Making the Game Lobby more accessible

[Langbart]

In the last 3 months there have been 22 users on IRC 0ad who simply wanted to know how to play online, it seems that the GUI layout is not clear enough on how to join the game lobby, listed below are links to the IRC logs where users have reported the problem:

Summarised the most common questions:

how to play 0ad with friends?
how can i create a multiplayer game?
how to setup multiplayer game?

• likshman (19/Jan/21)
• Nickdevries (19/Jan/21)
• Dynamofox (21/Jan/21)
• mjslick (22/Jan/21)
• astrozador (22/Jan/21)
• w00z1t (22/Jan/21)
• ringolero (25/Jan/21)
• GUY (30/Jan/21)
• Taiowa (5/Feb/21)
• Exorelico (13/Feb/21)
• tipo (16/Feb/21)
• asasa (3/Mar/21)
• efdfeff (8/Mar/21)
• bluewarrior (20/Mar/21)
• Tobi (20/Mar/21)
• alexroses47 (20/Mar/21)
• manuel_ (21/Mar/21)
• christianp (25/Mar/21)
• Nabil (5/Apr/21)
• Jaunixd (9/Apr/21)
• morimoto (15/Apr/21)
• pt93 (28/Apr/21)

On ​15/Apr/21 a user nicknamed morimoto suggested via IRC 0ad to create a patch for this problem.

A possible solution could be to move the Game Lobby to the main page and all other things to Single Player and Rest (see image below for clarity).

PS: In this video (@23:24min) titled ​Spring & Steam, an Odyssey (1/Feb/20), the presenter highlights the fact that users want to press as few buttons as possible to start a game and suggests implementing a feature where you only have to press one button and immediately start a random game with another user.

Very important [... ...] you really need very few clicks to get into a game.

EDIT1:
Related forum thread: ​shiny - an alternative main menu UI (28/Aug/21)

[Langbart]

added pt93 (28/Apr/21)

[Langbart]

Similar case in #6192 user mistakenly tried to join the lobby via "Join game".

[Imarok]

Assign correct component

[Stan]

Unlikely to happen for A25

[Langbart]

Related forum thread for a new user interface has been added to the description.

[Stan]

Unlikely to get done for A26

[Freagarach]

Pushing back.