the situation:
Mr.d4n and I wanted to play a private practice match on TTL3_Fractal for trying out strategies for Hera’s Colluseum. I hosted the lobby and unchecked “record game”. But a recording of the game was uploaded to Aoe2insights, showing the strategies we practiced against one another. We did not know, that we had to uncheck “allow spectators” in the “create lobby”-screen to prevent this from happening. Now Mr.D4n and I might potentially lose Hera’s Colluseum in our respective J and K brackets because our opponent will know about our Fractal lamegame and we might potentially lose out on… tens of dollars.
the problem:
In order to have a private practice match for tournament prep, you have to uncheck “allow spectators”.
This is not something, that you can figure out, without doing it wrong at least once first or being told by somebody who already knows. That makes it a badly documented and misleading setting. Since this defies reasonable expectations of what a setting does, I call this a bug.
some proposed solution ideas:
Rename the setting from “allow spectators” to “allow spectators and upload game publically”.
Make the tooltip for the “allow spectators” checkbox mention, that it will upload a recording of the game to the public.
Make the tooltip for the “record game” checkbox mention, that it this will not affect whether an upload of a game record to the public is made and make it refer to the “Create Lobby”-“Allow Spectator”-setting.
Make unchecking “record game” in the game lobby, also not upload the game publically.
Add a separate checkbox option in the “Create Lobby”-screen or the Lobby, that says “Upload game recording publicly”.
Some of those ideas might be too much work. So instead of doing nothing, please consider just adding more info to the tooltips. That way, it becomes way less of a guaranteed gotcha-situation at least once per try-hard tournament player and more akin to a rarer oversight.
