is none, they get sent to a smaller one but have their points be cut proportionally to the wave.
But if there’s no way to implement private lobbies for non-supporters, then ranks should be a thing.
Anything to aid in non-supporters with private lobbies is just not worth it from my end, there’s no actual reason to do it unless someone pays for those resources. There are potential ways to allow supporters to share their access in some way that’s reasonable to the server’s resources but I don’t see it being feasible beyond tying it to money.
I don’t know what you mean by ranks, if you mean matchmaking with similar skills, that won’t work because there are not enough overall players for that to work properly.
Hackers is a moderation issue, so people should report them as and when they see them.
Strategy and coordination are simply products of the players in the lobby, more often than not the players that don’t know what they’re doing will leave after a certain number of rounds, so you can often get a lobby with just the good people by simply staying in a lobby and progressing through the rounds. Or you just vote for a map that isn’t easy and when your vote is picked, they will leave by themselves. I’ve often found myself either alone or with 1 or 2 other people this way.
If you’re otherwise a player that’s not known within the community, so you cannot team up with people because you don’t know anyone and you don’t want to be a supporter, then you basically have to endure the good and bad players.
Well this change you mention would not be fair to those that are supporting DG via patreon. First, there are not enough lobbies nor people to separate guests from members or by raw DPT level, and having low player count in most maps is not optimal. Also me being level 800, would this mean that I’d be forced to only play with those similar in level? There are only 4-5 people within 300 levels of me, and a couple of them aren’t always active. Second, like Rofle said: resources are required to host these lobbies, so we would need more supporters (funds) to even contemplate expanding the lobby count without pulling the plug on some of the other dimension’s features. And lastly, I don’t think changing the perks of becoming a donor after some of us bought into the idea would be a smart thing to do. Honestly, I was gonna support this server with or without perks, but others may not. We need funds to keep this server running, that is just reality. Additionally, I usually invite others to play with me when I am doing a private zombies run, just so I can play with a lot of the more experienced players. This aligns with what you want too. If you really need a private lobby, let me know, I might be able to set you up one if I am online.
