Promoting Spring to the outside world

[tombom]

Sadly the TA orientated people will never agree to anything that changes things for the better. Its taboo, its a barrier that mustn't be touched, and it doesnt matter if it all falls apart as long as their TA setup doesnt change at all, because as we all know, if that peewee dissapears from the site banner the weasel will get a bertha gun, and if that krogoth isnt plastered over the screenshot page then the laser tower will be nerfed, and if we dont mainly show off our flash spam in advertisements and youtube videos, then all our maps will grow eyes and legs and run off into the sea never to be seen again.

I don't know anybody who makes arguments anything like this.

[SinbadEV]

Good Show Man... all that stuff can't be said enough and you almost managed to not do it in a flamey manner.

Anyways.. there are about, oh, 50 minor and major details (many of which we are told are in the next build) that I feel are holding back ME from investing time in trying to promote the game to heavily... I could compile a list but it would be incomplete and I'm sure repeat many of your sentiments.

I see a lot of work being done towards Games for the engine that have 0 Atari IP (if you ignore nitpickery like textures, sounds, scripts and formats)... and I think we are getting very close to the point where this will be viable for general public consumption.

Very good point about the having tapped out the market on TA fans... I mean if you are a REAL TA fan and have been keeping up with the game actively since 97 you know about spring and have tried it if it was something you were interested in. The next markets to tap are the general strategy game maket, from modders to players there has got to be an awful lot of them out there only looking at mods for C&C, WC3/SC, or still playing Dune II, (or even turn-based gamers because we have the depth they are looking for)... these are the next fresh life we need to get away from Atari IP and get things moving in the "right direction"... we are not ready for REAL general public of the gaming community... we are looking for the hard core modders or players who look for options like coding helper widgets when they play a game...

sorry... anyways... yeah... how do we get THEM?

[Wisse]

Lemme tell you what I, average player which has no idea about coding and doesn't even know spring related problems think.

Boring part:
TA Spring is one of the hardest games I've ever seen. It's so damn hard to reach elite players even with community of only few hundred players (larger community = more skill imho). It's not fun to lose and since there are mostly oldschool guys on server there aren't enough players left for newbies. Even if they decide to stay they'll most likely play Speedmetal from time to time.

Times have changed. Ppl don't want to work when they're playing, they don't want to think. They just want to have shitloads of fun all the time. They want Wii.
I know that there's Supcom, which is suposed to be similar to OTA (TAS), whit larger playerbase but those guys were dragged into supercool new game hype which TAS isn't (anymore).

There's lobby too.
I love how lobby looks and works. I can see every information i want instantly but it's damn UGLY for today's standards where everything moves, blinks and animates with fancy effects. And it's kinda hard to use too (there have been recent noob friendly changes in Satirik's lobby but it has to be integrated i guess). I understand that lobby can't be compared to in-game lobbys other games have since those are "rendered" or something like that (you know what i mean). Maybe optional skins with different bg color and other font would help a bit.

What would i do:
I would wait for new version before bothering with any advertising. You should integrate latest version of XTA, BA and possibly CA updater. Newbie has to get into battle window where he can grab map. It's hard to install mod first. Better integration = downloading directly to ur map folder would be cool. Lobby will be integrated anyways as far as i know.

I would increase number of hours per rank (silver star could stay the same) so there are more low ranked guys at any given time. I would ban smurfs too :D

It would be nice to have something like "tip of the day" when you start ur lobby. I'm willing to help with this.

How to advertise:
There are many game magazines which come with DVD. We each ask local one to add TAS on next DVD it doesn't take much space anyways. They could even drop a line on paper if they're rly cool. We could spam some large forums by starting new topic with page/download link and some cool screenshots. Site should be redone first tho.
We should all try to advertise in more or less same time so we get more newbies joining simultaneously which will give them opportunity to start slowly without being bashed hard in first game.

Epilogue:
Don't be ashamed of TAS bugs. There aren't any serious ones anymore. Just make newb friendly install&play pack. Oh... and add custom formations into pack

[smoth]

Each and every mod i've played from gundam into s44 into ba into aa into xta has the same mechanics of the old ta on different skins.

Then you have not played gundam. It is shit like this that doesn't need to be said sleksa. Gundam isn't a TA skin. It does many things that TA doesn't we have had many many threads about this. Please, I am asking you, leave gundam out of your little rants here. I do not feel like debating the points again. Gundam is not a mere TA skin, I ask you to respect at least that much.

[Complicated]

Heres what I propose about the TA content problem

Set a timescale to be completed by 2009.

Texturing, audio, scriptings, the whole lot. None of it must resemble to TA

If you need help, I'm sure the community would gladly assist.
Ask for help and you'll get it.

[LordMatt]

I go away for two days and nothing changes...

I think we should spam the supcom forums and try to get some of the OTA players that moved on there. Also, TA is a great game model, if it wasn't, spring would never have been made. New players can learn that model, but they suffer from a lack of good instruction. I think if we made some single player missions that taught the basics of online play, that would help with the steep learning curve.

[Complicated]

Heres a long shot, a very long shot but it could happen due to it's popularity.

Halo Mod. The game itself is at the top at the moment.
It will last until Halo Wars Comes out but some people may choose to stay and play some of the other games. Feeding off the popular games could work. All I see that is a problem is legalties, however we're still not profitting etc over bungie so we shouldn't get into trouble. The game will be based on Halo and would also help bungie my promoting it.

long shot as I said..

[Complicated]

if it doesn't work, other games are possible, there are some talks about a Dungeon Keeper mod.

[smoth]

Halo Mod. The game itself is at the top at the moment.

HALOWARS is coming out. They already killed an amazing generals mod. Do your research, Microsoft is quick to C&D. Even with the recent split bungie isn't likely to permit a halo based mod.

Doing something based on TA is fine, the TA model of gameplay isn't bad. I think if I had 3 months of off time I could probably produce something good for that but the problem is that I do not have 3 months of spare time.

However, since we are talking about included content. I motion for both nanoblobs and KP to be included with spring. Also I request that in the future TD be considered. Minigames like these are good for teaching noobs and it would be awesome to see all that content come with spring.

[Masure]

I would argue that of all the issues that we had a year ago although some of them have been fixed, if you put together their contribution to the problem, a large chunk remains.



This is mainly because that big block of red is full of taboo subjects, things that we are not going to fix because there's a large proportion of the community that ahve a vested interest in keeping them going.

Of that red block here is how I believe it is broken up:



Some of them will need a little explanation:

Spring website

This should be corrected in january, however it is a problem nonetheless and could be much bigger if it weren't for the new site design push.

Atari IP and TA Content

These are separate because people insist on TA content everywhere. Most of our screenshot page has TA units on it, our banners have them, even proposed new banners have them. This further reinforces the Second Atari IIP problem and increases the effect of several other issues such as primary mod syndrome.

Atari IP alone means our project has an instant 50 mile no go buffer zone around it that most sites or people refuse to touch.


TASClient monopoly

For 2 years lobby innovation was somewhat nonexistant. It went at a snails pace. Sadly this is a positive feedback loop because untill someone can demonstrate a viable alternative it will stay in place. On top of that, this alternative must be a sizeable way ahead of the current setup. The archaic platform has remained somewhat cumbersome and stifling to innovation for a long time. Recent innovation has only occurred because of Unity spring and aflobby posing competition.

AI collapse

Our AI community is almost dead. Lua has killed off most groupAIs and the end user is now unable to see any benefit in groupAIs, even though there are still things that only native code will be able todo that lua widgets can't replace so easily. That and the addition of masses of features to lua that threatened to break AIs totally and utterly forever. A lua <-> ai interface now exists but we should have had this months ago, great damage has already been done.

Primary mod syndrome

This pushes out other mods and stifles them. Nobody seems to want to actually do anything about it though but discuss it, and many of the solutions proposed are taboos such as starting a second server that are also problematic. Some lobby side effort has been attempted such as the extra tags I and trepan have added though.

Sadly some of these issues are self distorting. To many people the TA section will collapse in on itself making other issues look bigger, and some people don't really care about Ataris IP and dismiss it as a trivial issue which makes the Atari IP issue worse and making it look smaller.

Hey man, you're really boring with all your self made charts. It's not the first time you're using that kind of fake arguement. It looks like you're selling "body trainer" on the TV.

You re always talking about "the primary mod" bad sides but you're happy to claim CA will be the next primary mod to bother Sleska. You're always whining and often have kiddy behaviour.

You take every topic to complain about "the spring conspiracy" or "human kind". If you can't bear human kind and its weakness, kill everybody or kill yourself.

[AF]

Poor Masure:

I do not state CA will be the next primary mod to bother sleksa.



Infact sleksas great. Sure sometimes his posts leave more to be desired in the tact department, but I could say the same of a lot of people including myself. I don't think this community would be quite the same if he upped and left.

Sure if you think I'm boring then by all means do so, ignore my post, it's your prerogative, but making a post just to say so is rude, unless its relevant to the thread (e.g. the 'Is AF boring' poll or the 'whose the most boring guy on the forums' thread).

You take every topic to complain about "the spring conspiracy" or "human kind". If you can't bear human kind and its weakness, kill everybody or kill yourself.

This is trolling pure and simple, and it does you no favours. I'm not going to kill myself or cry in bed because of something like this, and I'm not going to start posting up pictures of you and me with your blood on my samurai sword either.

I suggest you make a cup of tea or hot chocolate and sleep off those E numbers and additives ^_^.



As for everyone else:

We already have non TA mods that do everything we need.

Nanoblobz, gundam, EE, kernel panic, even simbase, are all able to replace TA and establish a well known base for spring just on their own if given a chance and correct marketting and tender loving care.

Starwars spring, s44, and pure will be able to do the same thing when they're finished. I've seen far smaller games hold onto a much bigger following.

[LordMatt]

This is trolling pure and simple, and it does you no favours. I'm not going to kill myself or cry in bed because of something like this, and I'm not going to start posting up pictures of you and me with your blood on my samurai sword either.

I suggest you make a cup of tea or hot chocolate and sleep off those E numbers and additives ^_^.

lol

[Sleksa]

and supreme commander did fine with 2 resources yet it isnt slated for being similar to TA.

oh right mass and energy is in no way related to total annihilation's metal and energy

mass extractors to mex extractors

mass fabricators to mmakers

geos are there too just forgot the name of the supcom variant ~~

However we cannot rely on users from a game community that was released in 1997 to expand our community. We have already tapped this resource, and we've exploited it rather heavily. It is a limited resource and it is not a sustainable resource either.

In order to really grow we need to look further afield which is where TA changes into a huge barrier that nobody is willing to scale or take down.

So if we really look at it, people do not come here for spring at all. They come here for TA mods. There's a limited number of these people, and we've already reached a large proportion of them. This is not good for spring. Good for your TA mods perhaps but not for spring.

This is not a business corporation set to expand and make profit and certain % of growth, in fact i dont know what this is, calling this a freetime project for some people might be insulting to people like SJ, tobi and all the engine coders, but on the other hand dont we have a load of people who've done models, textures, artwork, AI's new modifications, should i just discard all their work and say its a freetime project for people who've done years(?) of work

IMO, this is still a freetime project for people who loved TA.

Times have changed. Ppl don't want to work when they're playing, they don't want to think. They just want to have shitloads of fun all the time. They want Wii.
I know that there's Supcom, which is suposed to be similar to OTA (TAS), whit larger playerbase but those guys were dragged into supercool new game hype which TAS isn't (anymore).

oh im sorry, how many people are playing WoW this very second?

How many hours, days, months and years of playtime in TOTAL have been put into WoW since the beginning

wow and a few million gamers just owned you and your arguments sir.

Then you have not played gundam. It is shit like this that doesn't need to be said sleksa. Gundam isn't a TA skin. It does many things that TA doesn't we have had many many threads about this. Please, I am asking you, leave gundam out of your little rants here. I do not feel like debating the points again. Gundam is not a mere TA skin, I ask you to respect at least that much.

Ok so it doesnt use metal and energy, you dont have labs and you dont have buildings that generate resources, you dont have constructors that walk around building stuff, instead you have a c&c harvesting resource system and world in conflict type of a unit managing system ?

That might have been a bit too offensive to you ~.~

Ofcourse i understand your point of view, and legally saying the only thing we need to do is to get rid of logos and all the units and names possibly to become totally free.

There are no flash in gundam yes, there are no bbs and no hawkdancing in it, there is no Dgun, etc

BUT


deep down in the heart of E&E and gundam there is a influence of TA in it. the resources flow in a same way, the game plays pretty much the same.
There is usually a equvalient of a commander, etc you get my point. The mechanics will stay in TA zone even when the game progresses is what i meant in the post

[smoth]

sleksa, please stop trying to argue this asinine point. I do not wish to derail this thread. IF you REALLY want to discuss it bring it to pm and we can talk about it there.

Equivalent of a commander is not even a valid argument that is part of the RTS genre, a central starting unit.

Resources do not flow the same way, I merely use what spring allows me to until I have the time to impliment the system that has been worked out for a looooooong time

I used ta for gundam, I did it for one reason, large battles.

of the current rts games that I played, dawn of war was too small scale as was wcIII, then there was generals but I didn't like the engine and game setup as it was too small. Earth 2150 etc was not the right system and not as open to moding. So I only chose ta for ease of moding and it's scale. Other games would have required whole new levels. Now here I am in spring, working on cranking out content to fill in all of the units. Now, when I get to it, yeah gundam has a new resource system planned. I am not stopping all other progress just to shut you up.

[AF]

Sleksa, WoW is an mmo and works by a different dynamic and has a hefty advertizing budget of millions across the world in newspapers, popular media, and television.

That and wow does change, blizzard release expansion packs and other little tidbits to keep players going.

And no I'm not saying we abandon everything we have and go after soem mysterious new game model to draw in some mysterious cult niche weve never heard of. Infact I said we already have what we need in a previous post.

I'm not sure what it is you're arguing so vehemently against sleksa, its like starting a million people protest march to the whitehouse becauss the guy next to you pinched your pen.

[zwzsg]

Heres what I propose about the TA content problem

Set a timescale to be completed by 2009.

Texturing, audio, scriptings, the whole lot. None of it must resemble to TA

If you need help, I'm sure the community would gladly assist.
Ask for help and you'll get it.

Very wrong. We already have not one, but several mods that do not use any TA content. They're just never played.

The problem is not that all mods are based of TA content.
The problem is that all played mods are based of TA content.

[pintle]

I sit and read thread after thread about this kinda thing, and i generally don't get involved, but I am just sick of it.

EE was the only "proper" rts running on spring free of TA content, and Fang effectively pulled it, until recently. You can whine and bitch all you like about the other mods not getting played, but that is because they are all generally lacking something or seriously flawed.

Gundam misses the (imo crucial) need for expansion that is integral to an RTS game (waiting in anticipation for lua resources)
SWS was broken by droid rush (again, I wait with bated breath)
KP, fun as it is, is not an rts
Simbase is in permaalpha
Nanoblobs.... my cpu cant take it, beyond "lol maek moar wolf"

What options are left open to me?

I got s44 svn and have enjoyed a several great games of what imo should become the spring flagship mod.
I tried epic legions beta several times, developement ceased.
I couldn't find anybody to play CvC with me.

You know what the none TA content mod i have played the most is? War Evo. Great as it is i really dont see the spring lobby filling with games of that either.

Bottom line is there are no none TA content RTS games running on the spring engine that are available to the average user, bar a couple which have serious playability issues. Stop complaining that we, the players, aren't playing the games, when they are not provided for us!

It is absolutely not my intention to discourage content producers and engine developers, i guess the reason i havent posted along these lines before is that i have so much pent up frustration it was bound to be inflammatory when i did.

Problem is not lack of people playing none ota mods.
Problem is lack of balanced, complete, easily findable multiplayer RTS games on the Spring engine which do not include OTA content.


blah blah long post im pretty drunk
quick somebody make a self righteous jab about drinking, it will be hilarious

[Felix the Cat]

"Primary mod syndrome" isn't really a problem... the mod is primary because people want to play it. If people didn't want to play it, a different mod would be primary. There will always be a de facto primary mod simply because there will always be a mod that is recognized as always having a game open and players ready to play, which is really what is necessary. We don't have the player base to support multiple mods of that sort, ergo we have one primary mod. If we had 1000 people on the server at a time, we might be able to have two or three primary mods.

IMO the TASClient "monopoly" isn't an issue and it's just AF's agenda speaking. A lobby client is simply a tool. The tool needs to be able to do its job well. TASClient, by and large, does its job well. There's no need to have 10 different versions of the same tool to choose from; a hammer is a hammer whether it is red or green or blue. I'm not saying that TASClient doesn't need work - it needs a LOT of work - some of the necessary work is server-side as well i.e. Unicode support for non-Latin characters - some of the necessary work requires outside resources i.e. closer integration with UF or whatever content hosting site we eventually decide on - but once the work is done, TASClient will be the only client necessary because it does the job.

[AF]

"Primary mod syndrome" isn't really a problem... the mod is primary because people want to play it. If people didn't want to play it, a different mod would be primary. There will always be a de facto primary mod simply because there will always be a mod that is recognized as always having a game open and players ready to play, which is really what is necessary. We don't have the player base to support multiple mods of that sort, ergo we have one primary mod. If we had 1000 people on the server at a time, we might be able to have two or three primary mods.

If a really good popular mod manages to become so popular it takes up 90% of the battles that's fine. But BA didn't get there from scratch it got there because it was AA with fixes.

Maybe it changed since then but that's how it got hold of its status. It inherited it from AA, and AA got it because back when there were 3 or 4 battles per day in very early spring history, caydr and some AA fans came along and started hosting battles, and because the lobby was so small they easily dominated, even though general consensus was that AA was an inferior product. If it weren't for spring, AA would be a lot less popular than it is today

The problem is that even if users don't want to play BA they're stuck with it. They're locked into the primary mod because its so widespread. It's self-sustaining and pushes out non primary mods to the fringe.

IMO the TASClient "monopoly" isn't an issue and it's just AF's agenda speaking. A lobby client is simply a tool. The tool needs to be able to do its job well. TASClient, by and large, does its job well. There's no need to have 10 different versions of the same tool to choose from; a hammer is a hammer whether it is red or green or blue. I'm not saying that TASClient doesn't need work - it needs a LOT of work - some of the necessary work is server-side as well i.e. Unicode support for non-Latin characters - some of the necessary work requires outside resources i.e. closer integration with UF or whatever content hosting site we eventually decide on - but once the work is done, TASClient will be the only client necessary because it does the job.

The lobby is the gateway into spring. It is what users use to play spring. As such its important its designed correctly. However not much has happened on this front in a long time.


TASClient is a UI design nightmare, and it is a real problem that has a huge impact. It's already been quoted by numerous users, and even got spring the 'rough around the edges' remarks in several major UK magazines. (btw the server already has unicode support but it was disabled because tasclient doesnt have support, which introduced a bug when receiving Unicode only characters)

Satirik has made some progress though, but he has inherited a slew of major design flaws.

The ideal lobby setup would be a 3 way draw between all major lobbies with minor lobbies on the fringes untill they implement enough to take on the main 3. And remember, a lot of the new tasclient features came from aflobby and spring lobby, and since those 2 projects started satirik did more in a month than betalord did in a year.

[TheRegisteredOne]

I have solution for all ye problems! Make a worth while singleplayer!
1. new players can learn the basics before going into multiplayer
2. people can play mods without looking for mod games to be hosted
3. majority of casual gamers dont play multiplayer at all. With single player, they can enjoy spring without going online
4. many people enjoy good stories in their games, singleplayer campaign!
5. singleplayer tutorial can be very helpful to those who are completely alien to TA gameplay.
This is so obviously I can't believe none of you saw this.

other suggestions include:
1. make it easier to install. Have a default set of maps and mods
2. Automatic updates or update notices
3. Better content (mods, maps) in general