Feature Requests

We have two fairly divergent crowds in our org regarding tower battle spammage.

One group wants tower spam in order for rapid response to defend friendly tower fields, casually join in the help for attacking tower fields, or just the joy of watching one's side attacking fields.

The other group does not engage in any PvP and are seriously annoyed by the tower battle spammage.

I guess I'd like to open discussions for some possible solutions to our problems.

I do have one possible suggestion, but lack the familiarity with the code to hack this up quickly.  Does someone have the code-fu to quickly implement a timer (where you can specify the timeout) that prevents "someone attacked the same tower as the previous 100 someones" messages for the specified amount of time, and when that timer expires, it allows new messages about that particular tower battle?

The rest of the code can stay the same, and thus allow people to look up the battle details using !battle, but will greatly reduce the spammage to org channels.  Also, !battle appears to be truncated on our bot. Is there some setting I'm missing to view more/all of the participants of the most recent battle?

The other bots have a timer which will allow you to suppress messages on a given active battle for a number of seconds. I'm currently looking into how easy it will be to recode this for Vhabot. I think I can see how, but its gonna take some time to work out the bugs.

Secondly, what are you referring to with regard to 'truncated' battle messages? Can yu post/send me an example?

I'd have to wait until the next big raid by one side or the other, but I seem to see that the "!battle" output is limited to one page.  In recent raids (both sides) the number of attackers are way more than one page.  I guess this would be a "feature request" that if more than 1 page of players attack in the most recent single attack, the "!battle" output should have output like "page X of Y"

Ah .. I can see an immediate limitation with the current reporting method. Because the bot doesn't aggregate the attacking orgs on the Same target .. we need to create a post which puts multiple attackers in the same message.

As it stands, the bot only reports the last X results in the battle database. If we reduced the number of messages in the output window .. perhaps we'd get more actual battles.

What we could also do, is to make an option in the configuration for how many battles are shown. And yes, we'd have to code it so that it produced multiple windows if needed.

How does this sound?

Yes, I think that would solve all our problems.

Aggregating attacks on one tower field, and display all the participants even if it means multiple pages. 

Perhaps fold in my timer idea?  For instance:

An initial message is posted to org/private chat channels with the name of the FIRST person to attack the specified tower.  Bot starts accumulating the list of who has participated in the attack on this particular tower field.  After (arbitrary number thrown in for an example) 5 minutes, if additional people have attacked the tower field since the last message was posted, a new message is automatically posted that is essentially your proposed full listing of who has attacked this tower field.  This message repeats only if new players have joined the attack since the last posting or until a victory or defeat is reached.

I think that would be the ideal situation.

Yes, it happens it was Naturalistic that proposed we needed ot make some changes to the Vhabot plugin to make it emulate the way in which BeBot, for example, works. Perhaps I will get a BeBot install downloaded, and just watch how some bits work and we can evaluate pros and cons.

And yes, Llie, there is a 30sec timer involved which simply traps all attacks on a given target and doesn't send any further messages to org channel. I don't recall whether it sends an 'update' later on though as you are suggesting. There are websites that monitor tower battles from the Tower Channels, and can tell you whether a given battle is still going on or not.
I don't know how easy/practical it would be to provide this level of NW reporting in a single bot .. but we'll see how the code evolves... [especially since if my NW knowledge is correct, the gas will eventually change and battle will either end or something]

I think they were comparing to what Bebot has.

When there are multiple attacks on 1 field within say 10 seconds, it will just combine all attacks into 1 "output" window.

Basically, once a tower gets hit, wait like 15 seconds or something before displaying, if there's more attacks, wait another 15 seconds, etc.

I was noticing the AO Tower channel spammage the other day... where it would say something useful like "[such and such] organization has entered into a state of war.  [So and so] attacked [such and such other] organization's tower in [some place] (xxxx,yyyy)"

Well, this seems to beg for 2 additional features:

First is an additional report to org and/or private chat that looks up the tower field in question and reports the min/max level range of that field so reinforcements can know what level range is currently PvPing and whether they have a twink in that range to join in.

Second is the integration of the /waypoint command so you can get a clicky to where the action is.  I'm expecting the plugin will refer to LCA data that is currently already served out by items.vhabot.net.

I have been discussing with Demoder (author of flw.nu) who offered his Tower database for use publicly. He has also kindly provided a php query to get Tower Field information from a set of co-ordinates send to it. There is more information here on how to use it.

I did pose the question whether he could provide an XML version of the stats his website publishes, so watch this space for any further news!

I'll look at integrating this into the towers plugin after you've committed your changes to vh_Towers

I'll look at integrating this into the towers plugin after you've committed your changes to vh_Towers

If I commit what I have currently, can you incorporate this, and then I'll start on the rewrite to reduce spam? OR if your php skills are ok (mine are 'weak' at best) .. if I post the php code, would you mind trying to integrate the BeBot php code into c#? ie. do the rewrite ;P

I would gladly tackle it, but Nat wants me to commit all the changes I already have, and there are a bunch of bugfixes and test runs I want to get through before I can begin work on it.

I can look at it, but I've been pretty swamped with work (the paying kind) so I don't know when I'll get around to it.  Never hurts to post it (the BudaBot php, your towers changes, etc...) and hope someone else will get to it first.  That's my philosophy, anyways.

Well, this got added to a list of feature requests/todo list in this thread: http://forums.vhabot.net/index.php/topic,6996.msg58348.html#msg58348 but since Mit has a habit of locking threads to reduce noice from the peanut gallery, I'll mention here that in addition to limiting tower spamage, I'd like to have the bot provide a clicky with a /waypoint chat command that drops a mission marker at the tower battle so reinforcements can get a waypoint to the action.

Its in this here thread .. thought I'd merge like topics to avoid such omissions .. will add to the Summary thread imminently.

Its in this here thread .. thought I'd merge like topics to avoid such omissions .. will add to the Summary thread imminently.

Thanks for updating the top-level feature request. 

Just didn't want to miss this feature, cuz goodness knows /waypoint could have been be sooo super useful but in its current form, virtually nobody uses it.

I am sure this is out of the scope of the original issue, but what we did for our org bot was to pipe the output into the private channel.  Org chat stayed clean, and those interested in monitoring towers could log into the bot channel and get spammed as much as they liked.  Its an extra step for those interested, but it also helps those who are part-time tower warriors to only get the messages when they chose to subscribe to them.

Thats all fine and dandy, but many orgs use their bot PrivateGroup as a GuestChannel for non-orgmembers (many reasons for this - won't go into). So that would, alas, mean that all the poor guests would be flooded with Tower battle spam, which they may not like.

It is, however, one quite neat solution for orgs not requiring the GuestChannel feature!