The basic idea here would be to let users who have picked slots for a lobby connect to the server for DM, warmup, or to just mess around while they wait for the slots to fill and the lobby to start.
This could improve a few things:
- Waiting for a lobby to fill up and start sometimes takes a long time, and this would give you something to do while waiting.
- If a lobby is slow to start, players sometimes go do something else but keep the slot held. Then they don't ready up, the lobby doesn't start and slots become empty again. This is annoying for everyone waiting for the lobby to start. If players could connect to the server pregame, it might avoid some disappearing and leaving lobbies stuck in ready-up-limbo.
- If you are trying to invite friends to join you in a lobby, it would be more appealing to them if you tell them can connect to a server and start some DM with you straight away, rather than joining a lobby and then having to wait an unknown time before you can start playing together.
The technical/organisational difficulties/issues I can think of are:
- There would need to be an extra option on the create-lobby config panel.
- The join-server button on the lobby page would have to be displayed for players who have picked a slot in a lobby.
- What happens if a player leaves a slot in a lobby? Maybe they can be removed from the tf2 server via rcon and the password changed so they don't fill the tf2 server slots?
- I'm not sure exactly how reservation servers work, but for this change to work obviously the tf2 server must be available before the lobby begins.
- If not managed carefully this change might mean we see a situation where there are 100 lobbies open and waiting for medics, while all the scouts/soldiers are happy DMing for hours. Depending on your point of view that might be a good or bad thing. However there are already seem to be limits to avoid e.g. duplicate lobbies so maybe this won't happen.
Sorry if this was suggested before! I read through the huge list of other suggestions and couldn't find anything similar.
