Fix pause abuse

[silver radish]

Fix pause abuse please @frank vector literally stops the game every time his teammate loses under 5min and then they force stop

[muted fractal]

⚠ Warned duxii

[silver radish]

I didnt bring up boss abuse idk how you got that impression on please read properly what I said was there are users who pause game because another lane died before 5min and they never unpause and force a stop which is under pausing and stopping abuse and no sportsmanship behavior.

[undone dock]

You can always votekick them. If the vote doesn't pass, then there's a lot more than just one player to blame.

[silver radish]

Oh trust me this just 1 but there are more people it's just something I wanted to bring up to this thread stop and pause needs to be reworked like cooldown or limited attempts same with resign votes.

[frank vector]

solution to pause abuse is simple: 3 pauses per player per match in ranked

if you still need to pause after 3 pauses you are distrupting the game too much anyway and should remove yourself/be removed

its also a proven solution by starcraft so just steal what works, things get over-discussed

[undone dock]

And the immediate unpauses can still be moderated the same as before

[frank vector]

also someone with a pattern of pausing during important events should eventually get moderated for cheating

[silver radish]

Yes I agree

[celest lotus]

lol another pause abuse complaint, this game is a joke

[reef karma]

I think something like pause with reason (command would be nice). That it shows not only paused but also the reason.

[blissful plank]

It can be discussed after the pause has begin - Most commonly I see pauses and then someone immediately says in chat "playing lagging" or "doorbell" or something, you know? There doesn't need to be a prerequisite input line - And if nobody says anything after 20-30 seconds, then just unpause and go from there, right?

[near pumice]

Isn't there already an option to turn off the ability to pause in your custom ranked lobby?
I know for sure issuing commands can be disabled, I thought we could turn it off too.

[blissful plank]

I don't see it in the lobby settings - but I think that's by design as a... Not sure what to call it, Quality of Life / Safety thing?
That players can pause briefly when they need to, and unlawful pauses can be unpaused, etc.

[earnest trail]

what if pauses required a vote, and a reason for the pause before activation. also to stop people from abusing pause, why cant everyone screen black out

[raw badge]

That breaks the use case of "brb door", "brb phone", "brb my dog is on fire"

Having pauses limited by number sounds okay though.

Also I congratulate the OP who seems to have sobered up and deleted the initial messages - they were, in fact, rather silly 😛

-# or just got banned ig

[reef karma]

What maybe could be nice would be something like a pause wheel, where you can pause and provide typical reasons at the same time.

[raw badge]

Eh, adds complexity.

-# but if we do end up going with that, one section needs to be just 🔥 🐶 🧯

[obsidian wing]

there is another fundamental issue that's worth looking into - 'system log' is way too small and non-expandable (%s paused the game, lua error, %s went idle, %s normal quit, etc)

really hard to track any info, there are no timestamps either

[raw badge]

Agreed, the visibility of that is poor, but it would be better discussed in a separate thread probably.

[obsidian wing]

probably yeah, but fixing it would fix the 'who paused?' questions

UPD: created separate post https://discord.com/channels/549281623154229250/1513803382756872322

UPD2: you can Ctrl+Shift to expand that log while hovering it

[quaint shard]

This is actually a very interesting proposal! Perhaps not that trivial to implement since everyone can unpause. Maybe limit both pause/unpause, and instead of having an hard limit, use a cooldown? E.G: 1 min cooldown, after each additional pause (or unpause) the player's cooldown goes up by ((previous + 1) * 2) minutes.
Did I overcomplicate it? 🫤

Rationale 👆
Removing pause completely might be unfair since things can happen (in game glitches? Real life unpredictable events?) but it should happen rarely, otherwise it's most likely abuse

Somewhat related: do I remember correctly that pausing/unpauseing doesn't show up in logs? That's a little annoying -- after the message goes away, there is no in-game memory anymore (I do like that it shows up separately but it should also keep track of that)

[frank vector]

that is how sc2 does it yes, it limits both pretty sure

the standard way to finish a 1v1 in that game was normally to use up all your pauses before game end to annoy opponent before resigning

it was not so bad the winner just had to unpause a couple of times xd

[obsidian wing]

that's true, it was funny, you really knew that opponent was butthurt if they did that

[quaint shard]

Do you want to turn that into a concrete proposal, detached from this thread? It seems quite solid compare to the current status.
P.S. I've seen "unpause" being abused a couple of times too, and the proposal would fix "one player going crazy about legit pause" too (i.e. cannot keep unpausing if the rest of the team keep pausing)

[strong hatch]

I think limiting visibility is an interesting idea. It's hard tac pausing when you can't see the map...

[undone dock]

And instead of tactically pausing to get a better control of the situation, you will tactically pause the game to disrupt your opponents control.
You know, having your screen blinking with pitch-black is highly disruptive.

[strong hatch]

Hmmm... There are ways... Severely increase the blur + lock the camera. It won't disrupt the opponent but will prevent you from using pauses to see what is happening. But this is preventing proper investigation when there is a genuine reason to pause like griefing

[red raven]

Please don't make the game experience miserable just so Timmy doesn't accidentally get half an OS more than they deserve. If the game is paused, let me look around and click stuff....

[strong hatch]

It can be an option to enable/disable

[midnight isle]

The way Deadlock does it, there are 3 pauses per team, and one is usually used up in the beginning for lane swapping. A system could work where each team gets 3 pauses and restores 1 per x minutes of gametime

[strong hatch]

That will tac pauses the default

[midnight isle]

I am not saying that pauses should be used that way. I rather tried to explain that in Deadlock with even less pauses it doesn't lead to issues

[earnest trail]

if its an emergency they have no reason playing a game, however if its about having to answer a door most people will just pass the vote

[sturdy onyx]

Tbh I equate this to people freaking out about widgets... if people are tac pausing kick them. If the lobby doesn't care enough to kick them then its not a big enough issue to enforce it through the game. Sure maybe limit each players number of pauses, it wont do anything to address the issue as most people are not tac pausing anyway, and if they do they certainly are not doing it repeatedly and limiting the count to 3-5 or w/e wont prevent the single instance use case that is the most common. If you make it so I can't pause the game when the kid/dog/door/emergency happens then I and most people (as previous games have shown) will just get up and leave and simply not pause and odds are I wont even bother coming back because...why would I if it took more than 30 seconds? What is worse, someone getting to issue a few move commands during a pause that you can already disable, or not even knowing someone is gone cause they are not lagging and had to leave abruptly and not being able to pause the game to then kick the player to then take thier units? I think those scenarios are going to cost Timmy a lot more of his precious "number go up juice" and broadly more common than Captain Tac Pause trying to preserve 0.21 of thier 30-50os. The idea that I am going to type !pause, child is screaming yes/no? into chat is silly.

People also should consider that we already have pause issues with the lack of engine exposure and functionality in Recoil and managing pauses is not straight forward, some of this stuff suggested, if it were to be implemented in a production quality way, wouldn't even be possible afaik.

We might be able to limit per player pause count in some janky gadegtized command wrapper but actual pre-pause engine level protection is going to take a recoil fix. I already ran into this issue trying to make a courtesy pause gadget and it was denied because of the lack of engine support and we will run into that same issue for most (nearly all) of the suggested fixes.

Recoil currently only exposes pause events after the game has already paused or unpaused via GamePaused(). Without a pre-event hook to allow or deny pause requests, Lua can only react after the fact, forcing mods to use pause/unpause workarounds instead of cleanly intercepting the request before the game state changes.

TLDR: The engine doesn't support it, https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/1067?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[frank vector]

I'm not sure about it because 8v8 dynamics are so difficult

if you make it per person 3 pauses a team still has way too many pauses but 3 pauses per team is probably too low

maybe pauses should trigger a countdown timer before becoming active to diminish their tactical effects

[quaint shard]

if you make it per person 3 pauses a team still has way too many pauses
Yeah but that's not necessarily bad. It's usually one player abusing pause/unpause, and it might be best to prevent that from impacting the other team members who might actually need a pause.

maybe pauses should trigger a countdown timer before becoming active to diminish their tactical effects
That sounds good too! Even a short-ish countdown like 5 (or 10?) seconds would be very effective against tactical pauses.

[frank vector]

the downside of a cd timer for pause is that ppl with a dead mouse might lose their army and the game during it

[quaint shard]

It indeed penalizes the real "emergency, now!" cases. In practice, the impact might not be huge. E.G. the dead mouse still implies the user to realize it's happening and type /pause in chat, so it's already a few seconds gone

[frank vector]

true and also these kinnda losses already happen because the game does not autopause for players that lose connection and if nobody notices in time they will lose their armies too

[quaint shard]

Yeah people usually realize what's happening when they hear the "player lagging behind" message, which is already a bold 10+ seconds late. If you are microing front, you already lost 🪦

[undone dock]

and type /pause in chat
have you heard of the keyboard button called "pause"
or the possibility to rebind it to whatever else, if for some reason your keyboard lacks it

[frank vector]

overall I think I would prefer to play with like a 10sec pause delay timer for sake of fairness

[frank vector]

also unpause should for sure have a timer too lol so we dont have to type 321 in chat like dents xd

[quaint shard]

Sure, I know the pause button exists. No, I don't have it on my keyboard. And No, I didn't rebind the command to another phisical key ||(as probably 99+% of the players without that button -- you nerd! 🤓 /jk ofc!)||

Still, the point is that real emergencies already imply a delay before pausing, at least in most cases, so the penatly would be real but perhaps not as impacting as one would think. There should still be an option to turn on instant pausing for specific purposes (e.g. in 1v1 tournament, I would rather trust people than see games ruined by the delay)

[frank vector]

yeah a pause option optimized for more...rugged conditions in public 8v8 lobbies would be amazing

[midnight isle]

The delay is half a second at most for me. I think it would cause more harm than help due to the low amount of where people really abused the pauses (not when others felt it was abused)

[quaint shard]

I see your point.
What about leaving the pause instantaneous as default, and adding an option for the delay? Some lobbies could still turn on the option, but it won't oppress the majority of the casual lobbies where this actually isn't a problem?

Regardless, I think the unpause countdown would work well in all cases.

[strong hatch]

Oh absolutely. I just needs engine work afaik