[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#12642) Voting considered harmful

["Jason Short" <jdorje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=12642 >

Per I. Mathisen wrote:
> <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=12642 >
> 
> Still not satisfied with the voting code, I took a step back and decided
> to try something else instead.
> 
> Why?
> 1) Voting is not user-friendly. This may change with GUI support, but this
> does not seem to be coming, nor is this easy to add.
> 2) Voting is relatively complicated.
> 
> Here is an alternative:
>  - We remove voting altogether.
>  - All players must press 'Start' (or /start) to start the game. A message
>    indicates who has pressed (or this is shown in a new start game GUI).
>  - First player to join becomes 'game host'; if the 'game host' player
>    leaves the game, the game is restarted; only the 'game host' may
>    change settings, and only during pregame.
>  - If there is only one human player, or _all_ players do /cheat on a
>    connection; this connection gets extra privileges; this gives a way to
>    add a referee, or change settings problems, for instance.
>  - cmdlevel is removed entirely; hack commands are available only to
>    'game host' and 'cheater' that are trusted (same reqs as now)
>  - Doing /endgame during the game removes you from the game; using
>    "set endyear" is deprecated and left for single player games.
>  - You can always /ai yourself. This is however irrevocable without
>    getting a referee into the game as described above. If you only want
>    to leave for a while, use /away, which does not allow using
>    the AI for cheating.
>  - /score is removed - see other patch.
> 
> Ths is similar to how Starcraft and other RTS games do it, and I think a
> much more user-friendly way of doing it than our current way.

This isn't good because HACK actually is a security measure.  It 
prevents a foreign client from connecting to a locally-spawned server 
and taking over it.  It prevents players from saving games in arbitrary 
locations on pubserver.

I think your system is still too complicated.  Simply having a game host 
is enough.  This is accomplished with cmdlevel ctrl first.  Having an 
info-level command that (if used by all players) raises the cmdlevel of 
a player to ctrl would also be good.  Alternately ctrl access could be 
automatically passed to another (the oldest) player if the last player 
with it leaves.

-jason