Just a thought I had, since my map is getting quite close to beta. Obviously when the map author is playing the game himself, he just listen to the other players. But does anybody have an ideas of a way to let players report bugs in-game? And then relay those bugs to the author? I was thinking of something with Banks. Where you save the bug into a bank file, and then if you play a game with the map author, the map sees that there is a bug report bank on a computer. And saves that information to the host computer.
Just a thought I had, though I doubt it's really possible (since blizzard STILL refuses to let us check player names against another value). But figuring something out would make life easier for a lot of people. Howver, the author of SOTIS has created a little program called gloop. Despite the terrible name, it somehow manages to get information out of the game and into another program. Thoughts?
Idea- Maybe there is some sort of code. Like a password. Only the map author would know it. And he can enter that code, thus marking him as the map creator. And then any games played on battle net would take any bugs reported by players, and save them into a bank file. Any time this code would be entered, the map checks each player to see if they have a "bug report" bank, and if they do, sends the information to the author. The bug reports could spread, almost like a virus, between different players.
People always complain that people don't take the time to report bugs. Something like this might make the process much more streamlined. People could even put polls and such into their maps, track statistics, and "mine" data from their map to help with balance. It could be turned into a trigger library that people could easily pop into their own maps.
Thought about something similar, since people is goddamn lazy and won't post feedback in forums, even if its forums they're active on.
The main problem of using banks is that the "chain" may be too random... for example, if I play it with my friends only, and my friends don't play with anyone else, feedback wouldn't exit our "zone". But well, it's the only way we have right now, and all shared-stuff maps I know use it like this. The only thing you can do is actively play your own map or play it with people that play it a lot (once it's popular everything should be easier?).
Part of that can be fixed encouraging the players to play with more people, explaining them how the system works so they spread the information. In the end, it's Blizzard's fault for not adding server banks -_-. At least, they could try adding some kind of mail system. Bleh.
But yes, it's a good idea, mostly for statistics and balance, rather than bug report. I would love to have something like this for my map (altered melee) so I can detect balance issues faster. You would need to make every player save other players' data, though, or they wouldn't reach you. That could prove a bit heavy size-wise after a time...
The only way I see it work is by adding "tags" to each "feedback", and once you use the admin code to retrieve them, you add those tags in a list that sends a signal that removes them... hell, that sounds like 50's computer mailing, but that's all we got xDDD.
Well, having something like that would be great, but the map would have to be popular to get the feedback to spread properly.
And if it is popular, itll spread pretty quickly and you'll end up with extremely large banks, and if I remember right that causes problems with the game :/
I think it'd be a great feature on battle.net if players could just click a "Feedback" button somewhere at the map and just type up some feedback and send it, and the author could just check the feedback similar to a mail account or something. Altough that probably won't happen anytime soon.
Also, is it just me or is blizzard taking their time with the next patch?
Yeah. But it could be used for tracking scores and whatnot. For balance. Without any player input. Maybe there is another method, other than the virus-style banks.
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When a bank is saved, it is stored into an XML (I think XML, haven't actually looked) file on the players computer. This is why you can't make a "global" variable, because everything is stored locally.
What gloop does, is it takes the data that is saved in the bank, converts into something it can read, and then uploads it automatically to the SOTIS website in the form of stats. HOLY SHIT I JUST GOT AN IDEA!! Give me a minute, I am going to make a new thread on it.
Just a thought I had, since my map is getting quite close to beta. Obviously when the map author is playing the game himself, he just listen to the other players. But does anybody have an ideas of a way to let players report bugs in-game? And then relay those bugs to the author? I was thinking of something with Banks. Where you save the bug into a bank file, and then if you play a game with the map author, the map sees that there is a bug report bank on a computer. And saves that information to the host computer.
Just a thought I had, though I doubt it's really possible (since blizzard STILL refuses to let us check player names against another value). But figuring something out would make life easier for a lot of people. Howver, the author of SOTIS has created a little program called gloop. Despite the terrible name, it somehow manages to get information out of the game and into another program. Thoughts?
Idea- Maybe there is some sort of code. Like a password. Only the map author would know it. And he can enter that code, thus marking him as the map creator. And then any games played on battle net would take any bugs reported by players, and save them into a bank file. Any time this code would be entered, the map checks each player to see if they have a "bug report" bank, and if they do, sends the information to the author. The bug reports could spread, almost like a virus, between different players.
People always complain that people don't take the time to report bugs. Something like this might make the process much more streamlined. People could even put polls and such into their maps, track statistics, and "mine" data from their map to help with balance. It could be turned into a trigger library that people could easily pop into their own maps.
Thoughts ?
Thought about something similar, since people is goddamn lazy and won't post feedback in forums, even if its forums they're active on.
The main problem of using banks is that the "chain" may be too random... for example, if I play it with my friends only, and my friends don't play with anyone else, feedback wouldn't exit our "zone". But well, it's the only way we have right now, and all shared-stuff maps I know use it like this. The only thing you can do is actively play your own map or play it with people that play it a lot (once it's popular everything should be easier?).
Part of that can be fixed encouraging the players to play with more people, explaining them how the system works so they spread the information. In the end, it's Blizzard's fault for not adding server banks -_-. At least, they could try adding some kind of mail system. Bleh.
But yes, it's a good idea, mostly for statistics and balance, rather than bug report. I would love to have something like this for my map (altered melee) so I can detect balance issues faster. You would need to make every player save other players' data, though, or they wouldn't reach you. That could prove a bit heavy size-wise after a time...
The only way I see it work is by adding "tags" to each "feedback", and once you use the admin code to retrieve them, you add those tags in a list that sends a signal that removes them... hell, that sounds like 50's computer mailing, but that's all we got xDDD.
Perhaps there's a better way that I am unaware of. Like I said, gloop manages to retrieve data from the game somehow . I wonder how it does that :D
Well, having something like that would be great, but the map would have to be popular to get the feedback to spread properly.
And if it is popular, itll spread pretty quickly and you'll end up with extremely large banks, and if I remember right that causes problems with the game :/
I think it'd be a great feature on battle.net if players could just click a "Feedback" button somewhere at the map and just type up some feedback and send it, and the author could just check the feedback similar to a mail account or something. Altough that probably won't happen anytime soon.
Also, is it just me or is blizzard taking their time with the next patch?
@TheAlmaity: Go
The problem with that it that most people would probably just post feedback along the lines of: this map freakin sux get it of bnet nao
@Nebuli2: Go
Yeah. But it could be used for tracking scores and whatnot. For balance. Without any player input. Maybe there is another method, other than the virus-style banks.
@zeldarules28: Go
When a bank is saved, it is stored into an XML (I think XML, haven't actually looked) file on the players computer. This is why you can't make a "global" variable, because everything is stored locally.
What gloop does, is it takes the data that is saved in the bank, converts into something it can read, and then uploads it automatically to the SOTIS website in the form of stats. HOLY SHIT I JUST GOT AN IDEA!! Give me a minute, I am going to make a new thread on it.
Great to be back and part of the community again!
@TacoManStan: Go
Did you just hijack my thread!? Gosh dang it tacoman. >.<