Lulz, whose smurf is this?

You are right, a first step would be to make a semi-professional website for BA. Then advertise it on Google. There are plenty of people with ad coupons we could use. Doesn't need to be much just an intro page, download with a real installer, spectacular screenshots and links to this subforum, plus maybe some extra content like unit info or background. Any takers? Do we have any good web designers here? Jazcash?

Somebody in New Zealand named Michael Robinson owns balancedannihilation.com too. Could that be somebody here?


We could put a default filtering setting in lobbies. E.g filter out ALL games that are empty by default. How do you think?

Alternatively we could have a blacklist server that lobbies download blacklist from and exclude those autohosts from their lists. No need for moderators a single person could be in charge of the blacklist. I could set it up but I can't force other lobby devs to use it.

That would be hilarious! Then on the next server reboot all the games would be empty and invisible!

ZKLobby has been doing this for years. It's a checkbox that's checked by default.

Haters are always going to hate.

Certainly you can understand that this only works because most people don't have ZKLobby.

How so? The checkbox works fine no matter who has ZKL.

There is also a nice big "open new battle" which spawns a new autohost that the player automatically joins. I've seen quite a few newbies hosting their own games this way. Once it has been empty for ~5 minutes or so it automatically disappears again. You get the convenience of insta-ready autohosts without the empty autohost spam.

This is a very nice feature.
To lower entry barrier (and for my personal laziness) what's missing is the integration in the lobbies to parse "!help[all]" and dynamically create a window/whatever where the user can see and change settings. A marker for each setting indicates whether the setting can be changed with or without votes.

This could be done for votes too, to clear the chat window from it. Not sure if it would encourage more or less voting.

I'd actually enjoy having all host-msg filtered into a 2nd text box, and have a clean chat box.

I can see BA's day has come, Zero-k has about as many players as BA at any given time during the day. DSD is the only map played in spring... its getting very difficult for dedicated BA die hards like to me find a game that isn't DSD. I refuse to play DSD.

Obviously zero-k is taking over. I switched from AA to BA and likely to Zero-K now. But its strange that there has been such a huge drop in BA players.

the only thing I'll give behe credit for is not locking threads in BA subforums as badly as they are being locked in general

based on that graph, its interesting how devs and mods spend 90% of their time trying to prop up failing mods when their capital player base is obviously coming out of BA. Anyone who mentions BA in general is asking for a ban. I'm glad the whole thing is going to fall down, have you people looked at the number of threads ''spring is dying'' have been locked in general?

What's happening
This happened last time when BA took over AA. People were freaking out, drama ensued several people including myself had to funnel the sheep over to BA from AA.. there was much resistance. Shit got ugly for a bit and when I pointed it out the AA community turned on me as well.

I don't necessarily want that to happen this time, I think BA and ZK while similar are fundamentally different. That is where I get pissed. You guys the BA players have had years to make it better and I have watched for years you guys drive it into the ground. Don't give me some bitch whine about DSD, I was around years before you when we all thought Speedmetal was going to ruin spring and I have been here more active than most in this community observing on the sidelines.


Since it seems to be such an issue... Why am I always so critical then?
Cheese and yourself seems to miss that I actually have been supportive of BA since it's beginning. If I didn't support and was acting against BA, I would not have such a good relationship with Fat and Behe?

I have always been here but I don't openly support BA/AA/*A because I think it is MORALLY wrong to take the models out of the game. I don't think IP is sacred and I think it is perfectly ok to homage something. I do not think it is ok to outright steal the models out of OTA:CC. It is wrong and I want no part of that. So I distance myself but make no doubt I am always here lurking and watching.

With BAR and MrBob's work I see my primary issue with BA being removed and take great interest in being more openly supportive of BA.

Why do I fight the spring=ba goons?
Because I think all spring projects should be appreciated for their own unique design. This is also why I hate too many BA splits, I think they should be BA mutators so ba STAYS unique. By trying to say spring=ba you say that every spring game is the same, whether or not you realize it. This hurts spring because players sometimes LEAVE thinking all spring games are the same because of our shared resources. For example almost every spring project includes at least 1 of my ceg particles and the team color textures of ba? I purpled them back when tobi patch the engine to give us actual color choice. So we all share abit and that to outsiders makes spring games very samey, something I actively fight when promoting spring.

Why does that matter?
The idea is retention, if they don't like 1 game they can try another at least it might slow them down or instead of leaving get them playing something other than BA. I don't openly suggest that because a lot of people are worried about people getting "stolen" from BA. Because god knows them leaving spring altogether is better right?

Good or maybe even a great idea, do you have more lobby ideas?

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I think there are some good things on the horizon for BA:

1. New pathfinding system.
   
2. ROAM and better FPS - helps for large team games & FFA.
   
3. New models.
   
4. New lobbies.
   
5. Fixing the FFA hosts.

Since all of these things should come true in the near future, what we should do now is work on marketing BA hard. If you google 'Balanced Annihilation' the first hit is the 90's-style wiki page, and the second the forum topic spouting changelog gibberish. We need to take people to a flashy website dedicated to BA.

To be willing to give BA a try, people need to feel that it is offering a commercial quality experience. People are put off by the concept of free games because they associate it with a lower quality. But if the game is sufficiently involving they will stick around and forgive its faults. Here's an example of how a BA website should look: http://www.thesecretworld.com/

Imagine someone is trying to advertise BA over the Internet. How should they do that? Should they give the URL to springrts.com? URL to wiki? How is anyone going to find that appealing? Let alone find their way through all the nonsense to download BA?

Here's a prime example of how not to advertise BA(don't worry about foreign language I will explain the thread): http://www.fz.se/forum/pc/spring-balanc ... ost-224745

Fz.se is one of the biggest gaming forums in Sweden. Basically a dude says, hey tried Spring with the BA mod yet? Then he posts a link to the wiki and some Youtube video. People probably check the youtube then they click the wiki link and instantly get to see a dozen mods. They have to scroll to the very bottom to find BA. This is a good way to lose players to other games and/or just turn them off.

Let BA die, we all know things get more popular after their dead

That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

Please just let BA die in peace.

Note its not dead, its still the biggest game in spring..

Unfortunatly I just wrote a big text that got lost.... some instead of that I'll just make a little list:

BA downsides
- no real multi-threading support
- no own character, too much inter-woven with spring engine. (foum, springrts.com, news/releases/test versions) unlikely to change, since ba is very dependant on spring engine/spring community
- brakes down after every new update at least for a few days
- poor settings UI/too nerdy to customize, it should come with at least 20 custom widgets (I'm not gonna list them again now)
- uglyness (but hurray for BoB's work!)
- and finally: some gameplay things... :D

With 85.0 pathing, BA is really breaking it down!

(unaltered BA 7.62)

oh well, thats just the pring engine failing to do process a peewee doing a Liu Kang bicylcle kick

Wat? You call it breaking down? Its epic D: