gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
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- Silentwings
- Posts: 3720
- Joined: 25 Oct 2008, 00:23
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
Based on my experience of watching #newbies the two main causes from there are
(1) lobby can't find engine, user is confused, can't download/start any maps/games
(2) user thinks they downloaded a particular game, has never heard of springrts, game has no players online, other games are hidden
I tried to help some of them by updating the read me first. Of course many people don't read the "read me first" and at that point my sympathy expires.
(1) lobby can't find engine, user is confused, can't download/start any maps/games
(2) user thinks they downloaded a particular game, has never heard of springrts, game has no players online, other games are hidden
I tried to help some of them by updating the read me first. Of course many people don't read the "read me first" and at that point my sympathy expires.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
These days, people expect intuitiveness.Silentwings wrote: I tried to help some of them by updating the read me first. Of course many people don't read the "read me first" and at that point my sympathy expires.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
One big issue of course is that many 'intuitive', easy-to-use features like quickmatching just don't work without having hundreds of consecutive players. A more plausibly solveable issue really is the idea that people come to play Spring instead of a game on Spring..
Right now majority of the games don't have their own installers. SL could be shipped with some pre-defined filters unless I am mistaken, and perhaps even in a slightly modified version that had some "join now!"-button for newbies to spam the hell out of. However, SL as downloaded by most people coming to Spring, is tailored for Spring and all the games it has, which is good. But it isn't game-friendly and it isn't friendly for people who don't come to Spring, but to a specific game on Spring.
Right now majority of the games don't have their own installers. SL could be shipped with some pre-defined filters unless I am mistaken, and perhaps even in a slightly modified version that had some "join now!"-button for newbies to spam the hell out of. However, SL as downloaded by most people coming to Spring, is tailored for Spring and all the games it has, which is good. But it isn't game-friendly and it isn't friendly for people who don't come to Spring, but to a specific game on Spring.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
Talking from the linux side, during the past year it has been a struggle to run a lobby on linux as the repository used by linux mint (the most popular dist atm, but I supposed that is the same for ubuntu as it uses the same repo) was providing a SL that was performing very poorly with the engine (crash, incompatibily, and more importantly corruption of config files). No problem with the engine, the static build do great (was an issue only with 95 iirc)
And when you want to compile it yourself it is not that easy if you have no experience with that kind of things and you need a lot of package that are not indicated in git and that are not shipped with basic linux distribution.
I think that definitly was (is?) the issue for linux user. I remember reading similar complains in the chat... If you want to test what a game be installed from the repo, I suppose you get annoyed quickly by all bugs I mentioned. I don't know if that have been fixed though since I now know all the dependencies, I keep using the last SL version....
I am really happy that SL has been improved a lot latly btw
And when you want to compile it yourself it is not that easy if you have no experience with that kind of things and you need a lot of package that are not indicated in git and that are not shipped with basic linux distribution.
I think that definitly was (is?) the issue for linux user. I remember reading similar complains in the chat... If you want to test what a game be installed from the repo, I suppose you get annoyed quickly by all bugs I mentioned. I don't know if that have been fixed though since I now know all the dependencies, I keep using the last SL version....
I am really happy that SL has been improved a lot latly btw
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
As you pretty much noticed yourself, the static builds are the future.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
People can and do return to games, it's sad that nothing quite like Spring SP was ever built after it died, there're plenty of people who never go online or wait until they're happy with their single player performance. For these people there are barriers, they're mostly an afterthought here and have usually been considered 2nd class citizens to online players. Even our metrics of how successful a game here is are almost entirely based on multiplayer lobby activity. Maybe they used to be online gamers but don't want to pit their 3 or 4 year gameplay against the current crop in almost certain defeat..
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
Single player users that don't even have a server or forum account might be into writing something in the feedback page.
Unfair matches are one of the problems. Auto-matching only works for large communities. Auto-balance is already applied on most hosts based on a skill measure, but that may have the side effect of making the games feel like "ranked", which may be more stressful.
We could change games to be less unforgiving. I'm doing that on MF.
By querying the db we might be able to find out the correlation between players having a low win% and leaving.
(edit : but that one is probably so obvious it's not even worth it..)
Unfair matches are one of the problems. Auto-matching only works for large communities. Auto-balance is already applied on most hosts based on a skill measure, but that may have the side effect of making the games feel like "ranked", which may be more stressful.
We could change games to be less unforgiving. I'm doing that on MF.
By querying the db we might be able to find out the correlation between players having a low win% and leaving.
(edit : but that one is probably so obvious it's not even worth it..)
Last edited by raaar on 12 Jun 2015, 18:25, edited 2 times in total.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
Lobbies should combine main chat/battle list screens as the old TASclient did around ~2010 when it was still the most popular/default client. After the change to Springlobby main chat/newbie channel participation plummeted. The chance of a newbie being heard and getting help is near nil (especially now that player counts are so low, so making such a change to Springlobby/Weblobby might not even make a difference *note* I don't know if Springlobby has changed in the last few years when I was away from Spring, I've been using Weblobby since I returned).
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
[x] Too much discussions.
Reasons i left thread.
Reasons i left thread.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
If I found this game now, I'd quit instantly just because tiny playerbase. Don't see the point of going through whole learning phase for a dead game. Especially considering how unfriendly it is to set it up and the dreadful lobbies you have you use. ZK often has 0 games running from around 3am-3pm GMT, who would care enough to stick for that? Then when they do find a game it is full of veterans and everybody gets pissed because you're a useless nub.
It's not really surprising that there's low player retention.
It's not really surprising that there's low player retention.
- Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
You realize that ZK has it's own server, right?BlitzTank wrote:ZK often has 0 games running from around 3am-3pm GMT, who would care enough to stick for that?
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- Posts: 823
- Joined: 21 Oct 2008, 02:54
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
That's probability one of the misconceptions that needed clearing up.Forboding Angel wrote:You realize that ZK has it's own server, right?BlitzTank wrote:ZK often has 0 games running from around 3am-3pm GMT, who would care enough to stick for that?
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
Not really. If you go to the ZK site and press the download button, you'll get a client that connects to the ZK server.
Also, I'm sure Drone isn't confused about this.
Also, I'm sure Drone isn't confused about this.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
the server doesnt matter, I'm just saying ZK is most popular and it is still dead half the time, it is the same for BA
though BA has more issues than ZK because its not just dead but its very outdated now, it looks like shit by todays standards
ofc its nothing new but it is probably biggest reason nobody want to stick around
though BA has more issues than ZK because its not just dead but its very outdated now, it looks like shit by todays standards
ofc its nothing new but it is probably biggest reason nobody want to stick around
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
An idea to fix the auto match for when no players are available and noobs(like me).
Make AI an option for when no players are around.
what i mean is that if i just want to play as fast as possible and I don't care against who, then a tickbox that will connect me to a game with AI if no real people are around kind of solves that for my use case.
skill level of AI would be quite low I imagine, so noobs will always have 'someone' to play with whilst also being available for when another noob shows up.
Make AI an option for when no players are around.
what i mean is that if i just want to play as fast as possible and I don't care against who, then a tickbox that will connect me to a game with AI if no real people are around kind of solves that for my use case.
skill level of AI would be quite low I imagine, so noobs will always have 'someone' to play with whilst also being available for when another noob shows up.
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- Posts: 823
- Joined: 21 Oct 2008, 02:54
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
I don't think tricking the player is a good idea.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
I know a few old indie games, similar to SpringRTS' games that have all seen a dramatic loss of players over the past 5 years or so. I think this is largely due to the huge increase of indie games being pumped out across the globe on a daily basis. Not only does it take a lot for an indie game to attract any sort of playerbase, but it takes a whole lot more to consistently attract and retain one. Unfortunately, the majority of the time, the old indie games with rapidly declining playerbases tend to look past this and attribute this to some fault of their own.
Simply put, I just think some SpringRTS games have seen their day. It'll take a whole load of effort for a SpringRTS game to even get half the growth of BA in its prime, especially when they're peddling nothing new apart from a typical *A Spring game with different models and UIs. Perhaps they'll be some small growth with a lucky highlight on a popular distribution platform or review site, but I very much doubt they'll be a Spring game that will amount to any serious numbers without an extreme amount of effort and polish.
Simply put, I just think some SpringRTS games have seen their day. It'll take a whole load of effort for a SpringRTS game to even get half the growth of BA in its prime, especially when they're peddling nothing new apart from a typical *A Spring game with different models and UIs. Perhaps they'll be some small growth with a lucky highlight on a popular distribution platform or review site, but I very much doubt they'll be a Spring game that will amount to any serious numbers without an extreme amount of effort and polish.
- Silentwings
- Posts: 3720
- Joined: 25 Oct 2008, 00:23
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
You are all so behind with the times, Spring died circa 2005 viewtopic.php?f=1&t=557&p=6961#p6961
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- Posts: 823
- Joined: 21 Oct 2008, 02:54
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
TBH I'm a single player type of guy when it comes to rts. The fact that engine originally design to be 3D TA multiplayer experience really holds back the current "idea" version.
Re: gathering feedback about people who leave spring ecossystem
So single Multiplayer? You can watch what the other guys do on there lane of the map, but cant interact? like twicht and chickens combined?