Openra: Redoing game lobby checkboxes

[Punsho]

Survey about checkboxes
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QCQD7WH

I'm going to list checkboxes by popularity and peoples opinions in teamgames and 1v1's from my perspective. I would also like to get more opinions on this. (also we should not care what checkboxes were in the original)

Explored Map: (default off)
If left OFF most people don't tolerate it and just leave the game. Though there are some people who like it. It should be ON by default

Crates: (default on)
A lot of people like it and a lot do not. It should stay the way it is

Short Game (default on)
It is always is left ON, If OFF it is just an annoyance and is frowned upon, minigames use it but they already have custom yaml files so I don't see the reason for this checkbox to exist

Fog of War (default on)
If switched OFF most people don't tolerate it and just leave the game. Though there are some people who like it. It can stay the way it is

Build off Allies (default on)
I never saw it being OFF other then people trolling, it should be removed

Limit Build Area (default on)
I very rarely see it being used and people are always quick to abuse it and prove the person wrong who though it is a good idea to leave it OFF. Checkbox should be removed

Separate Team Spawns (default on)
It is partially broken and is usually ignored. It's only off in RAGL because there is a 1v1 4 spawn map. This feature should reworked or removed.

Redeployable MCV (default on)
If switched OFF it is frowned upon and I have yet to see anyone liking this feature. Checkbox should be removed

Kill Bounties (default off)
There are people who like it and some against it. It should be left how it is.

Reusable Engineer (default off)
It is frowned upon if left OFF. I have yet to see anyone ingame who prefers it over the reusable one

Debug Menu (default off)
It's cheats, it should stay

[reaperrr]

Generally speaking I'm in favor of removing some (at least 2) of the "virtually never changed" options, otherwise #16317 will force players to scroll down to reach the last dropdown option, which I find quite inconvenient.

[pchote]

I mentioned in #16317 that I am planning to add dynamic vmargin support to the options bin before the playtest. This will sidestep the scrolling issue.

Generally speaking, I take this as a very competitive-mp-centric view, and find statements like “we should not care what checkboxes were in the original” unhelpful. Competitive play is an important part of OpenRA, but only makes up a small fraction of our total player base. You may not like that we consider offline players and “proper c&c” behaviour in our decisions, but you need to accept this if you want to work with us to get your ideas incorporated upstream.

[Punsho]

I don't want to start this discussion again but the silent majority is silent. How can you know what they want? What they like?

[GraionDilach]

The silent majority (of the C&C community) already considers OpenRA having that "very competetive mp-centric view" tbh, established by how much of an island the OpenRA community itself is. This is a reputation earned through long years and this community (both players and developers, excluding a few people) was never interested enough in changing that POV. Neither the modders coming from the legacy games, neither the OpenRA overrepresentation within the C&C remaster community council was able to change on that front.

The damage has already been done.

[lurtinigno]

Is there a way to persist different defaults for checkboxes in settings.yaml ?
Was looking for this in https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/Settings but couldn't fine anything related and ended up here.

[AMHOL]

Could there perhaps be an option to automatically set the options when you join a server as host and store your personal defaults in settings.yml with a fallback to the server / current defaults?

[abcdefg30]

See #4122.

[netnazgul]

@pchote

Generally speaking, I take this as a very competitive-mp-centric view

That practically denied all feedback to this issue, even though part of it was legitimate.

Separate Team Spawns is indeed broken as seen here (reported in Discord by Lucipurr)

I'm not seeing any use in this option because simple algorithm will have a lot of holes and require players restart the game (i.e. close opposite team spawns that are separated by a cliff) and won't work properly for >2 teams; sophisticated algorithm will take a lot of effort to implement for such a minor feature. Instead it is considerably easier to just setup teams in lobby manually.