Posted July 09 17:21
Hi Team,
Thank you so much for all the work you have put into Citieshare, I am so impressed and looking forward to playing in my first share.
Apologies if you've seen these suggestions in the Discord or elsewhere, but I just wanted to share a few ideas:
### Matchmaking based on DLC available
At the moment, unless you want to add/remove your DLC, you need to find a share set up by people who have the same DLC as you. There are some DLCs that most players seem to have, such as parks and mass transit, but others are far from universal. And of course, some players are totally vanilla. Even when I do have the DLCs another player has, if I have an extra one I would need to disable it while playing. This does involve a lot of scouring the shares list. One option might be to have a filter button in the Shares listing to only show recruiting shares with DLC matching you. Or perhaps toggle buttons for each DLC? It might be that the 'tagging' function of shares could cover this if players used the tags in a consistent way.
### Identifying a suggested (but not required!) standardised set up
At the moment it seems like there is a plethora of different set ups out there, in terms of Mods, DLCs etc. In order to avoid having a very narrow selection of shares, players will have to buy/disable DLCs and switch on/off Mods in order to be compatible with each other. This isn't going to be avoidable (and it's a good thing, the modifiability of the game is one of the great things about it!)
I suspect for many players, it would be helpful if there was a 'suggested' set up that would give them access to the widest number of shares. I want to emphasise it would only be a helpful suggestion, people should always be totally free and encouraged to set up their shares as they want to!
Two ways that a 'standard' set of DLC might be established:
+ A hint somewhere on the Citieshare app showing the stats on what the most common set up is in terms of DLCs (we should be able to work this out from the information people put in their profile)
+ A poll or discussion within those leading development of the app
With Mods, the current solution of people installing a collection from the Share initiator is really good. An idea to build on that:
+ Using a poll or 'census' to identify the most popular mods (or collections) and then forming a 'Citieshare basic collection'
+ Players could then install and use that basic collection for many Shares
+ Some Shares could ask players to have the Basic collection + 'Collection created for Share'
+ Even if we end up with about a dozen commonly used collections, that would be helpful
I'm sure such an approach would provoke a lot of discussions about what should be included or excluded, but I think that is part of the interest and, if anything, would incentivise mod development (and also for the game developers to try their best to maintain compatibility)
**** Most importantly, all these suggested standard set ups would be entirely by choice and voluntary, people will remain free to use whatever DLC and Mods they want on their Shares. ****