There was an old post on this back in March here, didn’t want to necro it but I wanted to bring it up again as I’ve experienced multiple rounds in the last week where the larva queue 1 minute after round start is upwards of 10 people.
Drulikar’s proposed solution in the last thread to restrict observers/potential marines? to weeds hasn’t been added at this time, and I feel as though allowing players in the lobby to see the size of the queue will promote more people actively playing on the server, as I imagine many people would play marine if the queue was long enough, and more people playing marines will reduce the queue time for those waiting. I’m totally willing to be given a reason this would be unhealthy for the server, but I don’t see any downside to seeing the length of the queue (and not xeno pop numbers) before you join.
Apologies, larva queue is hard for me to wrap my head around and I might have missed this in your linked response, but is it possible to see your position in queue while you’re in lobby before ghosting?
Cause sometimes I’m put in queue the second I observe round, then realize it’s too long and wish I had rolled marine. Then you have to pester admins to send you back to lobby
I understand why the larva queue is the length it is and why it changes, I’ve had to tell a lot of people about how it works in dchat. This doesn’t seem to invalidate wanting to see what the max current length of the queue is when I’m at the lobby screen.
Honestly a decent idea. All this would do is allow you to decide better if you should go marine or xeno.
You can already see how many marines are still avalibel, you even get info on what roles marines have a lot of currently and from what little. Like, joining xeno while knowing marines only have 2 HM? Thats pretty usefull info. Or that there is one ComTec.
So there isnt really an argument againt it balance wise, especially because xenos would only give the info “how many people are waiting to be xeno” wich aint intel.
Only problem this really has, is somebody needs to code it.
A new_player (person on the lobby) is not a valid xeno candidate but your time of death is set if this was your initial connection for that round upon entering the lobby. You won’t be selected for a larva until you observe and if you’re pressing the join as xeno button, you’ll only get the informational message explaining the queue (Edit: You will only get the message “There aren’t any available xenomorphs or burrowed larvae.” because there is an observer check prior to the queue info message here: cmss13/code/game/gamemodes/cm_initialize.dm at master · cmss13-devs/cmss13 · GitHub). But yes effectively every player connected has a time of death set so ever they pass all xeno candidacy checks they’ll be notified how many other valid xeno candidates are ahead of them currently.
Knowing how many players are behind you is irrelevant because they will always be behind you in queue.
Knowing how many people can possibly be ahead of you will be misleading because the count will be very large and grow larger and larger the longer a round has been going on. Only if we blocked new connections after round start would this be useful.
You are told how many people are presently ahead of you.
However, as far as determining whether you ought to observe vs go marine: sure that can be lobby information.
Yeah, doesnt need to be 100% acurate information after all. The current info you get of your position in que isnt 100% as well after all. You can get a larva even if your not 1st.
Just a rough number of how many are in que in general would probably be more then enough.
Not daring to code that though. Pure ideas guys here.
