Cut Down On Empty Lobbies

[StoPCampinGn00b]

Hey guys, sorry for the wall of text!

Most of you know that lobbies that don't start for over an hour still exist and that's a problem. After being semi-active here for a few months and being registered for almost 2 years, I've come to learn how many beneficial things that ENT offers. A regulation of game ruiners, fair rules, various tools and commands to improve the overall experience, balanced competitive play, a non-hostile environment, ranking system, replays / logs, and much more.

However, empty lobbies helps no one. It's bad for both battle.net and ENT.

The opinion that empty lobbies don't do any harm is hard to back up. The opinion that empty lobbies help people cannot be backed up. So it's on a scale of it being negative-neutral. I truly believe that this pushes away playerbases away from ENT and Warcraft 3. A good chunk do not know about the game lists on MMH and ENT. While many of us have worked on spreading the existence of those lists to help people find games because those are truly helpful and it makes finding games easier than ever, there will always be tons of people who don't know about it. To get people to find out about that is for people to read the announcement messages the bot gives in the lobby to check out the forum, but how can you expect people to follow those if they think ENT is just spam and WC3 is dead? Yes, numbers may be lower right now because the Garena playerbase can't connect to ENT, but from what I see in ENT public threads, there's no guarantee they'll be able to join ENT games again.

What needs to be done is increase the frequency of active lobbies. How would these be done? Well, the easiest way is to cut down on the empty lobbies. A cut down on the latter 20% would be fair and make a difference. Around October, there were around 25 autohosted games that launched less than 25 games in the last 7 days. A game that starts 25 times a week means an average of 3.6 games gets started per day. That is extremely low and are essentially spam lobbies for 95+% of the day. 50 times a week is only 7.2 per day, which is once every 3-4 hours on average.

I don't want ENT to be shut down in Patch 1.27 because of the quality of the games. By showing that these many bots don't just flood the lobbies being empty, it gives more value to the quality and maybe, just maybe, saves a ban on these autohosted bots if blizzard dares to execute such a bold action even after our Hive team personally gave reasons not to ban host bots to Blizzard's 1.27 team which reached out to us.

So thanks for reading! I hope you guys will consider this. @uakf.b

[aRt)Y]

I really start to dislike your threats all about the new patch. You should word it carefully.

Regarding the lobbies, we had those talks dozens of times. Yes, we can reduce them once we decide on which they are.

Does ENT spam wc3? No. We have auto-host bots, yes of which the majority is hosting games. Compared to Gamers.Host or dota void or whatever, we spam less and dont flood bnet channels with annoying spam bots and have more overall players.

Besides, I dont really see your goal/interest here. We shut down 10 bots, fine. Then what? Will HWS be happy then? I doubt. bnet's gamelist will still be trash and instead of repeatly insiting on removing bots, Blizzard should get their ass up and provide a gamelist with filtering options which is at least from the 21th Century.

Bnet offers custom games, yet, do they host them? No. Do they provide hosting options? No. Any major gaming company provides free hosting (be it server-sided by them or via bots/creating lobbies by users).

It's really tiresome and I am not sure whether the majority of players will start hosting HWS or any other mapper's community maps just because bots are gone. _If_ Blizzard decides to remove bots (even tho I dont know how they would do that considering it's a simple user account after all), TFT will turn into what RoC is at the moment.

Instead of searching the fault in others, Blizzard should take a look at the mirror first.

[StoPCampinGn00b]

@aRt)Y

I really start to dislike your threats all about the new patch. You should word it carefully.

Sigh. I'm really sorry about that aRt)Y, I didn't mean it as a threat and I failed to see how it could be a threat. Also, it was only the second time I mentioned the patch here, first one being private.
What I mean to say is that is that blizzard might and precaution should be taken to show that bots ain't all bad. It states in this in the latest b.net end user license agreement:

Blizzard may revoke your license to use Battle.net and/or the Games if you violate, or assist others in violating, the license limitations set forth below. You agree that you will not, in whole or in part or under any circumstances, do the following:
[...]
Bots; i.e. any code and/or software, not expressly authorized by Blizzard, that allows the automated control of a Game, Battle.net and/or any component or feature thereof, e.g. the automated control of a character in a Game;

Basically, the idea is that removing lobbies that people consider as spam helps the chances of blizzard just ignoring ENT or reverting an action to do you know what. If the event is on the likely side that they won't, it helps ENT's image and allows a better proportion of active lobbies anyway.

Regarding the lobbies, we had those talks dozens of times. Yes, we can reduce them once we decide on which they are.

What do you mean by can? In some old threads parallel to this, a staff member usually says they'll consider it and that's the end of the conversation. You even said that it may be a resolution to get the empty lobbies cut down. Also, don't you guys already know which they are since you have a list of stats?

I need to be clear that this is not in any way at all for Hive nor on behalf of Hive; this is just a suggestion / proposal in what other people and I think that can help ENT and maybe battle.net out. They are backed by a few reasons and that's all. Yes, some see it rude for people to suggest what would be better for another community, but I thought I tried my best in being objective, polite, and honest. Hopefully you can forgive me, sorry again.

We're on the same side but we might have different thoughts on how to help the WC3 community, with or without Blizzard. It's a hobby for me.