Just a simple Vote to Boot option except:

- you can use it even after a player has taken their turn
- the votes persist across turns
- it results in the player getting Eliminated
- it can only be used in Practice games
- the votes must meet a threshold (which must be at least 50% with a quorum of at least 3 people that can also be specified by the host)

The main use case would be to enforce player-designed metagame rules, like PE status in diplomacy games- PE's would now be much less disruptive and the kingmaker effect will be much less pronounced.

In actions:

- knyte, a L.3 player, doesn't know how to play diplos but somehow gets invited to one
- Fleecemaster goes out of his way to explain to knyte how rules work and how diplos are not just fancy FFAs
- knyte decides to break them anyway because all he cares about is strat 1v1
- knyte has now broken the rules of the game but has no opportunity to disrupt things further (avoiding any messy situations) because he's voted out of the game the next turn

(worst case scenario: things go wrong, the feature is abused, and knyte just gets kicked out of a Practice Game. Yay.)

Could also work as a "Remove" option only available to the Host (which might increase abuse but would also make it more easily avoidable since then people would just avoid games run by Sun God once he did that) but I think Vote to Remove works better since it better reflects the gameplayers' ability to craft rules- i.e., the only rules that matter in practice are the ones the players care about.

But basically some enforcement mechanism for player-created rules that gets rid of the need for messy implementations like Public Enemy status.

Edited 2/6/2016 21:45:05

I like this

it can only be used in Practice games


This is key. Well thought out and useful. You should make a uservoice for this.

In this community, unfortunately, I see this being abused.
BUT I like it. I don't play diplos, EVER. The main reason?? Absolutely unenforceable rules given the current game parameters. And all it takes is one rotten apple to ruin the bunch.
No idea how this could be coded and implemented, but given the above scenario of it only being for practice games, why not?? They're practice games, what could go wrong, even if it's abused??

That would be goddamn great to eliminate people who are toxic/not accepting VTE or surrender requests. Probably one of the best suggested features, most useful in FFAs and Diplos. Only one problem... You should post it on uservoice instead of the forums so you get the legendary roadmap message.



Edited 2/6/2016 22:37:38

@Mer: As far as implementation goes, it depends on how Fizzer's implemented elimination but I'd say it would call the same function/method that gets called when someone's Commander gets killed- they just get straight-up eliminated.

@Zephyrum: I wanted to bring it up here so I could get some feedback. I think a forum thread is also a better way to establish interest and refine a feature. Then I'll make a serious uservoice and hopefully we'll get it.

- it can only be used in Practice games

Most important line of the whole text. makes no sense to abuse it, because you're getting nothing in "reward" for abusing. If this helps diplo-players, i'm fine with it.

Really, this is one of the best ideas out there for FFAs and Diplos to have less asshats being jerks around. But I don't see this happening, sadly.

Probably 50% is not enough because knowing some players, they'd vote to remove someone who has a large advantage, which can be pretty frustrating. 75% or 80% would probably be a step up.

The best option, in my humble opinion, is have a pop-up show up for everyone saying "should X be removed?" when someone starts the vote, and people can vote yes or no, and a set ratio (2:1 maybe? or 3:2 can work too) of votes is needed for the player to be removed. This'll prevent tactical removes since several decent people in a game should be able to stop the rotten apple.

And this can't happen in Ranked Games, for obvious reasons.

@Zeph:

The quorum + threshold would be left up to the host with defaults at 3 players and 70% of remaining players. They can then change the value of the quorum to anything between 3 and 40, and the threshold to anything between 50% and 100%. These will all show up in settings.

The quorum is the minimum number of players who could possibly vote that much be in the game for this feature to be in effect. If the quorum is 3, for example, you need at least 3 active players (not Eliminated) in the game to vote the fourth off the island- so it works all the way down to a game with just 4 players.

In order for the rule to get abused with default settings, you'll need a game of at least 4 players and 3 of them will have to vote to kick out the fourth one. Scale this up to 21 players and you need 14 of them to vote to kick out any one of them. At 40, you'll need 28.

They could agree to just take out the biggest player or take out a player that they don't like for some personal reason, but it's decentralized enough to make that a bit hard to pull off. Worst case, they just took out the player with the highest income in a Practice Game- so no real damage.

The best option, in my humble opinion, is have a pop-up show up for everyone saying "should X be removed?" when someone starts the vote, and people can vote yes or no, and a set ratio (2:1 maybe? or 3:2 can work too) of votes is needed for the player to be removed. This'll prevent tactical removes since several decent people in a game should be able to stop the rotten apple.

A dialog would work- you don't really need to track the "no" votes since it's simpler (as far as implementation goes) to treat non-votes as "no"s (and probably safer too). At that point it's just a version of Vote to Boot which instead forcibly eliminates a player.

The best option was sort of utopic (much more complex to implement - which is already quite a process of it's own). But the dialog would be pretty helpful, because even with these dialogs popping in it's still awfully long until everyone accepts a surrender...

I like the idea, although it might get messy later in games and turn into a game of mafia. For example, if there were 7 people left, 4 might band together to kill the other 3 instantaneously.

If we could do test games, it would be very cool to see how it would work

@ WOLF Navigator, that's the danger.

Or imagine a game that has turned into a huge war of say, 5 v 8.... even if the 5 had the power to win, the 8 could simply vote them out...

Even if this was added, I would never use it.

Any thoughts on further abuse-prevention mechanisms?

I mean ... If it is practice only what benefit would anyone get from abusing it.

Edit: we could also factor in armies per turn.

Edited 2/7/2016 02:02:12

You could get rid of the problem of players ganging up and voting out other players by making it so every player (other then the one being booted) has to vote to remove, but then the feature would be pretty inefficient. Also, it could just be bypassed by a team of two PE's, since one won't vote on the other.

Edited 2/7/2016 02:06:15

@Conquerre

What if the host can choose the amount of players needed to vote for it to come into effect?

Edited 2/7/2016 02:30:43

@Conquerre- you don't need all the players to vote to remove someone, just a specified percent between 50% and 100% (based on the Host's setup)

OK, then