OpenRA

"Fragile diplomacy has been removed."

I was almost heartbroken when I read that line in the changelog.


I always thought that was such a nice feature to have and I was disappointed that all of the newer official C&C games past RA2 didn't have it.
That earlier incarnations of Openra had it (on both mods even) was one of the many things that drew me towards it many years ago.
I was kinda upset when you first removed it but that made me only happier when you brought it back. But now you remove it again??

I think it was a good feature that could make games more dynamic and unpredictable and therefore interesting.
It is also very useful when (like me) you usually play openra with a circle of friends with drastically varying skill levels, so that the weaker players could temporary ally to bring one of the stronger players down on their level without having to cut the game short by playing with static teams.

I get it could be kind of annoying if you play with stranger over the internet and the host enabled it without you noticing but
1) Not everyone plays like that
2) Thats why it was an optional mode that was disabled by default
and 3) The same could be said for the new "no nukes" option when you want to rush nukes. The more stuff you add like that the more it becomes mandatory to check the options before pressing "ready" anyway so I doubt that one will break the camel's back either.

Also I have read this https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/10650 and know there are apparently some bugs with this (even though I never encountered any of them in any of the games I played with this option enabled) but I do not get why that made you remove the entire feature instead of fixing them. Especially since it was an fully optional feature to begin with,


So I ask you, please bring back the fragile alliances, or rather don't remove them, with the next stable realease, because they were neat.

Thank you.

"It won't happen. Period." is the answer you'll get. I ranted about that enough times already.

Some recent steps on the development are actively undermining the possibility to see it reimplemented even.

Fragile diplomacy was removed because the code supporting it was poorly implemented, and this caused problems for other parts of OpenRA. These issues also caused some subtle but horrible bugs that could not be reasonably fixed without completely reworking the feature.

It therefore came down to a choice of either removing it or rewriting it. We weren't able to find a volunteer to rewrite it, and we found that it was very rarely (actually never) used by our core online players who we asked, so we decided to remove it.

I'm sorry that we impacted your gameplay with this!

If somebody wanted to work on re-engineering a new implementation of the feature in a way that avoids the original problems then we would certainly consider readding it.