I notice a decline in the number of spring players.
I remember 2008, where we had 400 players online.

What happened to the popularity of Spring and how can we increase it again?

My first thought is about the autohosts.
I think they are bad, since they push players to play DSD all the time.
This wasn't a problem before the autohosts where there.

The developers ignore the community side of spring because they think it's the job of the makers of the games. They only do some engine coding and nothing else.

The lobby is full of (empty) dsd 8v8 autohosts, and nearly every players is a dick. If you get spring working someway and figure out how the lobby works you either get kickvoted because you're a noob or somebody drops a com on you.

It's impossible to just come in and play something that is not BA dsd, unless you organize it with other people. To do that you need to know other spring players, new people don't know other spring players. The result is in the case that new people make it to the lobby they see that people only play the same boring thing and that if they try to join those people will chase them away. This means no new players ever start playing spring.

Long story short developers and people with power could do something about it (like ban those stupid autohosts and stop the dicks someway), but they won't.

Spring needs a flagship game and many simple and easy to code improvements that make a world of a difference. Making it user friendly, adding a NORMAL lobby to the game exe itself and stopping the flood of empty ba-dsd autohosts, combined with an anti-dick campaign (some heavy moderation), and a flagship game are the only things that will make it possible for spring to be popular in the future.

The devs need to work together with a group of artists to make this flagship game.

--

Now people will quote my post with a nice "do it yourself", but listen up. As developer of this engine you want people, many people to use it, right? If you want that you need to invest some energy in that. Spring is great and with some effort it can become popular. People aren't going to do this for you. You (the developers) need to take the initiative.

While the number of bots (random chatbots + autohosts) is pretty insane (73/~497 logged in), I think people overstate the DSD autohosts. There's only one that I see right now (generally peak hours) - granted, it is the most full server, but its only one. No other occupied hosts are playing DSD. The fact that there are almost 500 clients on the server is pretty cool, I think.

Edit: autohosts generally are awesome (combined with relayhosts). It means that it is always possible to play S44, regardless of whether there's someone around who knows how to/is able to host a game.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Nothing Spring-related should be promoted until it is stable, playable and all the holes have been ironed out. Otherwise you're wasting effort attracting players that may have stayed around if there wasn't a huge poo sitting right on top of the engine.

i was there too, but i remember 260 users max
also, there are currently 391 users online atm (see post timestamp for reference) , and it's not even a peak hour

About 60 of those are bots. Note, there were not nearly as many bots in 2008 as there are now.

You have to count the players in #main, since in local the autohosts and bots are counted too. There are only 286 players online there.

there are tons of bots in #main too
a lot of players (I for one) don't join #main, so it's not a good number
and as jazcash said, they are roughly 70 or so and you don't know how many were present in 2008
licho has a bot that keeps track of ingame time spent http://files.caspring.org/stats.zip
plot that if you want an unbiased value

and newer part

http://tracker.caspring.org/stats.zip

Autohosts make it much easier to play NOT*A, (mapname)+*A is nothing new. I recall making a thread Spring is not BA+speed metal or something like that oh it was this one: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9430&hilit=spring+is+ba+speedmetal so DSDBA8V8 is nothing new.

The only thing that has really happened is that I have an autohost that allows people come to play gundam actually have a way to find people to play with. Some days they do play all day and that is really cool but would not be possible without the autohosts.


hoi: Not happening. Also much of the attraction to ba is 2 things:
People come here to play ota based somethings...
People want to play the LOLHARDCOREIMMAPRO game.. which the community in lobby declares is ba and generally will bash anything else.

smoth - we host you self replicating autohost for gundam afaik
People can also easilly spawn their own using !spawn command..

Also it could be easier for nubs if you allowed us to list gundam as a game. But you said its not ready...

can I specify one dir yet? If no, then zklobby will NEVER be used by me.

Yes you can specify dir (springdata in spring config, zkl listens to it) but frankly WHO CARES!

Chrome is extremely popoular and it installs into documents and settings whole program and runs stealthy updater service etc..

I wont damage convenience of 90% users (no UAC issues, no engine version map sharing issues) to satisfy few percent of nerd complainers.

Insulting me as a defense is not acceptable.

I have no UAC issues.. I install to a different dir.

Having it place the maps and game archives in a separate dir is not how I want to distribute my game

Games are not chrome. Games are games chrome is a browser. Even still I hate that games install things to userland and as I want to make installers and crap for my game.. my preference of directory structure matters.

FURTHERMORE most games have their core maps as part of the core dir. Userland is reserved for things like user maps, replays etc. Also coredir/bin/ cordir/lib is acceptable but not userlanddir/engine etc. the actual game content and game maps(which in real games count as part of the actual game content) belong in the core dir.

I don't want to see the game files(INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE MAPS) in userland. That is not proper.

This is a barrier. You could rather than become defensive tell me where to set it thus, showing me to be an incompetent know nothing. Instead you become aggressive and defensive. I don't see where it was merited.

Also where do I get to game/map options in zk lobby? I still cannot find it.

We need more threads about people asking what they can do for Spring, not telling Spring what to do for them.

I didnt attack you, I didnt say anything offsensive did I?

You can change it its SpringData in engine config, but there is no point to make it more convenient. If someone cares enough they can change the config.

People who install stuff into manual directories are obviously minority nerds, I do that too, but majority of normal users simply dont care and click next next in installer. And chrome installs gigantic executables there, several GB of data for me.. I really dont see how its a "blocking" issue if most people don't care ..

Aim is to make it as simple as possible to install and use.. you can notice installer does not ask anything. Its not a lobby for people who want to tweak every single detail. For those SL or Tasc is better.

<3

Also I disagree with pretty much every single word of Hoi's post.

Calling people nerds is pretty offensive. Dismissing their arguments based upon them being a "nerdy minority" is also pretty offensive.

You're free too, but there are some very simple facts in my post:

- The community is very unfriendly
(not you guys but the people the new players end up with playing)
- Spring isn't very user friendly
- Ba dsd 8v8 ruins everything

Spring has much more potential, and should have much more players, but the points above are correct. Because of those three 99.9% of the people who try it quit almost instantly.

@Smoth

I don't understand how you're married to a single-directory layout in this day and age. What directory do Steam games install to? And yet Steam has rapidly become the most popular content distribution platform for PC games. No operating system works like that anymore.