Ages / Expanded races unused

[Gwledig]

Hi I'd just like to start by saying that Wesnoth is awesome and I've been playing it since it came online, thanks to all the folks who've been involved in making Wesnoth what is has become.
Going onto my topic, I think the expansion ages/races are great but I must say we rarely ever see an expansion age game in the lobby, and I've noticed when you try to create such a game you find users who don't have the download or notice the game easily gets out of sync due to mismatched versions of the ages on different players' computers. This is my idea, I think Wesnoth should select by popular/forum discussion a core set of races/ ages to incorporate into the standard distribution of Wesnoth, so these agreed expanded races don't need to be downloaded separately and when you go to create a game you see both age of heroes and other agreed races appear in the list, this would enrich the game a lot and do the following:
* avoid need for users to download the agreed set of expanded ages/races
* ensure players on a set version of the game like 1.65 have the same version of the races (unless they upgraded ages/races before the next game version)
* Avoid out of sync and crashes due to different versions (or reduce the possibility of this considering the point above about users manually updating their ages)
* ensure users do use the expanded ages, whilst at present its something people kind of avoid due to the problems above
that's it just an idea!
best
Gwledig

[Pentarctagon]

or everyone could download ageless era

[thespaceinvader]

Not gonna happen. We pride mainline on being carefully and accurately balanced. Wholesale adding of things which we know are not balanced is not going to happen, art issues aside (and for most of the expansions, the art issues are large). We're currently considering adding one extra faction to mainline multiplayer during the next dev cycle, but it remains to be seen how successful this will be.

[doofus-01]

We pride mainline on being carefully and accurately balanced.

I don't think Gwledig is proposing anything like moving all add-ons to default era. He was pointing out that lack of synchronized distribution is a crippling problem with add-on eras.

Gwledig: There are so many versions of the add-ons because each one is mostly a 1-3 person project. A new version gets released when personal schedules allow it. Anyone can start (and probably never finish) an add-on era, so I really do not see how they can ever be synchronized. You wouldn't want the main game to be held up because an obscure faction wasn't quite ready, and who knows if the author has disappeared.

[Rya]

Eras (especially ageless era) strongly reduce the speed of Wesnoth. I'm glad not many people use non-default eras.

[Gwledig]

I see all the posts above and agree with them all but I still think wesnoth could improve the way it all works, one idea could be an auto update for addons so everyone isn't out of sync, another idea might be to display the era being used more clearly in the lobby game list, and a warning/auto boot if a player trying to join doesnt have the correct era/version for the game being joined (they can join without the right version at present), this is pretty basic stuff you see in commercial games & probably be easy to implement as it's only looking at (*) what era name or codename is being set up, (*) what era version is being used. Yes I know users can download eras from the 'add ons' button and update them but a lot of players use era versions from outside the game, so you get told to go to some web site to download it, some users can't figure out most of the process so a few of the above ideas would simplify it for players.. ttfn Gwledig

[Rya]

One question: Why is it I can sometimes join and sometimes not join a game with an Era I don't have? I completely agree that people should only be able to join a game as player if they have the Era.

[Velensk]

It may be because you do not need to have downloaded some eras to play with them. I think the development server has made some improvements in that respect but I've been on it for so long that I cannot think of any specifics.

[ancestral]

I see all the posts above and agree with them all but I still think wesnoth could improve the way it all works, one idea could be an auto update for addons so everyone isn't out of sync

An auto-downloader that grabs the correct add-ons when you join a game would be freakin’ awesome.

[chaoticwanderer]

Not gonna happen. We pride mainline on being carefully and accurately balanced. Wholesale adding of things which we know are not balanced is not going to happen, art issues aside (and for most of the expansions, the art issues are large). We're currently considering adding one extra faction to mainline multiplayer during the next dev cycle, but it remains to be seen how successful this will be.

[Gambit]

chaoticwanderer: Kalfia or something like that.
The only UMC faction that the developers believe is balanced against mainline (designed by Noy?).

edit: Edited because there was some ambiguity, and again because the text was too big, and yet again because my second edit messed it up.

[chaoticwanderer]

chaoticwanderer: Kalfia or something like that.
The only UMC faction that the developers believe is balanced against mainline (designed by Noy?).

edit: Edited because there was some ambiguity.

Huh. Is that the persian inspired faction?

But anyway, what caused the developers to change their view that the mainline factions are good as they are? I mean, I have no problem with this development, it's just that it seems contrary to the messages usually given to the noobs who frequent the 'ideas' forum, by the mods and developers.

In addition, I'm curious as to how this will also fit into fluff and official Wesnoth canon.

Regardless, I wish the devs good luck with their bold undertaking.

[Gambit]

Well they're a multiplayer faction. Do they need to fit into canon?
And who's to say someone won't craft a Kalfia campaign some time in the future. It's not as if Wesnoth's story is set in stone (or even finished for that matter).

[pauxlo]

Also, the plan is to offer both current Default and Kalifa + Default.

[Rya]

While changing a faction can completely destroy the balance, adding a new faction isn't this bad. The new faction simply need to get balanced against the other 6 factions, while the 6 faction are still as balanced to each other as they used to.

The developers statement was always something along the lines "We consider the 6 factions already pretty well balanced against each other and won't change them." but they never said something against adding a new one.