"These lobbies are so boring, ughhhhhh!"
The root of the problem doesn't lie in the builds themselves, but that there aren't enough people playing each game to ensure that you never spend too long in them. There's only so many times you can do the parkour to no benefit of your character, before you begin to ask "why even bother doing it anymore?" Nobody cares that you beat the parkour, or that you were the first to do so, they all just want the game to start already.
So what is to be done to relieve the plague that is frequent boredom in a game that's supposed to be fun? I propose adding a small minigame that people can play in any one of the pre-game lobbies. The first thing that comes to my mind is 'Cookie Clicker', a public plugin that sees the player clicking on a cookie in their inventory (go figure) to score points. You can find the link to said plugin here.
This will give players something to do whilst they wait for other people to join the lobby. The cookie, and therefore the minigame, will only be available in pre-game lobbies. Remember, the objective is to give people something to do in pre-game lobbies! We don't want people grinding it out in the hub all day, resulting in them being too bored to play it when they have nothing else to do.
But at the end of the day, you're still just clicking on a cookie... so what's the point? Well... add achievements to it. For instance, a thousand clicks could warrant you a hundred experience points, or five-thousand clicks could grant you a handful of points. Every 2,500 or so clicks could also give the player a cubelet, giving everybody a consistent yet slow way of getting what seems to have become a rarity in recent times. What this does, is it gives the sense that you're still working towards something, when in reality, you're still just waiting for the real game to start.
Players caught auto-clicking by Sentinel will have their Cookie Clicker stats reset. Sentinel may also need to be changed in some way to be made more lenient towards faster clicks per second in pre-game lobbies. This shouldn't be too difficult, just find out how fast a human being can possibly click, and adjust Sentinel accordingly. Honestly though, it isn't hurting anybody else, so who cares?
There's also a leaderboard for it, though I reckon this should either be removed, or hidden to all but staff. Its removal will discourage auto-clicking, and help staff to see who might be cheating in the game. But again, it doesn't hurt anybody, so who cares? If cheating does become a problem, then simply remove the incentive of rewards from the game. It's not supposed to be competitive; it's supposed to be a distraction.
If there are issues with using public plugins, then fortunately this is apparently one of the easiest things to develop. I saw somebody on YouTube developing it in only a couple of minutes.
Bonus idea:
Add a little bonus to completing the parkour. For example, give us a guaranteed 10 experience, with say, a 1/8 chance of getting a handful of points, or a 1/24 chance of getting a cubelet. Would probably be more effort to do than the Cookie Clicker idea and not quite as satisfying (I would personally still not bother doing the parkour), though doesn't involve recreating nor using a public plugin.
Sowwy for unorganised thready :x
: )
