There are a lot of custom matches where Hosts (the player who created the match) puts little information to match title (like “Megarandom nomad FFA no noob”) (yes, there is a cap for amount of letters, I know) and you join the match, you go get a coffee, the game starts, you play, you enjoy it, until enemy comes with 50 mangonels, 20 bombards and 120 knights. That’s when you realize: “Wait, this isn’t a classic 200 pop match”.
OR in the middle of game you realize resources are multiplied by 10 (small stone has 12500 stone, gold vein 25000, tree 1500 wood, etc) and you know the game is gonna take 5 hours to finish.
People often ask in game “what is the pop limit?”. It is way too often that hosts put some random settings, which you don’t know about in advance, they don’t inform others about it.
Could the UI inform players better about what match they are going to play? Like if host changes anything in the match settings, it should put a message in chat “Host changed mod to 500pop”, etc.
And just anything what would be helpful for others to understand what they are about to play.
It should say more clearly if a mod is being used. It does show in the lobby though doesn’t it?
I don’t know how you could possibly go about displaying the changes every mod makes though, unless its title is explanatory. How would you go about parsing mods and then making whatever they’re changing a UI element? Some mods change one thing, some change dozens. I don’t see how you could do that very well without restricting what mods can actually do to a preset list of things and having those items tie into the UI.
That’s not what I meant.
I don’t want them to list whole programming code of the mod.
I only suggest to show in chat that some mod has been selected during lobby, when you are already joined.
Because you know what they do? You join a match, you see that it has no mod, and host puts some mod he wants to play in the last second before clicking start the match, and most of the players don’t notice it.
And there are tuning packs, which are not even shown in list of custom games.
And there is map seed, someone puts there his map seed that he knows and plays megarandom ffa with it, so he knows where is the ideal position to setup a base.
And there are win conditions that can be changed in the last moment too.