Auto alert and join custom games to mitigate waiting time

[sethmachine]

(if this belongs in the lab, please migrate)

A huge deterrent to getting people to join custom games is the wait and down time. I can't speak for Garena, but many WC3 custom players use Makemehost.com or ENT hosting for their games.

I was wondering if it would be possible to do the following:

-Create a "meta" lobby for a created (or not yet created) custom game.

-When the meta lobby reaches the requisite number of players, the players are alerted that the game has sufficient people. In response these things would happen:
a. If the game wasn't created, it will be created automatically.
b. In any case, some software/magic automatically launches a player's WC3,
and automatically joins them in the lobby.

-Once every one joins in, the game obviously starts.

What's the advantage of this? People don't need to wait around in the actual lobby, or even have the WC3 client open until they are pretty certain a game is going to happen.

Other things that could be done:

-Allow a quantum/warning time. E.g. a game is filled, and after X minutes, the game will start. People might be in the bathroom or finishing up other tasks.

-Send an alert to players via email/text/whatever to alert them when:
-Lobby is close to filling up
-A player joined the lobby
-Game is about to start
-Game will start in X minutes:seconds

Other things possible:
-If meta lobbies are popular, players who can host on their can just do that, and don't need a bot.

-Schedule custom games: You join a meta lobby and the game won't be created until a certain time, e.g. 9:00pm, in order to give everyone time to be ready to play


There's a few hurdles obviously:

-Where's an actual useable API to directly control and interface with a WC3 client: i.e. just needs a way to start up and join games.

-Makemehost.com has a very powerful captcha. The custom game needs to be manually created and/or the host has to sit in the lobby, periodically refreshing the game (this can be automated).

What do you folks think?

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Actually, a simple warning sound you can hear even with War3 minimized would already help a lot...

I usually join lobbies and then go AFK or do something else until about 10 minutes in, then check if the game already started or not. Then I'll check again after another 10 minutes.
It's a bad situation, as many people leave a game if the other players are unresponsive. A 3rd party program that plays a "beep" sound when the game has started would be as easy solution.

 

[Xonok]

ENT Link has the notification thing that you speak of.

 

[sethmachine]

Actually, a simple warning sound you can hear even with War3 minimized would already help a lot...

I usually join lobbies and then go AFK or do something else until about 10 minutes in, then check if the game already started or not. Then I'll check again after another 10 minutes.
It's a bad situation, as many people leave a game if the other players are unresponsive. A 3rd party program that plays a "beep" sound when the game has started would be as easy solution.

Alas I don't know how to interface with WC3's native code/API.

But for games which are listed on the internet, e.g. makemehost and ENT, you can just periodically query to see if the game is still listed and/or the number of players.

-If it's no longer listed, the game either started or was cancelled

-If the game has X number of players, it's probably time to get back to the lobby.

In either case it'd be a very simple web crawler.

Of course, there are people who have ways to access WC3 directly, which is how bots have access to in-state information like who won, who left, etc.

For whatever reason, nobody has released this API to allow for people to write custom bots or programmatically interact with a WC3 client.