[SUGGESTION] Match making/game schduler

Been thinking of way to attract more players to the game or at least get more current players involved. Most of the time I'm too busy to have the game open and be checking back and forth to see if anyone is playing and idling till someone comes in. I can't keep an eye on the game all the time and I see people come and go quick if I don't respond right away if I'm idling in game

I think having a game play calendar that can be accessed through the site/in game or a small notification program/app on phone/linux/windows/etc would be beneficial to get more game play on the servers, especially the NA ones which for the most part are dead but for a short time span during the day.

I guess to keep the system from getting spammed in game one would have to be registered on xon.org or restrict game time creation to one at a time or once every few hours.

Also if this can be time consuming I might be willing to fork out some $$$ or we could do a donation drive like we did with the monsters which worked out good.

No bites on this or brainstorming? I belive EACFreddys little app could be a start or the system?

The "group" that introduced me to Xonotic was using http://www.needtomeet.com/ for scheduling games, if it helps.
It's essentially a poll for time slots to give an idea when and how many people will go online.

Sounds like a good idea to me, but who's gonna develop it? we don't have enough developers for the game itself.

I like your idea. Although not exactly what you are suggesting, many activities are addressing this problem in different ways:

1. IRC pickup channels

People meet and sign up to play a game. The drawback is we can't schedule some time in the future. Sometimes the waiting time is so long that people leave before we get enough players.

2. Xonotic cups or tournament announced on the forum

These are scheduled events so people WILL show up. The drawback is it takes a lot of organizing efforts.


These are my alternative suggestions, for now:

a. Have a shared Xonotic game calendar, either one big calendar for the whole community, or one calendar for each server. Then on Xonotic.org, we show a page that displays the calendar(s) or RSS feed. People can put their planned play time on the calendar.

b. Players are encouraged to organize small unofficial events and post them in the forum. For example, you can write a post saying, for example, next Saturday July 9, 2016 at 11:00-12:00 UTC you'd like people to go to BuddyFriendGuy Fun Server for a series of CTF games.

FWIW: For Calendars, ICS is the format of choice. While RSS can be made to work, there's absolutely no standard on putting calendar-based events into an RSS format.

Added bonus: You can subscribe to most ICS feeds using Google, iCal, etc. Even Outlook works (depending on how it's feeling that day). Google can export public ICS feeds so you could have different Google accounts for each server group, event org and/or clan, etc.

There was a great calendar tool that allowed you to pull in lots of calendars to one (is a WP plugin) but they've recently made a nasty change in how it works, so until they fix it (if they fix it) I can't really recommend it. Which is a pity, cos it'd be great for this sort of thing.

I like your idea. Although not exactly what you are suggesting, many activities are addressing this problem in different ways:

1. IRC pickup channels

People meet and sign up to play a game. The drawback is we can't schedule some time in the future. Sometimes the waiting time is so long that people leave before we get enough players.

2. Xonotic cups or tournament announced on the forum

These are scheduled events so people WILL show up. The drawback is it takes a lot of organizing efforts.


These are my alternative suggestions, for now:

a. Have a shared Xonotic game calendar, either one big calendar for the whole community, or one calendar for each server. Then on Xonotic.org, we show a page that displays the calendar(s) or RSS feed. People can put their planned play time on the calendar.

b. Players are encouraged to organize small unofficial events and post them in the forum. For example, you can write a post saying, for example, next Saturday July 9, 2016 at 11:00-12:00 UTC you'd like people to go to BuddyFriendGuy Fun Server for a series of CTF games.

1 & 2 at least for me are useless, I don't want to depend on IRC or care much for cups.

a & b are good start, is has to be accessible by anyone so from xonotic.org is a good start.

Having a way to import the servers in the server list and remove or add new ones automatically would be good.