Improve new player experience by delisting competitive matches from regular server tabs

[Zatline]

It would be a good idea to make players more aware of what they sign up for when joining a server, currently, if a competitive match/clan war is happening there is nothing except for the difficulty icons to hint at that to which new players often do not pay any attention to so they are just joining with the expectation of playing and checking out the game but instead join as a spectator or are kicked instantly, if not kicked they will attempt to chat and join the game which gets them kicked anyway as they have just broken some unwritten rule they were not aware of. This results in a very bad first experience and impression of the game, worst case they’ll quit and never touch the game again.

I’ve spoken with some competitive players a while ago and we all agreed that difficulty icons despite being a good attempt, unfortunately, do nothing #3034. So we have collected some ideas on how this could be improved.

• add rcon for server admins to temporarily and directly label the server as “competitive”
• add default call vote option to make players able to label the server as “competitive” without the need of an admin, the voting needs the agreement of all the players to go into effect which means a 100% yes.
• once a server is labeled as “competitive” the server will disappear from every server filter tab and be put into a temporary tab that is color-highlighted and labeled as “ongoing competition”or so ...

competitive matches are now easy to find within the server browser tab system but not to find within any of the regular filters.
If players attempt to join a competitive labeled server a warning message should be displayed that explains some of the unwritten rules like that they’ll not be able to join the game unless they are part of the event or that chatting during the match will get them kicked.

-> (mockup needed for "unwitting rules" warning label)

alternatively, add an option to silence spectators either indefinitely or after they join for a set time, if they attempt to chat within that time they’ll be faced with the same warning message and the timer resets, once the chat timer runs out it is reasonable to assume that they understand the rules and the environment they are in.

[ChillerDragon]

Yea sounds cool. Should there be a new masterserver rule of not abusing that competetive status? At the top and in shiny orange might be the new advertisement meta like the ! prefix.

In case it is non obvious @Zatline made it sound a bit like those servers are non chat servers. But team chatting even as spectator is common practice and totally fine since it is not disturbing the in game players.

[Dune-jr]

• Masterserver moderation should be minimal, and certainly avoid having to enforce this sort of gray rule.
• New players facing hopelessly strong players that have been playing for a decade is a common issue among games as old as Teeworlds. Given how it's not popular enough to have a significant amount of concurrent servers active, I'd say this issue is unsolvable.
• The difficulty setting is largely unused/misused indeed. Given at least half of the server and client owners don't update, changing its semantics mid-major version sounds like a bad idea.