Afk hosts in unranked lobbies

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

I recently played a couple of unranked games. And in a lot of cases the host just was afk. Even after several minutes of having a full lobby with everyone readied up, the host didnt show a sign of life, being a big waste of time, the other 7 players in the lobby, would have liked to play.
This system makes it easy for trolls to be trolling, since its easy to setup: host a lobby, which seems to have a lot of people attracted to, and then just go afk.

So as a solution to this proplem I would love to see something implemented to prevent this. Some thougths on this topic:

  1. Host has to click a box (or have any interaction with the game) every x amount of time (lets say 1 minute). After that minute he gets a audio notification to show he is there. Then if he does not respond within 30 secs the lobby gets cancelled.
    Problem with #1: maybe its some kind of gamemode where lobbies take long to fill. So this is just bad for the host bc he cannot set up lobby, tell the people already here “afk for 2 mins”, go to restroom and come back (which I think is totally fine on FN for example… lobbies take up to 10-15 minutes to fill)

  2. Instead of cancelling one could hand over the lobby to someone else that is in the lobby. This solves the problem with the FN example I gave.
    Problems with #2:
    -the new host migth not have a UGC (user generated content, like FN, CBA, FVD, Roll the Dice etc…) therefore he wont be able to share that file (I guess this would mess up stuff)
    -the new host migth have joined an Arabia lobby, but does like Arena more and then change, so everyone who joined the Arab lobby now is in a Arena lobby and migth not notice (this would not be great, but still acceptable I guess)
    -there migth be cases where the lobby is tried to be handed over, but no other player is in it (I am worried about stability)

  3. Instead of cancelling the lobby or handing it over, one could implement a “host is afk” warning, that has to be shown in the lobby browser and can be filtered out (like the only-games-that-have-cheats-enabled-should-be shown-option (anyone ever used that? 11)). Also people in the lobby get a message about how long the host has been afk.

This third solution is the best solution I came up with so far, and I dont see any noticable disadvantages so far.

I dont know if its just me who has this kind of issue, since I have never seen a thread about it before. Did you ancounter this type of people as well? Any better solutions to the problem?

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Do afk timer in suggestion 1 to close lobby but do not start timer until lobby fills up (continues to run unless host clicks something even if players leave lobby afterwards, but does not start to count down until the lobby has been filled up at some point) - no issues for host waiting for players, if someone joins last slot and leaves immediately before game starts host can just click anything on screen to stop afk timer, if host is actually not there the lobby will close and they will have to make a new lobby after they get back to their PC

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Perhaps make a voting system: if all other players checked “I am ready” and are waiting for the host, after 1 minute they can unanimously vote to throw out the host. But changes to the settings aren’t possible after that anymore, so they only wait for a new player to replace the host. Once that new player checks “I am ready” the game starts immediately.

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Would work with vanilla custom lobbies but a lot of the custom lobbies have a data mod or a custom map, if any players do not have this they download the file from the host when the host clicks the ready button so the game would not be able to start without the host in it anyway unless one of the players happened to have that file and got assigned as the new host

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