Second Version Screeps Review

Link to Review: https://steamcommunity.com/id/VasVadum/recommended/464350
I've rewritten once more, but I wanted to save the second version for posterity.

[table]
[tr]
[th]Averaged Rating: [/th]
[th]★★★★★★☆☆☆☆[/th]
[th]6/10[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[th]Personal Rating: [/th]
[th]★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆[/th]
[th]3/10[/th]
[/tr]
[/table]
Personal: -3 Community treatment.
Average takes into account multiple factors I did not have space here for.

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[h1]Review[/h1]
Overall, my experience with Screeps wasn't a very pleasant one.
The game its self is ok, to a point.
The slack community is full of those types that jealously defend their game to the death if you even say one bad thing about it.

Before I bought the game, they claimed to me the game would teach me javascript, which lead to me deciding, fine, lets get it, it'll help me learn. No, it does not, they lied to get me to buy it. It helps you gain better skills if you're already an intermediate javascript coder, but if you're not even at the beginner stage yet, you're SOL because you can't learn anything here.

The official servers have a 3 second tick length sometimes worse, the average appears to be 3.5 seconds rounded to the nearest .5, and during some hardware issues it has hit 11 seconds per tick. If you play on your own private server you can set the tick time yourself, however Windows private servers are highly inefficient, and have no optimizations that lead to the game dying after several hours regardless of the hardware power you have.

The game needs several optimizations and has an issue with Novice Zones so beginner players will be wiped when they try to use the safe areas of the game. I've seen it first hand as one player wiped the entire Novice Zone I started in for my very first time.

Based on my personal experience, I'd have to rate this game [b]3 out of 10 stars[/b].
The game its self, ignoring the community problems, its great for teaching optimization of code within limits of CPU usage and memory.
Great for advanced coders for sure. In this aspect, [b]6 out of 10 stars[/b]. Has potential for more.

[h1]Suggested Fixes[/h1]
The steam client confuses people into thinking they have to join the global servers immediately and consume their 30 days of free subscription time, and you can't access simulation mode without entering a server global or otherwise firt. The one button interface is confusing to new people, and ends up wasting their free 30 day subscription with steam client purchase before they're ready to use it. The devs have not fixed this and when I suggested a fix in the Slack, I got scoffed at. Because review limits, I can't go into huge detail so I'll just provide some helpful suggestion URLs. Below is links to change the UI for better clarification, suggestion to let us delete messages, and novice time to tick time suggestion. I have more on the forums but these are relevant.
https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2297/change-the-main-screen-ui-stop-the-confusion
https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2299/account-messages-delete-archive
https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2292/novice-spawn-counter-ticks-not-time

[h1]Ticks[/h1]
I do not blame the devs for the tick time of the official servers, its only natural when you have too many people on one server. It could probably be solved by opening multiple small servers however, with a player limit per server. Special subscription servers for subscribers only, special free servers where you're maxed at 10ms even if you subscribe. Lots of methods to help alleviate this issue.

[h1]Private Servers[/h1]
You can always host your own private server if you want fair or better tick times, but if you're on Windows you can't get the things you need to optimize it. It comes un-optimized. After 6 hours of running a private server, it was using 150% of my CPU power running my system hot, lagging at about 5 seconds per tick. I reboot the server its self without even restarting the game client, and the CPU usage across my 4 cores 8 threads dropped to 25% and tick time was 1 second per tick again, everything was running super smooth, for another hour or two before it started maxing out again.

[h1]Bot Users[/h1]
Some users don't even know how to code, they just download someone's bot from the internet and use that. Unfortunately, there's no code or intervention system to put a stop to this. These users easily wipe novice areas as a result and prevent new players from learning the game.

[h1]Client Lag[/h1]
Another area that needs optimization is the client starts to bog down and lag after a while. Some sort of garbage collection issue in the graphics renderer, possibly. After a while your client whether steam or browser (browser is worse) will begin to lag. Click the gear icon and act as if you're about to change graphics options, then click apply and that'll reload all graphics and fix the lag for a while.

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[h1]My ban from Slack[/h1]
While I was trying to figure things out and learn, almost every time I asked for help, one of the primary few users there would just send me a generic link to the API docs. Literally a generic link. Not to the thing I needed help with, no reply onto my specific problem, just, linked the docs and that was it, with a special "!docs" command. These primary users didn't like me because I had said a negative thing about the game and pointed out a few bugs that, as I found out recently, have been there for years and are never going to be fixed.

These few hateful users who act just like the "superiority issue" type Linux nerds I met 15 years back, provoked and harassed me every chance they got, talking down on me when I talked at all in the chat. This being a game where you play with other people, the community is a big thing in it. I mentioned starting up a discord server for Screeps because Slack was terrible, and all white. They laughed and what not, talked down on me more. Claiming Slack was better because it already had 7500 users in it, when in reality only 50 people ever talked at most during a week. The same 5 people daily. 6000 fake accounts, 1500 lurkers. A few active users.

In that slack, when I suggested that novice time thing from above in the suggestion links, I got scoffed at as well. Hell, I even suggested a lesser version where we do nothing but display game time in the corner, I was still ridiculed about it. Simple easy to do edit that any of the devs could implement in under 5 minutes of work, and the community trolled me over it.

I went to a channel one day that I thought was ok for discussing politics and such, because the server didn't have a section on where was appropriate for what. No pinned rules, no obvious method of finding them. It was Slack, messages older than 10,000 got deleted. In a political debate I mentioned a view of mine that is seen as controversial, and instead of people saying "I don't agree with that, here's why.", they attacked me, changed what I said to the worst possible thing, started calling me Hitler putting me on the same level, spreading it around bringing other people into it to spread as much hate as possible.

Needless to say, that was the moment I was banned, because of server wide hate, not because I broke a rule. Or rather, there was a rule that says don't provoke heated arguments and political debates are exactly that, always heated, when a community of people like this is incapable of having a proper argument such as "I don't agree, here's my point of view".

After my ban, the slack users put a bounty on me in game, threatening anyone who was near me or allied to me demanding they attack me in game, endlessly. Game support did nothing about it but tell me to "build somewhere else", forcing me to lose my 30 day subscription because the slack community would just keep attacking me over and over.

I encourage people to reply with their thoughts. I think my contributions to the forums both official and steam, will speak for themselves.