Does anyone else see their challenge spam?
does anyone know who are they?
We have CHALLENGE spam, now?!?
idk… maybe its a glitch on my comp…
but those 2 guys have a crap load of challenges posted with the generic taunt… 
What do you mean, “now”? It’s cropped up in a couple places on the forums over the last 6 months or so. Page down through the challenge list and inevitably you will find a string of challenges from the same person with identical map and taunt. Look at the details and you will probably note that the snapshot is identical for all of them. The worst I spotted was a string of 26 completely identical challenges. Irritating.
It’s just in the last couple weeks I’ve heard of laser spam, missile spam, emp spam, frigate spam, fighter spam, shield spam, armor spam, and now challenge spam… I just think the people on this forum toss around this derogatory title a little too freely.
Challenge spam? What do you expect? I see only four solutions:
- The tutorial needs to be expanded to discuss how to post challenges, interpret challenge results, and delete old challenges.
- Deleting and editing old challenges needs to be much easier. Perhaps a series of tags such as “experimental”, “testing”, “in progress”, “completed”, etc… with the game bugging you about updating or deleting your old un-finalized challenges that are posted.
- A community system where you can upload to a group of friends rather than bugging everybody. This will also help against the “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” philosophy toward challenge design to keep everyone from unnecessarily conforming to the public standard.
- A feature where you can group challenges into a certain campaign, especially if they follow a certain theme or you plan to upload a lot. People who are interested can download (or subscribe) to that campaign rather than downloading each challenge individually. Challenges could then be upload directly to an existing campaign. Perhaps multiple users could even upload to the same campaign.
These 4 solutions should cut down your “challenge spam”, but due to the way the game is currently setup I think becoming upset that people are posting a lot of similiar challenges is ridiculous.
I was going to post a comment about problems I’m having with the challenge area, but this seems as good a place as any to start.
I’ve been playing GSB for a while (but not, obviously, commenting here), and of course gravitated to the challenges after finishing all of the pre-built scenarios (and a few that I built for myself). I have noticed, however, that there are a lot that just don’t work, a lot that are identical, and (recently) I have found some that crash my computer when I try to play them (some just on download, some only when I start the battle itself).
In addition, there are quite a few that tell me I don’t have the right content, although I have all of the supplements, so I have no idea what I’m missing there.
So I would suggest a few changes:
[]Moderate the challenge board more frequently, testing content when it is posted, removing bad content, duplicate challenges, etc. I am sure there are a few senior players who would volunteer to help out with this.[/]
[]Drop the “taunt” section, or simply re-name it and ask players to list the specific customized content (if any) required to play their scenario.[/]
[]Encourage the deployment of balanced fleets by developing a rating system based on number of ship types, or classes, or something. These unitasker fleets only present a challenge until you figure out their “schtick”, then they all turn out to have a glass jaw.[/]
[]Eliminate the ability of scenario designers to limit deployment into a small box on the map, or to only certain ship types. Stacking the deck that way scarcely seems sporting. If you are not confident enough in your fleet to let people take a crack at it any way they want, and from any position on their half of the map, then perhaps you should re-think your fleet design.[/]
Anyway, just my $.02. Apologies in advance if I’ve brought up subjects that have been discussed before.
I’ve deleted a bunch of challenges that seemed spammy from those two users. People should always feel free to email me at cliff@positech.co.uk if someone has posted too many spam challenges. I should get around to fixing things so the server only accepts X ‘All’ challenges from each user per day, but that takes time to code and test, and I’m in campaign land right now.
I should also run some stuff to prune any old and unplayed, or poorly rated challenges after a while. I’d rather there weree 1,000 fun and interesting challenges than the 30,000 there are now, with a lot of them uninteresting.
So much to do…
Edit:
I just deleted 991 challenges. Basically anything more than a month old that was issued to ‘all’ and yet got no attempts on it. That should clean things up slightly. I’ll code something better at some stage…
thx cliff! 
I understand your work load but I think this is a great idea. You know you could create a cron job to start a php page that ran a mySQL query to do this work for you every month/week… makes life so much easier (I can send you an example but they’re also easy to find on the web).
I’ve been doing this semi regularly now, so the older challenges are getting nuked if they had just 1 or 0 or 2 attempts and are over 6 months old. I’ll keep doing it. One day, I’ll automate it
thx cliff 