Messages

1

Complaints / Re: Complaint against admin Kyrre

« on: July 08, 2021, 10:29:15 pm »

Can you tell at which server and which date/time (UTC if possible or at least specify the time zone) this occurred so that we can check logs?

But let me already warn you that our general stance here is that if an admin tells you something you are supposed to comply. It's a very simple thing and I believe it should be obvious. From your own words here it sounds like that's exactly not what you did. Instead you started to discuss and ask how to file complaints.
Even if you had good reasons for this, during the game while an admin is waiting for you to fix rule breaks he pointed out is not the right time and place for that.
Unfortunately keeping an admin busy with endless discussions is something that people often think is a viable tactic to get by with a rule break or sometimes just to troll the admin, because they're angry they were reprimanded. So we are very sensitive to these things and tolerance for turning the in-game chat into a discussion forum while the actual rule breaks are still not being worked on is rather low.

Especially rule 3 is a good target for that, as by its nature it always leaves a bit of room for interpretation. Which is exactly why our detailed rules say this:

You can still come to IRC or post on the forums if you think a rule should be changed or if they should cover a specific situation and we can talk it through in an objective discussion. But while in the game, do as the admin asks you to do, even if you don't see it in the rules. Don't argue with an admin during the game on how you understand the rules in a different way – obey the admin instructions first, then join us for a factual discussion later.

_{Source: https://wiki.x-base.info/OpenTTD/Rules#h511-28}

2

News / Server machine removal

« on: July 06, 2016, 07:19:49 pm »

Our "RAxxOR" server machine (hosting the "r" OpenTTD servers using the address r.openttd.n-ice.org) was kindly sponsored by Kwissy during the last 2 years. At this point many thanks for that!

Now that the 3rd year started we were discussing whether we actually needed this server for another year and came to the conclusion that we don't. The average player count simply doesn't justify to keep this magnitude of computing power around and use Kwissy's generousness for another year.

So I don't expect any negative impact and there is no reason to be sad when RAxxOR will have its last running day on 18th of July.

Many thanks again to Kwissy <3

3

Apply to become an admin! / Re: Admin

« on: September 05, 2015, 12:58:40 pm »

Yes, sure thing!

4

Suggestions / Re: About scoring, number of vehicles and railroad networks beauty !

« on: January 08, 2015, 09:00:02 pm »

The current score formula doesn't reward using fewer vehicles to keep server load down. Of course that's a side effect but server load isn't an issue for us right now, we got more technical capacity than we got ideas for new servers. And in general there are more servers than players in the OpenTTD world anyway, no shortage of that.

Because usage of long or short trains is mostly a matter of preference or personal taste your next assumption might be that the reason for the current formula is that n-ice admins simply prefer long trains. While that might be true or not (I am not collecting statistics on that ) this is not the reason either. The most part of the calculation is coming from me and I definitely preferred short trains while I was still playing more actively and creating the initial formula.

The actual problem is that the calculations are still based on CV a lot for historical reasons: when we started with this there was no admin interface in OpenTTD. The only way to get values from a running game to do something with was the console. And that didn't show you anything useful about companies except Perf and CV.
At first this doesn't seem like much of a problem. CV is the obvious choice if you want to set a goal for a value that an automatic goal system could measure the progress on. And as a goal in terms of deciding when the game ends it is as good as everything else (e.g. end year reached). We're still depending on it for that and it doesn't work too bad.
But the concept of also taking CV for a (high)score system is flawed, because it can be manipulated by players. Players found out pretty fast that buying vehicles increases their CV, while at the same time any game will reach a point where money doesn't matter at all. Play long enough and you will always have enough money to max out on all vehicle limits, boosting your CV to heights you would otherwise never reach - and therefore this also applies to their score.
And even if the players didn't deliberately cheat the system: players with shorter trains would always have a higher CV than players with about the same network size but longer trains (because longer trains mean less engines that would increase the CV).

Fortunately from the console you could also see how many vehicles a company had, so even in the early days we were able to implement the obvious counter-measure: give a score penalty for having more vehicles. Now over time OpenTTD offered new ways to query more data from the game and our score calculation became more sophisticated, mitigating the effect of vehicles on the score a bit, but even today it's still strong enough that it could be used for cheating if there was no penalty for vehicles.
So any step in the direction of allowing players with short trains more points also means allowing cheating players more points.

That's why at some point it occurred to me that there won't be a way with the current system to improve much in this field. Also there are other issues with the system like the fact that (from score perspective) there is no motivation for players to play a partial game: If they play from the start but miss the end of the game (even when they reach the goal) they don't get anything. If they start late and finish a game they will probably not win it, hence also having a big disadvantage.


I must admit that I have been saying this for a long time and the system still is not here. But anyway: there is a whole new score system planned which will work entirely different. For starters, you will get scores every quarter so you can gain something even if you haven't got much time and join a 3 hour game for only the first hour. And you will get scores based on many many game parameters (and also score punishments, e.g. for vehicles with negative income, or crashes...) and can also get bonuses from certain events additionally to the quarterly points you get for progression in the current game.

The new scores are called "XP" (you might know the concept of experience points from other games) and are partially working like an ELO system, where you get more XP when playing against players that got more XP than you (while you get less XP for playing against "weaker" players).
You shouldn't forget that even the most sophisticated score system will never be able to act like a real jury and give you points for a "beautiful" or "aesthetic" or "well-thought" network. And even if it was technically possible: such things are a question of taste, just like the question whether you prefer long or short trains.

Instead you are stuck with taking the hard values that you can measure while at the same time these numbers can never tell the whole truth on their own, also specific numbers can always be cheated on. The sad truth I have learned is that it is really easy to find problems with a scoring system but infinitely hard to solve even only one without creating 3 new problems on the other side of the medal at the same time.
IMHO the best thing you can do (and that's the idea for the new score system) is to take as many game statistics into account as possible. That way you enforce a gameplay where players make use of many aspects of the game and by giving single values less weight remove the incentive to cheat on this value and at the same time more freedom (e.g. being able to leave the decision about longer or shorter trains to the player, because it wouldn't matter for the scoring).

To cut things short: I don't see any way how we could take the current system and solve the aforementioned problems by a monolithic change. The problem is the system itself.

Anyway, thank you for putting some thoughts into it and making this good (and correct) observation about one of the problems the current system has. As I have shown here creating a good score system is not an easy task and we certainly need as much input and ideas for it as we can get.

If you want to dive deeper into this topic I recommend reading the additional points topic where most of the ideas for the new system originated from.

5

Offtopic / Re: Other games I play...

« on: August 20, 2014, 12:32:57 pm »

i am not the type of guy who plays a single player game a second time, nevertheless worth mentioning are the following games i have played in the past:

• second sight (unique story and gameplay)
• the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (best "postapocalyptic style" atmosphere i have experienced in a game so far, expecially in the first game)
• fahrenheit (biggest strength here is the story, it's more like an interactive movie than a game)
• heavy rain (same as for fahrenheit, also from same publisher)
• the last of us (good postapocalyptic atmosphere, good story)
• assassins creed 3 and 4
• GTA (i played GTA 1 and 2 but didn't like them very much - but i finished every game starting from GTA 3, with GTA san andreas and GTA 5 being my favourites)

as for multiplayer games i played Minecraft some time but not recently. maybe at some later point i will play it again. also i played natural selection a lot.
the only online game i am still actively playing as of today is counter strike: global offensive. there i am mostly playing matchmaking with a fixed team of steam friends using teamspeak, currently i am proudly holding the "distinguished master guardian" rank. but it seems that i am the only one in the OpenTTD community that also plays CS, otherwise there doesn't seem to be any overlapping between OpenTTD and CS players.

6

Suggestions / Re: Tournament points

« on: July 11, 2013, 10:42:18 am »

regarding regular scores: i know the Elo system and i've seen the practical implementation in multiplayer games too (e.g. CS:GO competetive games), but it is hard to realize when it's not only multiple opponents but when they are also able to hop on and off the running game at every minute (the new score system aims to give scores not only at the end of the game). also it would mean that players always need to have other players on their games which have an account and are logged in - a limitation i don't want.

that's why the new system won't be pure Elo, nevertheless the scores will be influenced by other players on your game and how much scores they got in comparison to you.

7

Suggestions / Re: [Poll] Competition on secondary industries

« on: July 04, 2013, 10:28:42 pm »

now that the K servers are gone we only have servers with the changed rule left. i wonder why nobody mentioned it yet, does it mean people agree with the current situation or you rather want a mixture again (as Cossack indicated).

8

General / Re: Achievements

« on: May 12, 2013, 04:20:43 pm »

that's planned, also read here. just that development progress is slow right now, as i got a lot of private and business stuff going on right now.

9

Complaints / Re: Sabotaging on CB server (its getting really common and annoying)

« on: February 04, 2013, 07:11:45 pm »

agree with alex, it's covered by rule 3: "Don't build stations or station parts that serve the sole purpose of [...] sabotaging other players [...]."

we will try to sensitize other admins about this too, these kinds of cases seem to occur more often these days. in the past it hasn't happened that often, so not all admins are trained on this yet. especially Taroon who is still quite new and was a bit unsure about it. next time he'll know, we all learn and improve every day.

10

Introduction / Re: Good news everyone!

« on: February 03, 2013, 10:16:10 am »

well you will learn many new stuff here by watching some guys playing

stealing ideas is always a good idea

hey, you stole that idea to steal ideas from me! 

11

Introduction / Re: Benspartan

« on: February 03, 2013, 10:15:14 am »

welcome, good to have you here Ben 

12

Suggestions / Re: New server suggestion: Temperate, 1980 to 2080, 800perf, 5billion, 400 points

« on: February 02, 2013, 06:22:52 pm »

to the idea of gradual scoring:
1. partially it's already in there, winning fast gives you more points than winning slow
2. i don't want to do any more work on the current score system when we plan to rewrite the whole score system anyway

to the idea of owning industries:
we can do this but we should make sure it cannot be used by early joiners to reserve all the good industries. there would need to be a limit that only industries with low production can be claimed (similar to towns below a certain population in CB).
for the reservation itself we need to wait for the feature described here, doing it as we currently do it for CB would probably put too much load on the servers.

13

Suggestions / Re: New rule - city builder

« on: January 30, 2013, 06:09:15 pm »

the rules are complicated enough, i don't want to start with more rules that are server specific, adding yet another level of complexity.
apart from that you can invest into any other cities for various valid reasons, e.g. just to get the money you need for growing the network around your own city or because you plan to connect it to your city over a long distance later when you got more money. we would forbid such cases too.

usually if a player builds things that barely gives himself any profit but makes the profit of someone else decrease significantly we apply the "no sabotage" rule (part of rule 3) on him.
the problem with that is that you cannot drag a hard line here. if he is like a parasite but at the same time it is the only business he got, you cannot say he is only running the lines to sabotage you, it is also what generates all his income.
of course we also had situations where someone was running only long and big networks - and only at a few spots he let buses drive 10 tiles to move cargo away from an industry someone else was using, barely making any money from these lines. that would be a clear sabotage case.

most of the time it is not an easy judgement, and it is even harder without having been there, so i don't know what was the situation in your case. i understand your frustration but your suggestion is not a good solution, because it would be limiting legitimate gameplay too, which should always be avoided.

the sad story about this is that most of the players that compete in such a forced way aren't even worth mentioning as a competitor. they would never win and often the player they compete with is still the #1 player on the server with a big distance. yet that player complains, gets frustrated and leaves the game he would have easily won. i have seen players leave after being "leeched" that were at 80% when the 2nd was at 30% and the leecher at 2%. from an objective perspective this is not explainable - this is more an emotional thing than anything else. and the best players are those that learned they should just play and not worry so much...

14

Complaints / Re: new company abuse by Guy Smiley

« on: January 12, 2013, 01:48:25 am »

banned him.
about the general problem of such things: i want to write a plug-in that can detect certain kinds of abuses and act on them automatically (e.g. players running a crash train, players reserving too much land, players creating new companies with a suspiciously high frequency...)
it won't be able to detect and handle each and every situation of this kind but at least such obviously abusive/ill-intentioned things.

15

Suggestions / Re: file size

« on: January 11, 2013, 12:09:46 am »

i have raised the limit, please try again.