On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 05:34:25PM -0400, Zach Uram wrote: > Several times this week I've noticed no t on pickled yet 4-6 players > on warped. Right now we have 3 on pickled and 5 on warped. This has been happening for months, or even years. Why are you so concerned now? Bored? > I am formally petitioning the Developer Council (forget what it is > called) if there is anything we can do about this problem? There is a Netrek Infrastructure Team, consisting of Carlos Y. Villalpando, Dave Ahn, Karthik Arumugham, and James Cameron. If you have a matter relating to Netrek infrastructure which you would like addressed, please mail the team, at: carlos at jpl.nasa.gov,ahn at orion.netrek.org,karthik at karthik.com,quozl at us.netrek.org (That's according to the ServicesList page on the Netrek Development Wiki). Now, regarding your problem. It can be seen in another way. You find yourself unable to play on warped due to the feature mix, and you wish that everyone who does accept the feature mix on warped would not do so. The same could be said of the players there. They find themselves unable to play on picked due to the feature mix, and they wish that everyone who does accept that feature mix on pickled would not do so. It sounds very similar to arguments about other feature mixes. My opinion is that warped should be removed from metaservers and be blocked by client programs, because we have too few players to justify having more than one or two active servers splitting the available players. But this is not an autocracy with me at the head. Thank God. Others in the infrastructure team have views that conflict with mine, but that doesn't mean I can't continue to work with them. What we do agree on, we will do. So is there anything the infrastructure *can* do about the problem? Not really. We might try to block warped, but the blocks would be trivially circumvented. So is there anything the infrastructure team *will* do about the problem? Yes, we'll maintain the infrastructure as independently as possible, regardless of the feature mix of client or server that the player population demands. In this hope we will sustain an environment that will welcome Bronco players. p.s. I'm speaking for me, not the team. What can others do? - uninvolved developers, can provide independent builds of the most popular clients, independently of the primary developers, so that greater trust in the process can develop, so that single developers do not become unnecessarily powerful, - players, can stop bringing this issue up, but instead spend all their time on the server with the feature mix they prefer, and participate in development to ensure the clients have the features that bring in new players, - client developers, can add features that are actually needed to bring in new players, - server developers, need to add appropriate server side support for features that will bring in new players. Great, Zach, by raising it again, you help both sides of the debate. -- James Cameron mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/