Drop 'Bot' column in lobby
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Would be helpful from a code perspective, and I think from a UI perspective as well to remove the 'bot' column in the lobby window:
Typically when opening lobby I see:
The column in question is the one to the left of "EV". I personally sort by host name when wanting to view bots, all bot hosts are even required to begin with the word "bot".
Expanding the bot column so it's visible:
Opening this thread to track discussion around this if any.
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@lafayette I actually hope or think all sort by players or game in prog lafay (either way to edit in) the bot column does not matter but it would be nice to keep it for the future maybe? To be used for other things?
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@lafayette I was against that addition, when veqryn made it, but now I think it has a good value in glancing how many non bot games are being hosted at the moment. I'd keep it.
Also, I suggest renaming "Bot" to "Auto", or maybe "-Auto", in the "Host" names. Noobs sometimes think that bots are something AI related.
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I think it has a good value in glancing how many non bot games are being hosted at the moment.
@Cernel do you regularly use it for that?
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@lafayette Yeah, now I can see there is only 1 private game hosted; it's the fastest way.
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Vs just sorting by hostname? I think that is what most players do.
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Maybe the Password colum can become a "Y" / "N" thing. So that would give both the info if the game is passworded and if it is a private host, since you cannot password automated ones, which would have neither Y nor N, but maybe a "-", there. Or the automated hosts names can start with a "-", as I said.
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Actually what I suggested Veqryn back then, instead of the bot column, was to have bot names starting with "-".
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Okay, I think the answer is this column is not very useful. Let's not make this a drawn out question, it is a simple question and does not need a lot of time. It's easy then to drop it. If we find we have a need to more easily identify bots than just sorting by name, it is easy to submit a feature request. Hopefully our feature request process is effective enough that will not get lost, but that is another problem and would mean something about how we handle feature requests.
Not useful code and features have high costs, ongoing. In this case we have UI clutter. This is one more column to take up space for me and our default sizing has the name not even visible. From a backend perspective, there is data wired to this column in a very dirty way that is hard to maintain and prohibits unrelated work related to bots. So unless something is "yes, that is useful and I know it gets used", we can/should streamline so we can move faster and focus on things that are more effective/useful.
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@lafayette I confirm it gives very little value. When it was made, I opposed veqryn, saying that it was not good to make an additional column for no good reasons, but I was the only one not liking it, even tho now I'll admit it is not as totally useless as I thought. I cannot give the link to the discussion where veqryn presented this feature to the community, since it was in the old WarClub.
A minor thing to take into consideration is that, without that, I could feign my host to be a bot, by calling it with a name starting with "Bot" and putting "automated_host XX" in comments.
