Spring has less players

[scifi]

Totaly wrong, Rigth like thats the problem.

I havent seen any kick in ages, i havent seen people even complaining at help channel, no nothing 0!!!!!!!!!!!. No calls for help, no questions.
Rather than some random people that post even now and then.

truly sy is the only activie spring channel.

24 people autohosts, im not gona begin to describe, the madness this brings, once there were 2 dsd hosts, now there is one that snipes all the players, .AND Most that spec are waiting for a chance to play.

Hell id like DsD to return with 6v6 , 8v8, and not 12 v12 what the heck is this.

A guy from the clan im currently a part of, just came back a few days ago after months if not years of "0" spring, ill just quote.

"Everythings so quiet, every channel is idle, ive stayed logged in for 7 hours and nobady speaked anything in any channel at all."

[Tim Blokdijk]

Open Source community's suffer if the last release is more then a few months old. We're approaching 9 months now.

[PicassoCT]

Masochistic Open Source Comunitys enjoy the suffering.

[Tim Blokdijk]

The advantage is that the noise/signal ratio is good at the moment. A big active playerbase is a distraction for development. But not having your code released is also very demotivating for developers.

[smoth]

"Everythings so quiet, every channel is idle, ive stayed logged in for 7 hours and nobady speaked anything in any channel at all."

eu time or us time because I am betting eu time.

[Senna]

Its good all this talk, but if theres no solution, soon spring will have more bots than players, same happened to the moon project really the same!,
i got some experience with this and when a rts gets to few players then theres no chance to make more players back.

We tried with the old game and i was admin here, but comunity doesnt care about balances and left the game disbalanced for long and it wasnt open source, the game get less players till 0, it passes 50 players to nothing in less than 2 years, the cause? bad balances, trolls, kicks, and no comunity support, hope this dont happend with spring too, if yes another great rts down it will be really lame

[albator]

You are right Senna, but admins dont care. A simple exemple: LionHeat spec cheat multiple time and still is admin. The topic about this has even been locked to minimize the flame about it i guess.

[smoth]

-_- well start supporting projects that are developing. I don't like seeing rants like this as if all the work that is going on with the other projects doesn't matter when you are really talking(I assume) about the decline of BA.

[PicassoCT]

pw protected server is pw-protected

PW:LionheartDoesSpecCheats

[Jazcash]

Spring has less players because it's not aiming to expand its playerbase and it's just simply that old/regular players are now just leaving.

[oksnoop2]

Has anyone made the comment about spring not being a game and how it each game developers choice/job to gather a player base? Spring seems to have a decent number of devs floating around if you count engine/games/maps. At least that's how it appears to me.

[Silentwings]

Open Source community's suffer if the last release is more then a few months old. We're approaching 9 months now.

If you mean just the engine then, sure. But if you count mods releasing new versions and also new maps then its more recent than that.

I don't ever remember a time when spring engine releases were more regular than every 3/4 months. This is not a rant against the engine devs - they do a superb job, I just think your timeframe is wrong in spring's case.

And +1 to what Jazcash said - the biggest reason we aren't getting new players is because we aren't trying to attract them at the moment.

[PicassoCT]

I think the real problem is we dont copy the games industry closely. Spring does not support quicktime events, and has not one running success-simulator, software that can give even the biggest tube of nublube the impression he is good at vidya games.

And we dont have spy&controllware like Steam or Origin. Oh, i hear you whine - this is a good thing. Is it?
Or does not harassing your customers, not making them bitch and moan, just shows a lack of interest?

[zerver]

It is definitely an issue that you can predict who is going to win already before the games start with > 80% accuracy. Personally I no longer care about win/loss but noobs definitely may, since it takes time to learn to be a good loser. I think I have an even better solution to overcome the balancing problem.

Basically replace the "Ready" system with a balance thumbs up/thumbs down voting thing, and it is important that you cannot see who pressed thumbs down to prevent votekicking or other unwanted reprisals. It is also important that the voting will be restarted whenever the balance changes due to new players that joined the battle etc.

If thumbs up do not reach threshold X, the host will rebalance and everyone will "unready" (i.e. be forced to vote again). Clan balancing should be disabled unless there are multiple clans in the battle, with an approximately equal number of players from each clan. Clan balancing will also be disabled if thumbs down wins more than Y times.

Edit: You could also expand the system to automatically get rid of idle players. When the game is in a state where it can start, and more than half the players have pressed thumbs up/down, the host will ring all players and those who do not cast a vote within Z seconds will be specced.

[Silentwings]

To combine two ideas:

The thumbs up/down agreement for balance, which zerver suggests above, could be a feature which is only unlocked for player with say, a four bar account or higher. That way it won't confuse the newbs and it would also act as a reason not to smurf.

I think it would be important that the lobby/autohost has default state as thumbs up, assigned whenever a new battle is joined.

[zerver]

I think the noobs are clever enough to have some kind of opinion about the balance. Suppose the battle room is filled with high-ranked guys from a clan, and the rest are noobs... then only the clan stack can vote and it would be a total failure.

Everyone should vote imo, and there should be no 'default' state. You either vote, or the system will spec you.

[smoth]

I used to advertise on anime forums which did bring people into spring.

when I get the waves in, I spec them where I can and ask them as many questions as I can then proceed to develop against that + past feedback. We content devs all have different approaches but I promise you we are trying. Fact of the matter is we have people who come for our projects and leave because they cannot host. I have beaten this horse to death.

Relay host requires commands to work.
autohost requires commands to work.

I am only able to do so much unless I take on modifying the current lobbies which will leave gundam to languish in the interum.

I like relayhost(even though it no longer works for me) but it is often overseas and thus laggy. The firewall problem is a real pain in the ass for starting players. I really wish we had the lualobby stuff then I could have the player in spring.exe the whole time playing a mission or sandboxing while in chat.

tl;dr, we are donig what we can progress is slow, the smaller projects don't have players because there are not enough to maintain a stable match flow. It is the same problem with modern games. They have to have a critical population or people leave to play something else.

[PicassoCT]

How about a real-time-ballance-phase at the start? Sort of a pre-game, were the actuall nubism is tested, and then the games is reballanced, with handicaps and benefits, so that even the most "I built a tank"nob gets his chance?

[Forboding Angel]

Relay host requires commands to work.
autohost requires commands to work.

^^ this is the biggest issue.

[zwzsg]

Spring is about seven years old. It's that it's still played online daily that's wondrous.