Decline in the number of players

[PicassoCT]

I had my little bro play it yesterday.. was a long way in, we had to fight springlobby to get into the game, but after a half hour we got game.

[Lord_Hector]

I had my little bro play it yesterday.. was a long way in, we had to fight springlobby to get into the game, but after a half hour we got game.

everyone knows springlobby is terrible

[PicassoCT]

yeah, its my (de)fault! Should shave my head, and get some ashes. ComPlanEd will not be filed again.

[Forboding Angel]

SL gets a bad rep because the default spring setup is shit. Try evolobby and enjoy yourself once more.

edit: SL got autocorrected to "So" by my phone. Fixed.

[Neddie]

I have no problem with Spring Lobby.

[scifi]

Picasso can you list the problems your friend had mate????

yeah, its my (de)fault! Should shave my head, and get some ashes. ComPlanEd will not be filed again.

Listing the problems a new person had while instaling spring and playing it would be nice.

Since we all are used to solving issues with open source games and stuff, maybe we cant tell what is wrong for a new guy (since we got used to those issues and got passed those from natural experience).
Maybe asking someone new , to try do the instalation from fresh ,maybe we can get a fresh perspective of whats wrong.

[knorke]

I think everybody is kind of aware of whats not newb-friendly, its just that improving is a slow process.

[PicassoCT]

Oh, there was loads of stuff i never thought about.

Zero. He hit Spring into google.. and got everything, with spring. Try it. One of the Result was the Spring-Project.. is it a band.. is it a shoebrand? Beeing Nub, having near no advertisment (except oldbro rumbling) he searched the list and missed. Oh, and if thats your counter, hitting in Evo - or Tank doesnt improve the situation.

First Problem. He isnt good with english. I know. What do you do on the intertubes without any idea of english? But the spring public is from all around the world.. and many of those players we want dwell in local (Webs)

Second. He did find the download section. He didnt knew which of the many options was his. (he gave up there.. seems to many options, making yourself feel technooby scare people off)

third. He loaded the right version, but didnt remember where he installed it too, couldnt find the install, didnt want to load again. Somewhere in some directory, a spring is installed. I had enough of beeing called to help. So we loaded ZeroK. Directly from the zerok.info page.

four. He joined a game as spectrator (having troubls going through the autoregistration (why cant that damn thing (means springlobby here- oh, and its point 8 my fault, sorry) make defaultnames?)

five ingame.. some strange bug halfed his screen. he alt-tabed it away.. and forgot that one spring game was running in the background.

six. Thats were the data gets spoiled. It was Picasso.. it doesent work. Fixit Fixit Fixit. So i did.

seven. He also complained about maps not autoloading. I do complain about mods failing the autoload. Thats the story. Its not a good story. It shows, that spring players, are pre selected already, even before they get ingame, to be show that they are not good rts players.

[smoth]

ha ha most of thoss problems wouldn't be there if he was looking for a gundam game :)

[PicassoCT]

really.. if he would hit in gundam.. forgetting the game.. he would get fanforumz
if he would hit in evolution.. he would get a game, between bearded man and preinstalled-software-was-fine-apes
shall i continue?

Its not without reason, that especially new games without marketing power, make there game names so unique that the google search returns a "no results found"

Also Journeywar is not better, by the way. If i search it without the game addition.. i get a serie of ww2 book titles. Also a did-you-mean, which is mean.

Difficulties, Spring? Even before the Game has started?

[Forboding Angel]

Evolution RTS brings up all kinds of links, all of them relevant. Evolution Spring, ditto.

[PicassoCT]

If you dont forget RTS... which people do. Do not assume safer search.
People aint you. But without people you cant do.

when you search for starcraft..or kknd or darkOmen or other names, you suddenly realize, that all they have in comon, is that they dont have anything in comon- even not there shortcuts.

What alternative name would you give spring, that is really unique? Let the Brainstorming begin. Of course its way to late, to suddenly rename it, but i would be nice to talk about stuff that we would do if we could time travell.

[Forboding Angel]

try evolution spring
or gundam spring
etc etc.

[momfreeek]

"spring rts" or "spring engine" go straight here in ff

but ofc nubs who don't think of that.. don't think of that.

what do we call it when we tell people about it; just "spring" right? Shouldn't the official name be more unique? Is it called "spring rts", "spring engine" or "the spring project"? url, title and logo all say different.

[TradeMark]

what do we call it when we tell people about it; just "spring" right? Shouldn't the official name be more unique? Is it called "spring rts", "spring engine" or "the spring project"? url, title and logo all say different.

god damn, you are right.



lol.

[scifi]

i think the problem agravates when people think they are playing spring and not a game called BA.
New people think they are playing a game called spring and not a multitude of games, Spring is like a platform, where diferent types of games are played, this image isnt shown that mutch. OR at least people dont see it that way.

[momfreeek]

I think thats the reason why there are 3 different names. "spring rts" sounded like a game so it was (half-arsedly) renamed as "spring engine" and (half-arsedly) renamed as "the spring project". Given the lack of consensus, its just known as "spring" which is even less descriptive of the true nature of the platform than "spring rts" (and less unique).

[PicassoCT]

well, the fun is, once the new people come here, you can teach them the rights and wrongs of springspeak.. but before its all, word of mouth, and spring, beeing firstborn is travelling south.

Just accept that what is in the world, is very hard to take back. Spring is spring. Even if you play Evo in Spring, you say you play spring to nubs, and if you talk to another spring player, he will ask you WAT? and then you get moar precise.. i play EVO.

Your chance to change that arises only once you built up your very own comunity, who grows its own slang, forgetting the spring-thing, rechristining EVO as the "Big E"

Forb, shouldnt you training for the ragequit? It is hard, to quit in sfull affect . ;D


Also, inb4 your MetaMum jokes.

[knorke]

Whether googling "evolution rts" or "spring rts" brings up the correct pages is not really that relevant. Who searches for things he already knows?

It is more important that searching for "free rts games" brings up good (=Spring) results.
Funnily the search results for that seem to vary quite a bit every month.

So take a step outside this forum and try to find back in.
Right now the first result I find with "free rts games" is http://wilk13.net/freeware-games/rts.php

TA Spring 0.73b
A project aiming to create a new RTS in the spirit of the game Total Annihilation from 1997. Game has a full 3D graphic.
Producer / download / (29,8 MB) / GPL

uuuh.

When using image search with "free rts game", the first image from Spring is
and leads to
http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/f/strategy ... 1253327038
So not even a review of Spring but some rambling blogpost about pay2play games in general or something. (He even used a stock image)

Or pretend you are looking for a free World War 2 game.
I had to combine many words to finally find S44 ("free world war 2 rts game linux multiplayer") on page 2 or something
Was this forum thread from 2009:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1127524

Spring: 1944: a World War II RTS game using the cross-platform Spring engine;

Hey, he got the game/engine thing right! But sadly the link is to http://s44.koshi.homelinux.net/ so does not work.

I tried searching youtube for "free rts game" too, first Spring video is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_eR0FQl0o4
WTF? A slideshow made from a bunch of stock screenshots, all taken from of this site. I did not expect it to be that bad.
Basically if you see screenshots of Imperial Winter in a video or on a site, you know they did not try out the game but just combined whatever they found in the media gallery to create some article.

At least right under that "video" there is the The Cursed trailer, which is alright.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiBh8l200oo

Then nothing for some pages and then one of these bad BA videos where the framerate goes to the beat, as one comment puts it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZlzhINS8_g

Help, I am lost in the intertubes!

[momfreeek]

I play 40k. Everyone calls it 40k, but if someone asks what it is they will be told its "warhammer 40,000" and they will be able to find it as such. Everyone understands how shortened names work and they are not confused by this.

I play spring. Everyone calls it spring, but if someone asks what it is they might be told its "spring rts" or "spring engine" or "the spring project" or probably, just "spring" and they won't be able to find it cause its confused. How can we expect people not to be confused by this?