Force Start Once In Game!

Hi,

A small feature that I think would help greatly (and shouldn't require too much work) is to add a force start command that can be called once we get into an actual game.

We tried to play several 10 player games with Zaphod earlier today and it took 5 attempts to get the game started as for various reasons 1 player wasn't available. We would all have been happy to play minus one, however there was nothing we could do to get the game going.

Spring RTS uses an '!' symbol at the start of a word for server commands (e.g. "!Force" for force start). A simple command like this that would allow us to kick the game into action in the event of a problem would be very handy.

or a timer. people could abuse this otherwise

Well I'd prefer a voting command to the timer, in spring !force brings up a vote which requires majority of players to !yes before it passes. The issue with the timer, is that people often leave before its up, and it doesn't allow you to wait for a reconnecting player. A command system givers players more control.

Alternatively !force could be used to kick off a shorter countdown timer.

Until the last build there was a 5 minute timer, not sure why it was removed??

yes people could (and thus would) abuse this.

I don't really see how putting it to the vote is an issue? This is a proven working system in spring. The only way to abuse it is for a team to refuse to vote, in which case you go for a re host anyway.

Voting to issue server commands is a proven strategy that works in a variety of games including Spring and TF2. I don't see why you are insisting it leads to abuse. It can only be abused by a concerted effort.

There already is a timer in the game, but it's broken now and so instead of staring after 5 minutes it just breaks and the game can never start.

5 Minutes can still be an annoying amount of time to wait esp if there are only 2-3 starting locations. But if there are a lot of starting locations, esp if there are more planets than you can get a commander on it might not be enough.

I would like to see some kind of scaling timer (one that is actually displayed as well) so the more spawns you have the longer you have. But also once people start to ready up the max timer should go down, so if the timer is 10 mins and 1/2 the people ready up the max timer should be 5 mins.

You buddy is playing too much warcraft 3.
But i agree a force start command will be extremly usefull in the matches since it can get rid of game hijack

I'm confused, is there something about Warcraft 3 that relates to timers then?