Bot Feature - (Duck) Community Building Test

Dataworm

Ex-Admin
Ex Admin
22 Feb 2015
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Hey everyone,

some of you may have noticed some new features I recently added spontaneously. Right now (might change) you might see messages from AI Bot like this appearing ingame:

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This message shows up when a player joins that is member of ED steam group and is ONLY shown to the ingame players that are part of the group as well. So regular players will not be bothered by it. It is somehow a test for community building so that members of a clan can easier recognize each other and maybe get in touch.
In theory the same could be applied for EH group. Since EH group is more limited, it may not be so useful since EH clan members might know each other anyway. For EH fan group it may be more useful, even though members of that group will find people who like the eh server all over the place.
For those of you who can see this message, I would love to receive feedback from you! Do you like the feature, do you consider it as spam or do you simply don't care?!
Would you also like to see such greetings for EH Fangroup members? Or should there be a greeting for every player that joins (which would mean that also every player would see this message whenever someone joins)?

Another similar feature in testing that has been added recently is the command !duck which will simply list you all ED members that are currently playing on the server.

Looking forward to feedback from some more players!
 

Slowian

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I think that it isn't really needed for EH group, there's only a few of us playing right now and we know each other. For me also, it's pretty easy (hehe) to notice when another member joins the game. That's just my opinion tho.
When it comes to creating it for EH fangroup or the whole server... I don't think it's a good idea, it might create too much spam in the chat. Maybe that could work if there would be option to disable this message for yourself?
 

Dataworm

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22 Feb 2015
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Yeah based on reactions the options would be to keep it that way, remove it completely or provide an opt-out ;-)
 

JUNIOЯ'

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Well, sometimes you have good ideas, but here I'll put that in the ideas that bring nothing more.. that's the kind of thing that can happen say "I'm going to leave the ED group, too much spam" and then are the IDs added manually, or automatically, and if a player leaves the group will he still have the messages... too much inconvenience for EDs and in "collateral damage", for EHs

Already, I don't think you're going to get that much feedback from the Elite Duckerz or even from ordinary people here (I consider myself ordinary), most people just want to play and it will remain spam like any other.. the best feedbacks will be the ones that have the message and will talk about it immediately in game I think, and then it's a public group, there are 333 players at the moment in the group, a bit like the welcome message when a player connects, no one pays attention to it anymore.
And let's say there are 40 Elite Duckerz on the server, with each new map there will be 40 more messages than the usual welcome messages for them ? I've never seen 40 but that's a guess

For private groups, most know each other pretty well and you don't need that extra to see that a member is connecting, I agree with what Slowian says

Me as long as I don't see the messages I don't care, but since the time you've been playing on the EH you must know that they do everything to avoid as many "useless" things as possible or which would take too much time for newcomers players to download or see
The server has just what it needs, not too many goodies, not too many messages popping up everywhere, not too many commands (as you can see on other servers), quite "oldschool" as players like / learned to like again

Focus on the things you've recently done / posted (warrants / administrative commands ...) I find it rather interesting and it's very good ideas that provide additional help, don't wasting your time for a bot that says hello to the duck that connects, even if you are very good at this kind of thing, you should forget this one..

Let's see if others have different opinions
Well done anyway, I am unable to do that
 

easy

Dances With Zombiez
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I have to admit don't really like it either, as some of your clan members are admins and sometimes need to do undercover work. Unfortunately your open clan has many rulebreakers that are now warned whenever an ED admin joins...

I left the group meanwhile, too many disadvantages from my POV^^
 

Dataworm

Ex-Admin
Ex Admin
22 Feb 2015
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@junior: It was actually a quite spontaneous idea which I mainly worked on during one evening. So yeah it was not a well-planned feature and if it would have consumed much more time I surely wouldn't have wasted my time with it.
From old experience (I had a dashboard for active members for over two years ago) I can say that it's usually not much more than 10 players ducks at the same time, these days rather less than ten at evening times.
The system works automatically, so when someone joins or leaves the steam group, it automatically adapts.
Even though many of those players are probably not playing on eh anymore, >300 players is quite a lot and only a few use the clan tag. Also since over 3 years I get notified whenever someone joins or leaves that group. But even I often see players that are members even though I wasn't aware of it. On the other hand there are many players that play the game like we ducks usually do but they are not clan members nevertheless. So for me personally, I get a better feeling of the members being around.
Got also positive feedback from 3 ducks so far, so this feature surely does have a positive side. But the question remains if it's worth it or if there is a too negative impact as well.
And when it comes to spam, EH produces so many other messages that spam me ingame, these few join messages would be by far one of the smallest issues for me even if I wouldn't like to see them. ;-)

@easy: I had the same thought in regard to greetings for EH members. In that case I would totally agree that it could be bad for being undercover. For ED it might now be so worse as there are simply so much ducks around, but yeah after some time it could be a warn sign for some of the very active players. One solution might be an opt-out which would disable these kind of notifications being send when you join.
 

Dataworm

Ex-Admin
Ex Admin
22 Feb 2015
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3 people like it, 2 do not like it. Not enough feedback to make a good decision, most ducks probably also dont look into the forum and I am too lazy to ask around. :-D
So for now I come to the conclusion that even though it has no really negative impact as far as I can tell, it also may not have a big advantage either. And since I am also too lazy to fix the negative parts that currently exist, I deactivated the join messages.