Do you know who these trolls are? If so, is it possible to code games where certain people are not welcome to join? That might fix your problem. I don't know if they would entertain that philosophy here but, if you count enter the players not wanted then....?

ssorenn,

No, it is not possible to prevent certain players from joining your games. The best way to prevent people from joining games with you is to set your games on private. The moderators cannot and will not prevent people from joining public games.

I said I was not certain that the site would consider that, thx for clarifying.

Is there a reason why a password won't solve your problem?

I am guessing that he can't use a password because he needs to advertise for it. The troll would be able to see the password in the advertisement. Unless he knew enough live players to PM them all.

Just have people interested PM you and you give them the password privately.

That... Is a really good idea.

You always say you spend "all this time" organizing games. I too, start a lot of games, and you know how much work it is?

1. Make game
2. Post in live games thread
3. Maybe post again a few minutes later

Done.

@ssorenn

Thank you for the suggestions. Please keep them coming.

Unfortunately, setting any kind of a password for a game makes it effectively likely that the game will not start.

My first thought was that this indicates that some players were too lazy or stupid to deal with a password, although I no longer think that's the case. Upon further reflection, I think that plenty of players here are not just casual players, but are ultra-casual players. Meaning that they log on once or twice a week (after band practice, or when the kids or in bed, etc.) just to see if a live game is starting. If a live game is not starting, they will immediately just log off without checking the discussion boards. Indeed, experience with other gaming communities indicates that only a minority of active players actually reads the discussion boards, and an even smaller minority actively posts.

Regardless, I can confirm that the use of passwords is not a workable solution to that problem.

Well it's the only option you have at the moment unless you can talk ssorenn into developing it (I believe he did another mod recently, although it isn't on the site yet) and then get Kestas to actually push it up.

Might I suggest trying two of these suggestions in combination?

1. Advertise the live game 20-30 minutes before start.
2. Request that interested players PM for password.

This would accomplish two things - it would let you control who plays, even if the game is anon, and it would diminish the time commitment to setup. 3 hours to set up a live game is excessive. By their nature, I think live games on this site are a catch-as-catch-can proposition. But if you play at the right times (M-F 5:00-9:00 PM EST seems to be the sweet spot) I don't think you'd have any issue with a passworded live game. It seems like you aren't the only one who wants to add that element of both quality and commitment to your live games.

Also, you need not create the game until you have your seven players lined up, then create it and set a 15 or 30 minute till start time on it and PM the ID and PWD to them.

One thought would be to create an Invite Only Live Club. Approved by you and select others.
You can create an email list if you wanted or use a website/forum thread to organize the people.
Similiar to organizing Raids in World of Warcraft, you can create a general schedule when people would strive to meet up for Live Games. Example : Tues/Thurs at 8PM.

All games would have the same password that only members of the club knows

@2WL

Thanks for weighing in, bro. And while I understand that your intentions are good, much of the advice that I'm getting is sounding a bit out of touch.

After all, if the Colonial-era starving French peasants had a surplus of cake on their hands, Marie-Antoinette's advice wouldn't have been so unfortunate for everyone involved.

My substantial prior experience with this is that, as stated above, creating a password effectively serves to kill a pick-up game. I need to emphasize that we currently *do not* have the playerbase to support something like this.

Our community is caught in a vicious cycle. People are going to start wandering off to pursue other hobbies if we cannot give them a reason to keep logging back on. Live pick-up games are very appealing to part of our user-base, most importantly to the casual gaming fans. If you are limited, by reasons of lifestyle, to maybe six hours of gaming per week, WebDip is only a reasonable gaming choice if you can pretty much count on a fun game starting around the time you happen to casually pop online. If players are unable to experience this, they're going to wander off.

For what it's worth, I followed your instructions last night, and not a single person PM'd me for the password.

Our problem is not passwords, it's trolling. If we can't get a handle on the trolling situation, things will be unlikely to prove.

The quality of the high-end games won't improve until we have more of a playerbase to recruit from, and playerbase won't grow until we are able to make sure that people are having a good time when they log on.

I can promote and fill games. I can make sure that most casual players are having fun. Only a minority of people, a few individuals, are preventing me from doing this.

I can and do have the patience to work with the trolls on this to help them understand why they're causing problems, but I will ultimately need some authority to restrict bad-apples from my games in a way that won't deter casual gamers. Passwords are not the solution. It's not me, it's our playerbase. The players have spoken. People don't like passwords.

Let's put our heads together. I understand that this probably won't be solved today or tomorrow, but I've had enough fun here gaming that I don't want to give up simply because a few people are making this issue inconvenient.

So if you can't actually say certain people are not welcome, what about a line in the code where people under a certain point value can't join. In the setup of the game if you say only people with 250 or more in their account can join..it would seem to me that most trolls probably have 100 or less and if they get back to 100 anyway they have nothing to lose by trolling and quitting if it doesn't go their way. People who have built up their points are less likely to throw them any on a troll.

Thoughts?

This way no individuals are singled out

There had once been a discussion about creating individual blacklists. Perhaps, a blacklist that only works for the game creator to keep people he has blacklisted from joining and gives a warning to anyone who has a person already in the game on their blacklist that they will be joining a game with someone from their list (if anon, don't say who, so they can't break the anon should they choose to join anyhow).

I wish I did PHP and had some time, but alas I am in the midst of learning all the new features of HTML5, CSS3, and the JavaScript/JQuery enhancements that support these two.

The minimum account point has merit as an idea, but not all trolls are bad players. They just are being assholes. And it would eliminate new players who Al wants to encourage.

You code PHP, ssorenn. What about the idea of adding a blacklist for game creation to the site. Then Al could blacklist his known trolls and they would be stopped from joining games he creates.

I do not code. Sorry. No nothing about it. I hire people to code

I thought it was you. Shoot. Now I have to recall who it was who recently coded up something to present to Kestas...

Anyhow, even not coding, what do you think of the game creator's blacklist block and the players heads up when they are about to join a game with one of their blacklist on it to give them a choice.

You wouldn't need to code it Draug, Oli already has on vDip, it's just convincing Kestas that it's a desirable feature. Which I'd recommend emailing him about if you do.

I haven't been to VDip in a while. So they have blacklists now? How do they work?