You allude to TA-mods? I am talking about spring players in general (yeah I know, there is no "spring player") measured by count of people in the lobby.
Forboding Angel wrote:
Were things better then? No.
Well, I have the feeling that 3 years ago, people were far more open to try different mods and maps. Nowadays spring is even more 8v8-BA-DSD than ever before. Probably caused by the autohosts.
There are very few but big (and long) games going making it more difficult for a player to actually hop in a game when he enters the lobby at a random time. Newbies who freshly installed spring and are firing up the lobby for the first time have no clue of this situation. They have a very small chance to get into a game at all.
This is of course just my impression (basically BA-only-player). Feel free to tell me yours is different.
Neddie wrote:
We had more BA 1v1 players. Not more players period.
I clearly remember a time when there were >320 players in main channel on a regular basis. AFAIK we don't have that any more today.
player base is cyclical during time of the year, max peak is in the winter low peak is in the summer
also it cycles during the week ( max at sunday )
and cycles during the day ( max at EU's evening )
this winter the peak reached 430 concurrent users ( altho 50 of them were autohosts )
last year's winter peak was 410 concurrent users
the year before was around 350 ( don't remember exactly sorry )
so there has been a steady increase in the playerbase, even considering autohosts ( much larger than "peak value delta" since to achieve puntual increase you need much larger amount of players )
you have only my word for it since I made no screenshot, next time I will ( altho I made few users in #sy to notice it as well back then, so if they remember they could confirm my claim )
Yes I know it cycles. To keep it short and to stop hijacking af's thread I will note to myself "spring's player base does not shrink - but it does not grow also."
if you really didn't want to hijack, you shouldn't have brought up the subject
to achieve average increase, if we approximate the join function as poisson ( I know it fails for constantly connected services such as autohosts, but those are present since 2 years more or less ), you need ^2 of delta of the players, so it grows, not a lot, but it does ( I reckon on an average of ~50 players/year )
FLOZi wrote:Go away, Cup.
Spring IS an engine. It should be marketed as such. To developers. Spring is not BA.
Next time im in HMV ill be sure to pick up a copy of the unreal engine 3.5 engine, i hear its really fun to play.
FLOZi wrote:Evo, GRTS, S44, KP, CA, BA, XTA these ARE games. They should be marketed as such. To players.
Again, too much for such a small player base, as evident by the current games being hosted & played in the lobby. A full grown multi million dollar company wouldnÔÇÖt try to push this many new products at a single time. An open source community with like 1000 active players of which 500 are developers (lol) definitely shouldnÔÇÖt.
What does the spring community want? lots of indy games based on a wicked engine which noone plays or a few games which the mainstream gamer likes who don't care what the engine is?
iamacup wrote:its fine if you ignore everything i said.
FLOZi wrote:Go away, Cup.
Spring IS an engine. It should be marketed as such. To developers. Spring is not BA.
Next time im in HMV ill be sure to pick up a copy of the unreal engine 3.5 engine, i hear its really fun to play.
FLOZi wrote:Evo, GRTS, S44, KP, CA, BA, XTA these ARE games. They should be marketed as such. To players.
Again, too much for such a small player base, as evident by the current games being hosted & played in the lobby. A full grown multi million dollar company wouldnÔÇÖt try to push this many new products at a single time. An open source community with like 1000 active players of which 500 are developers (lol) definitely shouldnÔÇÖt.
What does the spring community want? lots of indy games based on a wicked engine which noone plays or a few games which the mainstream gamer likes who don't care what the engine is?
(ps, tobi is still a god )
xx
First off, part of the reason its a small player base is because BA is standing there, parading it self with somewhat old graphics, and causing gravitation to it, and away with the games with the potential
Second off, I would say the community wants the first because they aren't developing for BA, they are developing for their games and the new stuff Spring can do with them, and if BA isn't standing there, then maybe just maybe their games would get people as well.
This is of course why I support the "1 game only" SD that has been spoken about, although AF does have a good idea as well.
Hold up there a minute, some of this almost sounds like blaming the existence of BA for holding other games back. If BA, with its supreme technical inferiority as attested to by those saying so, is holding the rest of the games back... the other games are doing something wrong. Get out there and push them. It's to be expected that the TA-derived mods are the most popular, since the engine was geared for them from the beginning, making them generally the most stable and longest lived, but that's not stopping mod developers from heavily promoting their own games and getting people into them. Maybe part of the problem there is that BA is being viewed as competitor, when it's really only a competitor if the competing mod is also derived from TA...
BA is a solid game, it's old and the graphics are lackluster, but it works well and people enjoy it. Stable and played. A lot of the mods are undergoing a constant development cycle which doesn't leave them with a solid base to derive that from, are actually in a pre-release state, and then we get back to this problem of marketing... might I suppose that the reason certain other mods aren't as popular is because they just aren't ready to be?
This all rests upon the vital assumption that BA is popular.
In comparison to the other games it is, not as much as it used to be, but it is still relatively unpopular, minor, and fringe as a whole when compared to what it could be, and this is neglected.
The potential BA playerbase dwarfs the actual BA playerbase.
i came to spring looking for an alternative to supcom. there were some BA battles going on in the lobby, just as today. BA was what i was looking for, so i stayed.
it was just 2 days ago that i decided to give CA a major shot. although i knew its much like BA and i'd probably like it, there are so few games going on... you actually cant _really_ play CA.
As for NOTA, XTA, Evo, Gundam... they're like legendary stories i read about here. i never played any of them more than once.
it never made much sense, since almost no one else is playing them.
none of my rl-friends play RTS, so i have to stick with the community.
from my perspective (i'm really sorry), spring _is_ very much BA, at least for now. and well, if there are no people starting to play more (...), this wont change. no one will come to play a game all by himself.
i'd go with AF and market BA (only because its most played!) and hope that the more players there are, the more other mods are played on a regular basis.
tl;dr
blablablah everyone plays BA blubbblubbblubb AF got it
May I point out that I was not advocating we advertise BA here.
Advertising BA here, would be a travesty for both BA and the engine.
Nor did I say advertise BA and only BA.
BA should be advertised at the BA website, with BA banners, BA adverts, BA videos, and BA promotional media by BA people.
If we deviate from that then we loose focus.
Kernel Panic should be advertised at the Kernel Panic website, with Kernel Panic banners, Kernel Panic adverts, Kernel Panic videos, and Kernel Panic promotional media by Kernel Panic people.
Quit paying so much attention to a handful of banners and tiny thumbnails on somebody elses website, and focus on the giant frontpage on your own websites.
When you want to advertise on TV, do you advertise in the bottom corner next to 5 others on one of your suppliers adverts? Or do you push out a brand new advert dedicated to yours product, tailor made for maximum effect?
If games do their job at selling themselves, then all this engine needs to do is mark sure we have the 'made with spring engine' logo in the bottom corner.
Lets take a prime example of misplaced developer attention.
Argh spent hours working on front page banners on this site, arguing over the size of his logo. He lavished masses of attention of a 600x350 banner on the frontpage that only displayed on every 1 in 5 page views.
Despite gaining a minor almost insignificant gain by using the banner, he neglected to update wolfegames.com, a site dedicated to his work, a site which gets thousands of hits every month. I should know, I built it for him, I have traffic statistics for it, and of all the places you can see P.U.R.E or Argh related work, his own website is the poorest source of information he has control over.
Thousands of potential buyers are met with a website that lacks upto date content. He regularly posts updates to things, everywhere but his website.
These are people who not only land on wolfegames.com but take the time to stay and look around. The bounce rate for wolfegames.com is 0.5%!!! For every 200 people who hit wolfegames.com, only 1 immediatly closes the window. This is extraordinary, its like having people walk into your shop and stare at a product for hours on end. Not only that, but they stay for several minutes and look at almost every page on the website.
Despite thousands of visitors every month. Despite them sticking to the website instead of immediately closing it. Despite having complete control over every aspect of the website. Despite visitors staying put for up to 10 minutes looking and exploring, he regularly ignores it and focuses on mundane things like a banner most people will ignore on a different website.
Argh is not alone in this kind of thinking, and he's not the only person who focuses on the minutae of stupid things, while letting the gold rush pass him by. At least argh has a website, nevermind the torrent of former TA players who come here, get baffled, then bugger off somewhere else
I suggest that we change the name from Spring Engine to Spring RTS. This matches the domain name perfectly and has less potential to scare away new people looking for "free RTS game".
Except that RTS games typically don't use "RTS" in the name. Actually, I'm not aware of a single one that does. To me the RTS word itself implies this is something more generic than a game.
That is more a mistake of the person who registered the springrts.com domain back when the purpose of the domain was to advertise the RTS games of spring, and then later handed it to the developers, than a mistake of the developers & community at large with misaligned goals.
We already have multiple sites, which if taken together, bring in more traffic than spring itself. Remember what I said about having stats for Arghs website? That's an unadvertised, underutilised site, pulling in thousands. Darkstars has its fair share too. If spring is too small for us to successfully launch a satellite website, then you have the following obstacles to being correct:
Existing thriving satellite communities, such as smoths website, springinfo, springfiles, darkstars
Moddb followings such as those of P.U.R.E and Gundam
Existing websites for games, such as imperial winters site, CA. s44 etc
If spring has too few users to launch a second site, how did this site get launched at all?
The games that would benefit from this most, are the ones that lack any website of any kind. But most of all, the whole point of the sites is to bring in users. Your logic results in:
We need a new site to bring in users because we dont have enough users, but we cant launch the new site because we dont have enough users.
We stand to loose nothing by making a site for BA etc and all the other prime time games that are ready to play right now, that are our of heavy development. It really comes down to wether you want to sit there and detract from the point and keep things as they are, or if you want to actually do something about it. The community will always be too small if you think like that.
zerver wrote:I don't think the community is big enough yet for separate game sites to become successful. People will still come here.
They go where they are directed I think. And when pointed here a lot of people get confused and turn right back. And that's not just because the site is poorly structured, it'll always be like that because you have to share the site with a dozen other products.
zerver wrote:I don't think the community is big enough yet for separate game sites to become successful. People will still come here.
The evo site gets 600 unique hits a day (fluctuates). Why don't you let us stand on our own two feet and get the largest stumbling block out of our way (that is, the barebones spring engine download hosted on this site)?
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