Q&A #12 – What do you think about this new phenomenon of master sharing?

Ladies and Gentlemen, we hereby present the next episode of our Q&A series. This week the phenomenon of master sharing, which first appeared with the Collect Edition, intrigued us. So we asked several players about their experiences with it. Check out their answers below!

<obst> I thought about this some times now and it just shows again how much hate in this community is. This is off-topic but people also claim auth to kick/ban without proper reasons, then the kicked person calls someone else with auth to kick the person kicking or kicks with own auth the person kicking someone. (so much kick in this sentence ;) I have seen this tons of times already with auth or master from a lot of people in the community. All behave like kids here “oh you said something bad and I don’t like you” -> kick. This will continue forever because almost everyone active has auth or gets master already which causes chaos between people who don’t like each other.
This is also why I give a fuck about auth and master usually because I don’t want to be responsible for this kindergarten stuff. I just like shared master to pause a game when someone disconnects and try to maintain a fun game for everyone. To say it with the words of TheLove: This game is not worth it to have these bitchfights.

Some people call shared master “the cancer of sauerbraten” and I already said what is bad about it. First of all: With great power comes great responsibility. And there are different opinions on how to run a clanwar or a mixed game. Some say there should be only one host who is in charge of everything. When the master does not see that someone lags out the game is screwed. If you share it with the wrong angry player the game might get destroyed as well. So simply share it only with people you trust. In a clanwar I think everyone should have the ability to pause the game in case something goes wrong. In a mix 1 master per team should be enough but when you know the peoples behaviour it is okay to give it to everyone.

All the abuse happens when people get angry at each other. For mixes for me there are some unwritten rules like “the first one gets in”, for cws “the team which is challanged picks the first map and then the other team”. When a master does not want a player to play it is his/her right to decide about this in my opinion. When somebody abuses the permissions whether if it is auth or master they should not get it anymore. I have my personal blacklist for this.
For those who say tl;dr: Don’t share higher privileges with people who tend to rage or you don’t trust, don’t be a dick and we can have great games together.

<Honzik1> I think sharing master is better than without, because anyone can pausegame during the clanwars/mixwars. Also when someone disconnects, then game is paused much faster because more masters can see more. I remember in previous version of Sauerbraten that when someone had a phone call during the game, then game had to be restarted after. So I think pausegame and shared master saved a lot of time for us.

<Agalloch> Since you dont want me to answer simply, like “its retarded”, i will try to answer this way. I think that goal wasnt though bad. But i think that only 2 players from the game should be able to have master and just 1 in the same team. If everyone in game can have a master, so the game can be very unstable. Especially if you meet annoying player. Random kick, random pauses, disturbing and breaking game. I am raging. 2 masters are ok. 1 or more than 2 is not ok i think.

<obi_de> I was a long time inactive and as I came back to sauer I was like: “Wow it is possible now to have more than one master now!” But as I started thinking about what advantages does this sharing has, I came to the conclusion that there is only one advantage. Everyone can now pause the game. After a few rounds of mixed games I had to see the disadvantages of sharing the master. One guy, I will not say his name but maybe someone can guess who, just switched the map in the middle of the game. I think he was pissed, because he was bad in the game or something like that. So to sum it up, if one or even one of every team has master, that should definitely be enough and you will get less complications.

<Wlkr> Well, in opposite to most players i dont like the master sharing at all. I dont doubt it has its benefits and i’m convinced that it also helped to make mixed games as popular as they are right now within our small community. I also play a lot of mixed games, since they are the only chance to keep competetive gaming on, but i dislike the path it took. Which path? There are already a lot of players who aint play any clanwars anymore, but rather have some mixed team games. I dont think that the abstinence of clanwars helps a first person shooter community, which exists out of clans, to evolve. But back to the sharing, sorry. For me it is one of the things which empowers the drifting apart of each other of our small community. I didn’t fill in a table, but im sure the hate kicking from public servers (like psl2-4) increased.

Before you could share master, there was 1 person having the power and if you were interested in keep a 3v3 game going, you didnt abuse your power, nowadays everything seems more replaceable, so noone actually cares. Also, the master sharing increases the time between the games, since people discuss the next map for 5 minutes or more. If there is one master or admin, he simply can start a map to play, which is why i basicly start sauer, not to discuss the same mappool 10 times a day. Also this sharing is used inflationary, so some people get offended if you dont share it, why should any player but my clanmates have master on the w00pservers? I don’t get this.

I’ll stop here, to avoid this becoming a book.

As you can see, there are diffrent opinions about master sharing. Some of them prefer the old times, when it was common to have just 1 master. On the other hand there are players, who like the new system, because it saves a lot of time. Now we ask YOU! Are you a fan or an opponent of the new system? Let us know your opinion in the comments!