Cosmic War

[icycalm]

I've been delaying the work on this because I hate the lawyer-y stuff, but we are getting to the point where we are going to need it, so I am starting this thread to jot down rules as they occur to me, before sitting down and making a web page about them. Feel free to propose your own, etc.

-For the Wars, I reserve the right to change systems in the lobby, if the number of players we get is significantly higher or lower than the number in mind with which the system was designed. Any system is game, but I will give priority to systems already featured in Clan Wars, especially once we have a couple dozen of them or so, and feel like replaying a previous one to explore alternate lobby compositions and strategies.

-For the Wars, I reserve the right to turn any lobby/system into "spawn anywhere", if the number of players we get is higher than 25. I will PROBABLY be doing this whenever the number is more than 30.

[icycalm]

-All players from a clan must have identical and identically-formatted clan tags. This clan tag cannot change from game to game unless I have agreed upon the change with the clan leader in question beforehand.

-All players must keep the same name from game to game unless I have agreed upon a change with the player in question beforehand. This name must also be the one by which the player in question is generally known to the greater community.

-Under no circumstances is a player allowed to use any other player's name. A clan that allows one of its players to impersonate another player -- whether belonging to the clan or not -- is liable to be banned in its entirety.

[icycalm]

-No whining in the lobby about "when the game will start". These are huge lobbies that take forever to get started, and your whining is merely delaying this process. If you whine, you will be cautioned, and if you continue, you will be kicked from the lobby. The best way to ensure the game gets going as soon as possible is to observe all the rules to the letter, including this one.

[icycalm]

-Each clan has a unique primary color that cannot be changed or ever used by any other clan. Whichever color a clan uses in its first Insomnia event will be that clan's color for all Insomnia events, ever. To reserve this color in advance, post in this thread as soon as possible:

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=5846

Unfortunately, there is a very annoying lobby bug that changes your color if your team composition changes after you have selected the color, so to ensure that your clan gets the correct color every time you need to follow the procedure for color selection we have outlined in the above thread. Please memorize this procedure as soon as possible, as it can help us save many precious minutes in the lobby, which is important considering that for some players some of these games take place very late at night and every saved minute counts and is best invested in playing than in dicking around with lobby acrobatics.

[icycalm]

-Players get a free/instant switch between clans just by showing up in the lobby with the new clan's tag.

The second time they want to do this they have to wait for a month between the last time they played with their previous clan, during which time they can't participate in any Insomnia events whatsoever. When the month has passed, they can just show up in the lobby with the new clan's tag, without giving any notice to me or anyone else.

The third time they do this they have to wait two months, the fourth time four months, and so on.

We want to allow people to switch clans in order to find the one that's most suitable to them, but not make it so easy that people keep hopping between clans and diluting clan identities which are so important for our events' success. If you are unsure if a clan is appropriate for you, it's best to play a few casual games with them over a few days/weeks, and delay representing them in our events until you are certain that you'll be sticking with the clan for a long time.

P.S. Please note that leaving a clan in order to create your own counts as a switch.

[icycalm]

-No player has the authority to tell any other player how to play the game via the in-game chat. You can give politely worded ADVICE to other players to "kill their dox" (better yet: to use them), or to avoid planet-patrolling stuff, etc., but ordering them to do so is obnoxious and annoying, and won't be tolerated. If a team has fought hard to gain an advantage, and they feel that using dox or planet-patrolling in order to maintain that advantage is crucial, then they are welcome to do it, and whoever cannot tolerate the resulting lag is free to disconnect and hand over his commander/units to his teammates who don't have the same problem. If an entire team has this problem, they are welcome to delete their commanders, which is the surest and fastest and most honorable way to "save the sim" or whatever. If you want to be the Lord and Savior of the sim, do like Jesus and sacrifice yourselves instead of ordering others to sacrifice themselves for your convenience. Of course if a team purposefully floods the game with T1 spam for no tactical reason, or even worse, in order to shit up our game, they will not be invited back into future events, so please don't do that.

-Related to the above, the casters have no authority to order the players to do anything. They can suggest whatever they want (though they should be careful with that, because giving advice of tactical or strategic value to the players is forbidden), but the players are free to ignore them. The only one with the authority to tell people to do anything in a game is me.

-No one has the authority to pause or unpause the game except me. When someone disconnects, our default action is to wait for them, except if the player's teammates urge us to continue, in which case I will unpause the game. Otherwise we wait until the player has reconnected or his teammates tell us that he cannot reconnect or has chosen not to. If in the future we reach huge player numbers of perhaps 40+ or 50+ players, to the point where someone is disconnected all the time, and waiting for everyone would mean that we'd never get to play, then perhaps I will change this rule and we'll start ignoring disconnects and never waiting for anyone, but for the time being, with games under 30 players, we can afford to wait for everyone, so that is what we'll do.

[icycalm]

-If your clan dies, please disconnect asap and go watch the rest of the game on Twitch so that your spectating won't take up server resources. This way the remaining players can build more units with less lag, and you get to see a better game.

If a clan doesn't do this I will be pausing the game and manually booting them by going into the server's controls (it's possible to do this, right recoil?), so please just do it and save me the trouble.

[recoil]

I don't know if it's possible to boot anyone during the game and I haven't seen any specific controls for it anywhere.

[icycalm]

mikey would know if it's possible and how to set it up.

Well, we'll have to ask the players to please do this then, and rely on the clan leaders to enforce it with their players.

[icycalm]

The spectator-disconnect rule might not seem very important now, but when we have 30 or 40 players and use spawning anywhere to get rid of a clan or two at the start, it will be VERY important. We don't want to have 10-15 people spending 1-2 hours spectating a huge game that could use the extra server resources. So please start disconnecting now the moment your clan dies, and develop good participant habits.

The clan leaders will be responsible for making sure their entire clan disconnects as soon as it has died.

The Twitch cast is more fun to watch anyway, so go in there and liven it up with your views and chat comments.

[icycalm]

-If two clans get the same number of points in the League, they play a tie-breaker match on neutral ground (i.e. a third clan's system picked via RNG).

[icycalm]

I thought of a rule that might be interesting to try. With every commander that dies, one player has to disconnect, preferably the one the commander belonged to. I know people will say "that's how unshared armies work", but I want only that specific aspect of unshared armies, not the other ones (which basically make close co-ordination impossible).

This rule would:

1. Give people an extra reason to take care of their comms, and to target enemy ones even in the early game,

and,

2. Lighten the load on the sim much faster than via normal comm death rules

The ultimate would be a mod that kicks the player out of the game the moment his comm dies, so that we wouldn't have to police this aspect.

I don't really see any negatives to it. If the mod was made I would want to try it out immediately.

Imagine how much more meaningful the decision to sacrifice a comm would become, when you know that you are sacrificing the player at the same time.

[icycalm]

We are trying to make a mod that takes away the "Review/Spectate" buttons when you die, and gives you a link to the Twitch channel. If we succeed, we won't need the relevant rule.

Of course we'll use this mod only for Clan Wars. For the League it's not needed.

[icycalm]

-How we roll the RNG for lobby positions.

We use this website for Clan League: http://justflipacoin.com/

And this website for Clan Wars: https://www.randomnamepicker.net/slot-machine

The procedure is as follows. In the League it's straightforward since there are only two clans. In the Wars, we roll when we start the lobby, on stream, for all the clans we suspect might show. E.g. for this Saturday, we expect APAA, BRN, BSE, CULT, NBT and pXs. So we roll for six positions, and we get an order. Then the clans take their positions as they arrive, and at the end, if some of them don't show, we close their positions, and the rest are ordered accordingly. And if more clans show, that we didn't expect -- e.g. clans that joined on the spot, or clans that haven't played in a while and weren't expected -- they simply take new slots that I open up in the order that they arrive.

An example stream from Clan Wars #7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GMC2fzxdds

[icycalm]

To participate in an Insomnia event, you must be present in the Insomnia Discord at game time: https://discord.gg/8Vx2Sax

[icycalm]

Last Saturday we had two or three people being rude in the chat. Two of them were clan members, iirc: one of them said "We don't care about colors", while I was trying to help some team leader get his correct color, and the other one said "Just start", in an effort to hurry me up and pile even more stress on me at an already stressful moment. And then there was one random I think just spamming the chat.

I don't know why I tolerated them, but I will not do it again. I have spent half a year of my life working on these events, and still spend at least 5-10 hours a week preparing them. On weeks where we are working on the mod, this number rises to 20+ hours. And that's just the work I am doing: if we add Robo and recoil, the figure rises to the man-hour equivalent of a full-time job.

Now I know most people don't appreciate anything we do, but I am not asking for appreciation, I am asking of people to not be rude. And I will be kicking from the lobbies whoever is (and banning them from the events the second time they do it).

In-game chat also counts. It is too bad that I cannot kick people from a game in-progress, but I'll be taking their names down, and this will count towards the total of 2 = ban.

Clan leaders, make sure your players realize that rudeness of any kind will no longer be tolerated. I am the one who says if we "care about colors". I am the one who says when the event will "just start". If some of your players are rude pricks, advise them to keep their traps shut if they don't want to get kicked and/or banned.

Once a player has been banned, I expect the clan leader to ensure that he no longer shows in the lobbies. If he shows in the lobbies with an alt name and plays in the event, and I later find out about it, the whole clan will get banned.