Lobby Decisions - How to start a game?

Yes, that was my intent, sorry I didn't clarify

I'm going to also vote against displaying everyone's ping.

It just leads to irrational judgement and predjudice, when ping isn't even that reliable a measure.
At best, it would be informational to see your own ping, but I don't think it worth the dev time to include at all.

Ok to address a couple of issues first:

Ping - not going to happen. This isn't necessary and having a bad ping doesn't effect other peoples games. Exposing ping is just going to create confusion.

Planet Background loading - this is an extremely high priority for me. I kinda freaked out when I realized it had gotten broken. We have top men on this.

Other issues like showing the systems better etc. are not on topic for this thread which is concerned with starting the game.

Top. Men.

Ok here is the final proposal.

- everyone has a ready button, players can un-ready at any time
- when all players are ready the game launches with a fairly quick countdown (5 secs) - if someone unreadies during countdown it will stop
- lobby leader controls the config and can change this at any time. If the config changes all of the ready buttons are unset so people can make adjustments before clicking in
- the lobby leader has a kick button and can kick people that are problematic - this is the trump card for people who are griefing (open question, should a kick also be a kick-ban by default - it is for now for this lobby)
- we will echo more things in chat. For example clicking ready/unread, people joining, leaving etc.

Originally I had proposed that the lobby leader can force a start. You guys have convinced me this is a bad idea mainly because forcing the start of a malformed game is pointless anyway.

There are some other subtle things I would like to address going forward (like the ability for the owner to move people around between teams).

I admit that there is plenty of places people could argue about details of this (like we are doing in my office right now) but this is what we are going with for now. It's simple, it puts the power in the hands of the lobby owner.

Ok all in all this sounds great.

I like the kick function, but I think banning the player immediately is a bit rough... can't you ban people manually by clicking on their names in the lobby, if persistent annoying players are coming back.

So what does moving players mean? I join a game with my friends, we are one team and the host can just move me to the other team? Definitely a no go for me.

I also would like to have shared armies an option that affects everyone or no one. I find it difficult to play a match where one team has this enabled and the other doesn't. Especially since they can use teleporters together and so on.

Sounds near perfect.

It would be nice if the lobby recognises a game with only one human and every other player an AI, and so skips the five second countdown.

I agree with kick being kick-ban for that lobby.

I think that they get banned only from re-joining that specific game:

What happens when a host accidentally kicks a player, or their is friendly trolling? Will there be a way for the host to remove the ban? Or put a time delay on the ban. It will be bad if its automatically banned by default if there no way to reverse mistakes.

Recreate the lobby. It's not like the UI element is hanging around near other buttons.

I would like a permanent ban for trolls or whatever... if someone is repeatedly coming to troll... I would love that.

For the lobby itself, why not have the option to kick or ban... wasn't it like this before Gamma?

Isn't this already in the social settings?

The point of kicking is to remove the need to restart the lobby. Why, if there is a mistake would you punish the entire lobby by having to restart? Adding a tab that has additional commands for the entire lobby would be simple enough. One command opens up a list (it would probably be a small list) of banned players where the host could unban a player who was wrongfully banned.

So you kicked/banned someone (lets say by accident) 5 other people are already in the lobby, abandoning and recreating a lobby sounds more difficult than a simple kick.

Awww... Methlodis was faster...

But what if I leave my own lobby by accident? I need a button to reown the lobby!

No. The button is waaaaaaaay over on the right, it's not near any other buttons you'll be clicking. If you're clicking it by mistake the odds are the lobby isn't what's worrying you right now, it's the seizure you're having.

IMO definitely not. Either there should be separate 'kick' and 'ban' buttons, or if the same player is kicked from the same lobby twice, it becomes a kick-ban.

I don't like a UI that makes decisions like that without being clear about it. Why not just have "kick" and "ban" buttons?

You could add a dropdown button on each of the players that is only visible to the host (duh), and can display kick, kick for x amount of time, and ban. That would remove clutter and give the host all the options theyy need.

Though you don't HAVE to have kick for time, but would be nice.

What is the purpose of the kick button if they can rejoin? What problem does it solve?