i think it's time to try player caps.

[Zamujasa]

I don't think ghosts/observers/afterlifejoiners should count towards the cap. We'd end up with deceptively high counts as 1/4th of the server "fills up" with people just joining to watch.

Which isn't to say I support a hard-cap at all, but if one does get put in, then it needs to account for this very common experience of the game. I spent over a year "observer maining" before I became admin.

again, the proposed cap accounts for "observer slush", and is loosely based on actual experience.

a huge amount of players suddenly deciding to en-mass observe instead of playing would be unusual.


the stats on 3, right now:
90+ minutes

81 online
56 alive (-4, who are in in afterlife bar)
10 dead
4 observers
11 players on the title screen


boot the people idling on the title screen and you get 70. nuke 5 more and at worst you lose 5 living people, dropping you to about 45, which is where i'd consider the ideal range lies.


additional stipualtions:

- as zewaka said, some sort of redirection would be given, even if it's just "here are two links you can use to join different servers". this is trivial to implement so i'm not really worried (literally just "cap hit? client << link(byond://....")


- i don't think making the cap distinguish between who's alive / dead is a good idea:

the benefits of a simple hard cap are that it's simple. if there are 65 people online, no more can join. if there are 64 people, then another person can join.

if you try to tie this to "alive", then you now have to adjust all of the other game systems to compensate. one suggestion was limiting job slots, removing the "infinite" assistant slot. this would require:

- changing cyborgs to limit construction, since new latejoin borgs = new slots = bypass pop count
- respawns are now limited, first-come-first-serve; if you die and there are no more job slots, you are simply stuck as an observer
- population now depends on job slots and can vary by map, or in the case of stuff like security, weird dynamic caps. if a HoS joins, does that mean another player is allowed to join when the NTSO slot opens? that sort of stuff


one of the other arguments that comes up is "but people want to play with their friends": yes, that's part of the problem. letting them in to observe and watch doesn't let them play the game; it just means they're now sitting in the the afterlife bar or as a ghost, unable to interact or play. it also means that they're still not going to be able to even if they stay connected.



the jobs thing also has another really big, glaring problem that i realized: how do you handle round start? if you have 100 people on, and a soft cap of (say) 60 jobs, what happens if enough players are ready that all slots are full? does someone on the server get a "sorry, all the job slots were filled! you aren't allowed to play this game and must observe" message? for a hard cap, that's solved by just not letting them get to that step.


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edit: the round on 3 just started, and here are the numbers:
73 online
17 title

52 alive
0 dead
4 observers

players on the title screen for longer than, say, 5 minutes, could get an afk warning and then booted, which would open slots for others. or alternatively, only do this if the cap is near if you wanna do that.