Community player pings

[Gegy]

Our current solution for player pings revolves around the @ping: playtest role which has to be sent by an admin before we run a scheduled playtest. Although this works mostly fine, it is within our interest to decentralise this process to allow players to organise playing with each other without the involvement of an administrator. Given our small scale, this is especially important to support organisation of players because one cannot rely on players being online all the time.

One kind of approach is to work based off of a threshold of "interest":

• A ping could go out automatically when the server player count reaches above some threshold
• A bot system could allow people to request a ping, and when a threshold is reached, a ping is sent

Another potential approach is to work with polling for scheduling an organised playtest. This would go through a bot which people could vote through reactions. This could work in addition with another picked approach, or could potentially even work alone as a sole replacement.

A much more directed approach would be to have players specifically register interest in playing, and have those players be notified specifically when enough other players also register interest. This helpfully excludes players who aren't interested in playing from pings, but it also excludes people who may want to play but did not register interest, whereas a role ping would include them anyway.

It is also potentially worth still remaining the separation between community pings and playtest pings, where a playtest is initiated by a developer to test a specific game / feature, while a community ping is initiated by the community to casually play games.

[ghost]

As, I said on the discord:

Or a @looking to Play role
Want friends to play? @LookingToPlay

[ghost]

Oops I just pinged a random guy called looking lmao