@garat @varrak Whenever I spectate an in-progress match, the planets load, but I can't see any units.
See the following: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/spectator-mode-broken-cant-enable-player-visibility.63681/ https://forums.uberent.com/threads/cant-see-anything-in-specator-mode.62747/ https://forums.uberent.com/threads/spectating-nothing.62013/ PA#3272
I've been reporting this since release, but looking at that beta site linked above, you mean this has been a confirmed bug since March? Good golly. What bugs me is that in the three or four times I have created or responded to threads about this, not a single soul, including the devs, tried to help resolve the issue. The spec system can't be entirely broken; after all, people are posting matches everyday with seemingly live play-by-play commentaries. So what's so special about our setups that we can't view the players but most others can?
The others can, because they are present as spectator in the game lobby. Once the game has started, there is no way to spectate an already running game. You can watch the replays afterwards just fine though using the replay browser and the lobby ID. It's just a low priority bug as you can tell.
And there may be people who do not even want that others randomly can watch their games while in progress.
@ezerek recently commented and noted that "Oh, didn't know this was still happening". It will get worked on.
The default spectators is now zero so it's only possible if you add spectators. (it was 1 just prior to release)
Ah! Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I finally know the reason for my two weeks of frustration. The thing is, though, I kind of figured that might be the problem, but whenever I try (only three times, actually) to join as a spectator to a game still waiting for players, I get a "Login Failure" (or something similar) message. So based on that, I figured the opposite of what you said and thought the game had to be in progress first. (For in-progress games, I always get "Login Accepted.") Anyway, again, thanks for the explanation!
Yeah. Looking at the lobby right now, there are four games in the queue, all with 'Spectate' set to 0/0. So, in a nutshell, random spectator mode is not supported? Will it ever be? Edit: Yay! After two weeks, I was finally able to spectate a couple of matches tonight. To answer my own question (struck out above), I guess it seems the match creator/host sets the # of spectator slots in the match creation screen. So, yeah, I doubt most people care one way or another, so if defaults to zero, it will probably remain zero since the creator simply doesn't notice or care. So please consider changing it back to one.