Hello! I'd like to report several bugs in version 6.6a. It is mainly about the new player list. The new layout is not very positively welcomed among community.
Everyone was used to how things were and there was not any reason to change something, which wasn't broken in the first place... which now thanks to the "fix" broken is.
1) The new playerlist shows less information!
In previous versions, mainly as a host, we were able to see players running different plus versions. Like 1.24+ and 1.23+ (Symbol being Teal or Blue) This cannot be seen anymore. The NON-plus players running different version than 1.24 do not show ! symbol anymore. Also when the player joins, we cannot see if they are running outdated plus version, or NON-plus until they finish downloading or connecting. This was possible before. So now we have less informations shown.

^The above post was copied from a reply to an unrelated thread where it was off topic. I let Clank know it was off topic but got no response for a week, so I took action to split it into its own thread, using the same logic as here.

The subject of this thread is also covered in this poll, so maybe they should be merged actually.

So far, based on the poll results, in almost every category the current model is the most popular option, but this is a big outlier: most people don't care about whether 1.23 clients are represented at all, but among people who do care, more people want them represented than not.

Why? This should not have been useful information since 2013. The only things that 1.23 and 1.24 clients should experience differently are ambient sound events and MCEs, but in both cases, 1.23 clients probably have the better experience, since I suspect most levels with ambient sound events or MCEs are designed for 1.23, not 1.24. (Also they're probably SP levels.) Is there some underlying, unreported issue that makes it useful to know who's a 1.23 client? What is that?

I think the idea is to help 1.23 players update jj2 to the most definitive experience in one go, which is 1.24+. Now for 90% of the use cases that's irrelevant. And my first thought didn't go to multiplayer levels from the era of MCEs that seem incredibly niche. I think only some niche battles and races use that (icboomerang for example comes to mind, but it accounts for both ambient sound IDs I think).

My first thought went to how 1.23 does not have lori, and a lot of entry level tests require you to morph to lori for a level or to morph during the test in a specific order.

The scenario:
Online is empty most of the day. A new player joins the battle server during dead hours and not realise there is peak hours in the weekend or a dedicated discord organizing events.

This person joins the battle server in 1.23. The person is very interested in the game. A veteran joins and wants to bring this person to experience some custom content and wants to bring them to a test server, which needs 1.24+. This means you need to convince this person to install TSF and also plus. The problem is that the new player and the veteran have a huge language barrier.

Why tests specifically? It's a good hook to get people hooked on online play. New players can play it on their own pace and skill level, engage with other people and come back at it at any time regardless of jj2s activity. Out of any gamemodes it has a high probability to get new players to enjoy jj2 and see something different.

If communication is very difficult, any extra step to get things to work might become a difficult task. If asking about Lori, said person might not even know what a Lori is. If asking about version numbers that has low chance of being succesful. If you can just see that person has 1.23- you can focus on giving the other version. Just linking to GOG for 1.24 when possibly the person already has a legal copy of 1.24 installed is immoral too. Perhaps as a veteran test enjoyer you only care about getting more people to play tests, but know that you are more likely to succeed with 1.24 players than 1.23.

Yeah it's an incredibly niche situation but this is the only thing I can think of other than just fear of losing information. To play devil's advocate: why would we not show it, because the likelihood of there being 1.23 players still out there is extremely low, and the people wanting to know is also extremely low. Why would a vague difference like a teal/green coloured icon be harmful for informing the player. Some information is just there for 99% to ignore and 1% to make use of, and that's fine. I think as long as it doesn't have extra icons or takes space, it's unharmful.

Originally Posted by FawFul

This person joins the battle server in 1.23. The person is very interested in the game. A veteran joins

Clients could never see whether other clients were playing 1.23. It was information only available to the server host.