FAQ
|
This is the FAQ work in progress (just like the rest of the site) If you have a Question please send a message to Critters and I will try to answer it and may include it in the FAQ. Website questions Formatting text in your profile, messages and shouts. What are the circle and star icons next to members names? What are levels? Game questions Win / Loss / Disconnects explained Player points explained The multi player game lobby explained Lag in MPDTD and getting disconnected because of it Formatting text in your profile, messages and shouts. You can format text you enter by using any of the following tags: [b]text[/b] will bold the text [i]text[/i] will italic the text [u]text[/u] will underline the text [m]members name[/m] to create a link to a members profile [g]group name[/g] to create a link to a group. [s]Results Code[/s] to create a link to a games results / score page. The code is given at the bottom of all game results page for you to just copy and paste. What are the circle and star icons next to members names? The icon next to a members name will tell you if that member is online (surfing the Collective now) or offline and if they have a free or upgraded account. If the icon is orange they are online, if it is gray they are offline. Free accounts have a  and upgraded accounts have a  .Paul and Dave do like to feel special so they have little diamonds next to their names, how precious :o) What are levels? Every member has a level next to their name, this number ranges from 1 to 60 and is a measure of how experienced they are with the site and its games. Your level is based on a number of points that is added to when you do certain things. When the number of points gets high enough your level increases by 1. Things which can increase your points include winning awards in single player games, doing well in multi player games, keeping your profile up-to-date and upgrading your account. Win / Loss / Disconnects explained A win is when you come first in a game, anything other than first is considered a loss (however that does not mean you don't get points for runner up, see below) If you disconnect (close the game before the game over screen (when the game ends or you run out of lives) you will be marked as Disconnected. Player points explained The simple explanation Points are awarded for each game you play as soon as the game has ended. The more points another player has than you (the better they are at the game than you) the more you will get for coming close to their score or beating them. The less points another player has than you (they are not as good at the game as you) the more points you will lose if they get close to your score or beat you. In simple terms, if you do better than expected you get more points. The longer explanation We use the ELO system to rank the members. This has nothing to do with the amazing Electric Light Orchestra and everything to do with the ELO rating system which was invented to rank chess players but has since been used in games like Age of Empires 3, Guild Wars and World of Warcraft. You can read all about it on the ELO Wiki. We made a few small changes to the basic formula to adapt it to suit games with more than 2 players. The main change was setting the 'K' value to ((the number of players in the game - 1)*10). We also do not let the player points go below zero. Each player starts off with 0 points and we only show them on leader boards when they have played 5 games or more. The multi player game lobby explained The multi player game lobby is the screen you all see when you are in a game and waiting for the host to press start. On this screen you can see a bar for each player in the game. The top bar is always the host and the other bars are people who have joined the game. When someone joins it checks to see if they have a copy of the game already cached. If they do not they download it, their download progress is shown by the green bar behind their name. The green/yellow/red block to the right of the name shows the players connection quality. This is a measure of how quick communication is between the player and our server (which is located in New York). A green or yellow ping is completely normal. What is LAG in multi player games and why do I get disconnected from a game? Lag in most games means the time it takes for information to get from your PC to our server. If this is a long time then the game feels 'laggy' and slow to respond. However in MPDTD lag mostly refers to how far behind your PC is from the fastest PC in the game. To make sure everyone gets the same creeps at the same time, and has a fair game we use frame locking. This means that all the people in a game are trying to stay on the same frame number as each other, so if a player wins a level on frame 1,000 we only count them as a winner if all other players have made it past frame 1,000 and not reported a win. This prevents those with fast PCs from having a faster game and winning every round because they killed the creeps first. If a slower PC detects it is falling behind 3 things happen. 1. The slower PC drops into low quality mode, this reduces graphics quality and also turns off particle effects. 2. The slower PC increases its frame rate cap to try to speed up some more 3. The faster PC(s) in the game lower their frame rate to help the slower PC catch up, this can be upto 50% of the games normal frame rate. The 'Waiting for player to catch up' message that some people get is when, even with these 3 things taking place, the slower PC can't catch up and falls 100 frames behind. If this happens 5 times the slower PC is disconnected from the game to improve the game quality for the remaining players (who would have been running a slower frame rate). So if you get disconnected because of 'Lag' then you know that your PC, with everything set to low quality was still running more than 50% slower than the other players. If you always get booted try to find other players with older and slower PC's. If all players in a game are running on old hardware then they should not cause each other problems. |
JOIN THE COLLECTIVE
• Play multi-player games with others.
• Earn points and awards.
• Save your scores and progress.
• Unlock extra levels and modes.
• Join and create groups.
• Build up a list of friends.
• Customize your profile.
• Access our live chat and forum.
• Earn points and awards.
• Save your scores and progress.
• Unlock extra levels and modes.
• Join and create groups.
• Build up a list of friends.
• Customize your profile.
• Access our live chat and forum.
