I wasn't talking about BA, I was talking about Spring which has an installer and an uninstaller

i actualy think the problem here, is decline in Spring players, rather than BA players but whatever............

Also zero-k increase in players hasnt been that mutch, BAs decline in players is the main reason ZK is on top of those grafics.

Most integrated gfx cards of the last 5? years can run spring I think, at least if the settings are apropriately low. Even if the FPS isn't too good, it's still passable.

At least BA, probably different with some games with heavier effects it might get unbearable with just a few units shooting.

That's not really true. I have laptop with a dedicated graphics card, it is from late 2009. The FPS is down to single digits after mid game in large games (not cpu related, my cpu is as good as most desktops'). If I were to use the integrated intel card then FPS would be truly terrible. All my settings are on low I don't even have shadows turned on.

The first time I ever played spring was on a Radeon 9600 pro with a 2.5ghz athlon xp and as I recall the performance was great in 3v3. Not lowest settings either. I'm guessing if you tried that rig on current spring/ba it wouldn't be nearly as smooth today as it was back then.

You need a pretty new computer to play in the average 12+ player game of today. For sure a lot of people won't have a good enough computer that is why large games get so laggy in late game.

try MT ?

Yeah performance is worse and worse..
I sarted playing with geforce 4 series and athlon 2000 and it run fine in big games.

Now its sometimes laggy even on high end hw.

I remember playing spring (mostly BA) a few (three) years ago on an old library machine (lowest settings ofc). It was not just bearable - it was quite playable unless in late game. And that wasn't nowhere near fresh by then.

Anyway, isn't there any benchmarking to check how bad it is in numbers? Nostalgia can be faulty.

1 billion lua script later, spring is slower, sure it is, but don't forget we used to play spring in 5v5 at 0.2 speed in late games, now it plays at 1.0 speed the whole game because the slower pc doesn't slow the game as it used to

The sad thing is that many of the players who lag in those large games could enjoy smaller games just fine.

Large game are not the issue, large game played on overcrowded maps with too much dispareted level are. FFA are extremely fun to play, probabily the only reason i keep playing spring and MT made that doable for PC >= 2009 since first quad cores. Just a matter of education about what to play to have fun: noob surely dont know that, even some vet still dont know. Role of admins should be to drive them the right way:

-> http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26812

keep the beating on :D

Fun fact: I am considering 20 players FFA to be even worse than overcrowded DSD because its even more random. I know I am quite alone with that opinion. But people who are disliking DSD are also a minority while the majority would also say "16v16 DSD is extremely fun to play".
I dont say FFA should be banned to save spring though.
I am still close to quit spring/BA since currently it seems there is only 16v16-DSD and 20-player-FFA left.

Whoa, easy there pilgrim!

Imho FFA being popular is good for spring. If one game mode can draw 12+ people on an evening(sadly this is an awesome number today) then it should be treated like a golden egg. FFA should probably be divided into newbie and pro though as you say since pros roflstomp newbies into tears in a minute or two, which can't be fun for the newbies.

ZK has ZKLobby. None of the rest of us can emulate that. The lobbies we use are lolz in comparison. It's no great shock that zk is doing just fine.

Evo would be doing great, but I can't retain online players. #1 complaint, "Lobby wtf is this I don't even..."

You want an Evo lobby? PM me.

I think the one thing everyone has seriously overlooked was the recent utter death of XTA according to the graph.

Oh lol now that you mention it.. I think a lot/all of XTA players went to ZK though it was always the same couple of dudes who played XTA.

yea..a few games are played every odd evening at least. So not much, but regular and since a long time. Since some weeks its a bit fucked because 2 mod versions. Also much blabla between games.

http://www.lostgarden.com/2009/11/testosterone-and-competitive-play.html

In brief: If ur not winner ur gay!