Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.

[BlackRedDead]

@maudlin27 ...i want to see how you sprint to the bathroom, even just peeing (and don't forget to wash your Hands!), in just 30s! xD - yet alone answer a doorbell or call, or looking after what you kid/pet did that made those loud noises!

[BlackRedDead]

There's also another potential fringe case issue with all of this - what if someone said he/she/them is away for ~10min, so everyone else is also doing something else in the meantime - but then the player that initiated the Pause comes back after 5min, unpauses and might get the advantage of others being absent from their PC for another 5min - huge advantage, and doesn't even need to be by malicious intend! - so if possible, a general unpause vote, would be the "ideal" solution IMHO (if someone abuses the system by repeatedly pause without good reason, that falls under the rules already! - ofc, an accidental pause would be much more annoying, but maybe it's possible to print votes into chat? - so if the person who pauses immediatly unpauses, ppl know that it's a mistake and just vote unpause aswell and continue playing^^)

[maudlin27]

@BlackRedDead said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

@maudlin27 ...i want to see how you sprint to the bathroom, even just peeing (and don't forget to wash your Hands!), in just 30s! xD - yet alone answer a doorbell or call, or looking after what you kid/pet did that made those loud noises!

I already explained in my post how 30s per pause would mean 3.5m in a 3v3, in the same sentence as mentioning 30s so it's not hard to miss...
If you need the game paused more than 3.5m then it doesn't seem fair to force one team to have to wait that long (even if half the players in the game think you should), and 3.5m is plenty of time to do things like answer the doorbell.

[BlackRedDead]

@maudlin27 said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

I like the idea of a pause with a fixed length before a player can resume, providing it's relatively short. Around 30s feels reasonable to me, since the default is 3 pauses, so in a 3v3 with 30s that'd mean your teammates could pause for 3m (in addition to the 30s from when you pause and have to go afk) with no further pauses then permitted by them.

Avoids any need for moderation, and strikes a balance between competing interests (since resuming the game while one player is afk likely ruins the game, but it's also no fun to be forced to wait for ages because of one player)

well, it seems i somehow read the first sentence wrong, i assumed you mean a fixed pause of 30s, wich would be ridiculous - i should have read twice there! xP

But, you also did an error - according to your calculations, it's 4:30min total, not 3! (tho, idk why you made that calculation in the first place? - other than maybe to show how much time your proposal could waste in the worst case, when everyone uses all their pauses?)
math = 3 pauses x 3 players in a team x 30s
(wich is the theoretical MINIMUM time a team could waste, if everyone uses all their pauses - wich is arguably WORSE than the current state, in wich you don't have (much) of a delay between pause and unpause/resume)

But that's still just a delay! (like already proposed earlyer, with 10s) - wich, regardless the lenght, only makes things worse.
Having to wait 30s just because someone accidentally paused (worst case) - while on the other hand you go away, assuming you have time, but after 30s someone unpauses = same issue as before, just with a 30s delay. - that proposal solves nothing.

@maudlin27 said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

@BlackRedDead said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

@maudlin27 ...i want to see how you sprint to the bathroom, even just peeing (and don't forget to wash your Hands!), in just 30s! xD - yet alone answer a doorbell or call, or looking after what you kid/pet did that made those loud noises!

I already explained in my post how 30s per pause would mean 3.5m in a 3v3, in the same sentence as mentioning 30s so it's not hard to miss...
If you need the game paused more than 3.5m then it doesn't seem fair to force one team to have to wait that long (even if half the players in the game think you should), and 3.5m is plenty of time to do things like answer the doorbell.

And here you state 3.5m(in?, or meters?) now, where do you take that from out of a sudden??? - could you get your thoughts together first and check your math?

That argument (to NOT force ppl waiting longer than necessary, like with a delay) is exactly why i'm against your proposal.

Even if you would've added a point about making pauses only unpausable by the player who started them, this makes no sense back or forth thought - just adding delays solves nothing - even my cooldown (between pauses initiated by the same player*) idea only delays abusement of the pause function! (but only makes sense when the player that initialized is the only person who can resume the game, or by vote!)
*wich doesn't prevent a team initiating pause after pause, but at that point, you ofc meet a team of trolls!

[BlackRedDead]

I think a vote system could be possible - as to actually pause/unpause the game for other players, the game has to send the (pause/unpause) signals across clients (or rather to the Host), wich can be intercepted and put trough a AND logic until enough signals have been received, with some code to make it work with a majority vote, before sending the actual "resume game" signal to the clients - while printing in chat who's (resume) signal got received to make it transparent to players
tho, i'm by no means a programmer, just an experienced modder!^^ - but someone has to like spending the hours to find out the correct signals (with potentially someone required to help finding them!), write the code and test it! ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[maudlin27]

@BlackRedDead said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

But, you also did an error - according to your calculations, it's 4:30min total, not 3!
And here you state 3.5m(in?, or meters?) now, where do you take that from out of a sudden??? - could you get your thoughts together first and check your math?

If you're going to make such comments you should be really sure that you've calculated things correctly. Which you haven't. Despite quoting me where I spell out the calculation for you. 3.5m means 3 and a half minutes, or 3 minutes 30 seconds (something that is obvious from the context). That is made up of 30s (that's seconds...) for the first person pausing when they go afk, and 3 minutes for their teammates who maintain the pause when the enemy team decides to ignore the request and resumes. Since you come up with a 4.5m figure as a 'correction' that suggests you are assuming an afk player is always able to pause the game while afk - in which case they're not actually afk.

In terms of the more coherent argument you make that the problem with this is the risk of accidental pauses, if it's possible to allow either the pauser or anyone on their team to resume the game that would solve the problem. If that's not possible then a shorter delay such as 20s could be done to balance the risk of an accidental pause against the risk of someone ruining the game by resuming.

[Jip]

@RudePlayer said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

Something to be said about this, and all moderation actions/rules, which I know may not be part of this discussion at hand but, can we please stop with manipulating the ban hammer for everything. (...)

All of your suggestions already happen. They're just not transparent to the average user. Moderators have a backlog of everything a user did that is relevant to the moderators. There's a lot of thought that go into some reports, up to the point that there's even a Discord channel between the moderators and some game team members to discuss whether something is a bug that is being (intentionally) (ab)used or not.

If anything, try to become a moderator. You'll see (and help maintain) the nuance that you request.

@Nuggets said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

Not to mention "oh misclick"

You can unpause your own pause just fine. I mentioned this - the delay only applies when you try to unpause a pause that is initiated by another user. Unrelated, the other quote of me is in my opinion a little bit of a clown reaction. That's okay, but to what purpose?

All the discussions about turning pausing into a vote - it is fundamentally not how the game works with pauses. Every user can pause the game. And every user can unpause it. The comparison with Recall is not correct - Recall fundamentally works different. They're not comparable.

It feels to me a lot of people are just thinking in problems. We won't ever get to a solution like that, even if the solution means that the original problem is not perceived as much as a problem and therefore does not require any changes.

[IndexLibrorum]

@Jip said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

They're just not transparent to the average user.

We've recently released a webpage that explains this whole system in quite some detail. To be found on the main FAF website at https://faforever.com/moderation.

It should help, thought I doubt more than a few people will take the time to read it.

[BlackRedDead]

@maudlin27 said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

@BlackRedDead said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

But, you also did an error - according to your calculations, it's 4:30min total, not 3!
And here you state 3.5m(in?, or meters?) now, where do you take that from out of a sudden??? - could you get your thoughts together first and check your math?

If you're going to make such comments you should be really sure that you've calculated things correctly. Which you haven't. Despite quoting me where I spell out the calculation for you. 3.5m means 3 and a half minutes, or 3 minutes 30 seconds (something that is obvious from the context). That is made up of 30s (that's seconds...) for the first person pausing when they go afk, and 3 minutes for their teammates who maintain the pause when the enemy team decides to ignore the request and resumes. Since you come up with a 4.5m figure as a 'correction' that suggests you are assuming an afk player is always able to pause the game while afk - in which case they're not actually afk.

In terms of the more coherent argument you make that the problem with this is the risk of accidental pauses, if it's possible to allow either the pauser or anyone on their team to resume the game that would solve the problem. If that's not possible then a shorter delay such as 20s could be done to balance the risk of an accidental pause against the risk of someone ruining the game by resuming.

Oh great, now you're trying to gaslight me instead using a calculator, how adult from you xP sarcasm - this is exactly what you stated:
@maudlin27 said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

I like the idea of a pause with a fixed length before a player can resume, providing it's relatively short. Around 30s feels reasonable to me, since the default is 3 pauses, so in a 3v3 with 30s that'd mean your teammates could pause for 3m (in addition to the 30s from when you pause and have to go afk) with no further pauses then permitted by them.

Avoids any need for moderation, and strikes a balance between competing interests (since resuming the game while one player is afk likely ruins the game, but it's also no fun to be forced to wait for ages because of one player)

3pauses x 3players/team x 30s = 270s / 60s = 4,5min

but doesn't matter, your proposal doesn't address the underlying issue of ppl breaking or abusing pauses (unless you add a delay of 2-4min, wich is indeed enough to check/take care of most IRL distractions, wich is absurd, as you could be back much sooner - especially if it was accidental!) - not to mention if adding such a delay is possible, a vote system is too, and the much better alternative - that might indeed also waste time (as n of players are required to click unpause, to actually unpause the game, wich takes a few seconds longer...) in case of accidental pauses (...still less than a static delay!), but given everyone should be ingame anyway (unless someone told/asked for longer afk times, and others might use that time afk too), not all to much and much less than 30s! (propably even less than 10s.)
While also addressing the issue that the person that initiated the pause, could gain an unfair advantage by being able to singlehandedly unpause again, while others might be still afk too - wich is why a simply majority vote is needed at least (51% or 5/8p), or clear majority vote (75%), or make it require each and everyone to unpause (100%) - given the importance of player active time in this game, i now think that's not only the codewise simpler (as a simple AND logic), but also overall better option - as annoying it can get or potentially be abused by a single troll to not unpause... xP
but you could change that afterwards if that becomes a widespread issue. (but afterall, the issue were disgussing here, is ppl unpause, not ppl refusing to unpause, tho currently simply not possible - but given most ppl are here to play the game, i think that won't be as much of a problem than currently ppl unpausing because they wanna play - but i do see ppl not understanding they have to unpause, so some chatprint would be really necessary to explain the need to unpause, and tell who already unpaused!)

[BlackRedDead]

@Jip well, the question is how pauses are executed - clicking un-/pause needs to send a signal to the host and eighter to all other clients, or the host to all other clients to do so - if it is possible to only add a delay for everyone else but the person that initiated the Pause, that means you already have(to)/know a way to identify that specific client that send the signal - thus it's possible to write some more code for a simple voting system, and for the chat printouts - yes, it's lots more than a simple delay, but still not all to much - testing it potentially requires more time.

Ofc it's much trickier if the person that clicks un-/pause does send the signal to all others and thus un-/pauses their game directly too, clients&host, but you could still use that system to have an AND vote, that requires everyone to unpause everyones game, before it actually resumes
(just at every client, than just the host)
Tho in that case, it needs an exception procedure for players being dropped out in the meantime! (to not await their unpause signals anymore!)

[Jip]

@BlackRedDead said in Suggesting rule change: make immediately unpausing after a player asked for a pause against the rules.:

Tho in that case, it needs an exception procedure for players being dropped out in the meantime! (to not await their unpause signals anymore!)

And hence, my case that everything gets complicated.

I appreciate your input, but it appears to me that you do not understand the code base and its limitations. We do not have access to how it works internally - there's two globals exposed to the user side of Lua that allows a user to (un)pause the game. We can add additional logic on top of that, such as a small delay. But we can not mess with how the signals are sent over the interwebs. That's all in the binary and it is definitely not something we should mess with.

I also do not believe that people will 'abuse' this. It feels really dark and pessimistic. A small delay in a pause exists in other games too. Besides, any form of abuse can be reported. And if individuals really want to stop or break the game out of spite then there's easier ways to do that .

[BlackRedDead]

@Jip yea, as said i'm by no means a programmer, just a modder - i just modify code, thus learnt to understand it a bit and the overall way how things work - but that's it, i only can invision a way it could work, not write it on my own, else i would do. (well, assuming i have the freetime... - and more available than the SteamDeck and my Notebook atm xP (to code AND test - Linux is good enough for day2day IRL Tasks, but not really modding friendly, given most tools are Windoof only -.-#))

Well, my proposal asumes you can detect, and delay the execution of said signals, trough some AND logic checks, and print their receiving in chat - NOT mess with how they are send!
But i respect your expertise in this.

This tread is a Testiment about how Stubborn and Ignorant players are, else it wouldn't be that much of a Problem that it asks for some sort of treatment or solution.
But they are indeed mostly that way because they want to play and can't wait for a few Minutes on their own xP - but the kind of player that would abuse a Pause with delay to take advantage from or just to annoy everyone else, currently has no power to do so, so we will only get to know them when they have that Power! (trough a delay/minimum Timeout time)
Maybe it's near to no Problem at all, only time&experience can tell.

Well, about the forced duration of the Timeout/Pause - 10-30s is to few and wouldn't prevent Pause wars, just delay them.
IF the player that initiated the Pause can in fact unpause immediatly and thus mistakes are no issue, i think 2-4min Pause is a good lower target - i personally would vouch for 3min, despite i definitively need longer to answer the doorbell and take&sign a large package - and if you have kids, you know there are things you can't resolve in 3min eighter, but ofc you can't expect ppl to wait much longer than 2-4min - despite pretty much everyone having a smartphone or other device nowadays, you could easily distract yourself for 3-5min! - or do something reasonable and do some sports exercises in the meantime or brew a Tea/Coffee
And ofc the Person that innitiated can just unpause when being back again. (wich is the much bigger issue with this IMHO! - tho, ofc only when other players use that timeout to do other things afk too!)

But if the Player that innitiated the Pause is also affected by the delay (to unpause again), then that figure drops down to 1-3min IMHO - 2min being the best compromise, giving enough time for most tasks you might need to use a Pause for, while not forcing an unreasonable timeout.

I challenge everyone to simulate and measure how much time it would take them to answer the doorbell, get dressed up (like in summer when it's how or in winter when it's cold) and take a package, including signage, and getting back to & rdy at the PC!