Spring RTS Engine

None of the mods that aren't TA mods have done a good job of managing their development and PR. We see a micro version of exactly the same thing that is happening in HL2 modding right now, and it's destroying the modding scene here the same way as it's destroying the modding scene there.

Posting in some obscure thread on this forum that only fans follow that X nearly unplayable beta V5 is now released with a DL link is not effective promotion.

EE in it's glory days acctually had days on end when there was nearly one game playing 24/7, and simply put the reason being was that people tried the game, it was reasonably polished, and they therefore became fans and advertised it and forced others to play. Effectively we started a word of mouth promotion, that kept the project going strong until fang eventually caved to harassment and took project development out of this community.

I love the nonTA modding scene for this game, I've been promoting it as much as I can since I first started playing spring. That being said, this "us vs them" stuff is just retarded. The blame lies in the laps of one group and one group alone. If your mod is unpopular it's nearly 100% your own fault. It's not the fault of competing TA based projects, it's not the fault of other people in the community, it's not the fault of the community mechanics, it's not the fault of the players. You guys are making games here in a small community, every ally you have is only going to be another one or more players, while every enemy you make is only going to pollute your reputation that much more.

DSD - Flame war
Altored - Flame war
Tabula - Flame war
Small Divide - More flames war
Supreme Battlefield - Even more flame war
Comet Catcher - Flame flame flame war war war
Charlie - FLAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMmmmmeeeeee waaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrr
SpeedMetal - Ppl who build 500 flying units lag everyone and call everyone noob. And because of that, ppl tend to hate whoever CPU's usage goes over 30%.
SpeedBall Vulcan wars - Laugh first time, never play again!

Any of those maps but in XTA or CA, rarely flame war??!?! Errrrrrmmmmm.......................

Rarely played mods = rare players = no flame = logical?t.

NEVER EVER RAGEQUIT OR LEAVE! If you do that... You join a game, somebody comes in, spots you, then yellws "BAN HIM!!! He is a ragequittteeeerrr!!!" The host says "OK". Join another game, another random player yells "KICK HIM!!! He PORCS!" and the host "OK." LAWLLAWL LOOOOKLLLLLLLLLLLLllllllllll..............

[ IMG ] Pictures of flamethrowers [/ IMG ]

SwiftSpear wrote:None of the mods that aren't BA mods have done a good job of managing their development and PR.

Fix'd because noone plays non-BA TA mods either. I see CA attempting advertisements with constant #main spam and all but noone seems to care. Then again BA stopped with advertising after they overtook AA. Doesn't seem like anyone is (successfully) doing much to change anything here, BA just managed to get the incumbent position when AA died and is keeping it now. Was there ever a successful change in the mod popularity that didn't involve the old king ding?

KDR_11k wrote:Was there ever a successful change in the mod popularity that didn't involve the old king ding?

Anyone know the tales of XTA:s demise?

swift, for those of us who do not care about popularity like myself. What is it that we are doing that hurts this community? I mean outside of our apathy about mod promotion.

smoth wrote:swift, for those of us who do not care about popularity like myself. What is it that we are doing that hurts this community? I mean outside of our apathy about mod promotion.

lolol

Sleksa wrote:lolol

I don't follow.

smoth wrote:swift, for those of us who do not care about popularity like myself. What is it that we are doing that hurts this community? I mean outside of our apathy about mod promotion.

Nothing. Making mods doesn't hurt the community. Making drama over said mods might, but the statement that that is happening here is arguable at best, most of your drama is pretty detached from gundam. Not that you've ever really done this... but there really isn't much reason to wonder why gundam doesn't have a large popular following when you actively avoid popularity and promotion.

I'm not saying having a solid development and promotion base is the only good thing a mod development thing can do for the community, but if a mod wants play time, that IS the only way to get it.

[edit] In regards to "killing the modding scene". What happens often times is a modder puts massive amounts of work into a mod, expecting on completion that players will pick it up. What usually happens in the modding scene for gaming these days is that modders partially complete a mod, release several prereleases that don't look or feel polished and push players away based on first impressions, and as a result are unable to attract and hold a large community base. In turn this frustrates modders who want their work to be enjoyed, so they end up quitting projects and going and doing other things. Smoth, if you're personally outside of this cycle for your own reasons than that's fine, but realize that not all spring modders are. Every spring modder can't necessarily be as stood back as you are.

do my periodic releases hurt the other modders, as in do you feel that my occasional version release of the incomplete gundam may add to the amount of negative feeling that players have about other mods?

I doubt if that has any affect whatsoever, Smoth. The fact of the matter is that:

1. Spamming in the Lobby has not been an effective advertising tool. People just ignore anything that isn't whatever they're conversing about, pretty much.

2. Posting in the Forum has not been an effective advertising tool. Many members of the playerbase simply don't come to the Forums, or just can't be bothered to look at the threads about anything except the one thing they already play.

I'm going to just see what happens, now that the Installer gives people a lot of choices. We'll just have to see whether that is at all effective. I doubt it- it doesn't have nearly enough sizzle, it's static, and it requires a game to be ready well in advance of a release- for example, I can't just get P.U.R.E. done tomorrow, and have it show up in the 0.76b1 installer. This isn't a model that I predict will be successful. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong... at least now, people will be aware that many choices exist...

THe most effective tool imo is vids on youtube.

Last night I gound out that a lot of people were anticipating evolution, simply because of the vids I have posted. If one vid gets attention... the others do as well, and it has a sort of snowball effect.

THe installer has helped evolution out quite a bit.

Heh, if you want to help non TA-based mods, you might want to take a look at the banner and re-make it.

Honkeh wrote:Heh, if you want to help non TA-based mods, you might want to take a look at the banner and re-make it.

we already had that discussion http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtop ... =1&t=13124

Argh wrote:I doubt if that has any affect whatsoever, Smoth. The fact of the matter is that:

1. Spamming in the Lobby has not been an effective advertising tool. People just ignore anything that isn't whatever they're conversing about, pretty much.

2. Posting in the Forum has not been an effective advertising tool. Many members of the playerbase simply don't come to the Forums, or just can't be bothered to look at the threads about anything except the one thing they already play.

I'm going to just see what happens, now that the Installer gives people a lot of choices. We'll just have to see whether that is at all effective. I doubt it- it doesn't have nearly enough sizzle, it's static, and it requires a game to be ready well in advance of a release- for example, I can't just get P.U.R.E. done tomorrow, and have it show up in the 0.76b1 installer. This isn't a model that I predict will be successful. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong... at least now, people will be aware that many choices exist...

Spamming the lobby was instrumental in the AA --> BA transition.

Argh if you got P.U.R.E ready for .76b2 you could have it in the installer. Additionally, there might be other times in which the installer could be rebuilt without making a new release, however a rebuild of the installer is required to add (or subtract) mods. Also the installer doesn't allow each mod to have an extended description and screenshots, things that would be nice to have as well.

smoth wrote:do my periodic releases hurt the other modders, as in do you feel that my occasional version release of the incomplete gundam may add to the amount of negative feeling that players have about other mods?

It might hurt KDR, but from my experience it only really ever effects the dev team of a specific mod when that mod makes a mistake.

What many modders don't realize is that first impressions matter an epic cockload, and with a small community like spring, if you poison half the community base with a sketchy beta release, you'll take a metric forever to win those people back. Mods kill themselfs, and in the process they kill potential modders simply because the impression is made to people that the modding scene is fruitless. A project like yours can't hurt anyone who isn't pumping effort into it.

I mean, if we postulate that gundam is just so damn good that it could easily be out popularizing the TA based mods if you acctually put effort into advertising and polishing it, than maby we could make a case that since you aren't pursuing that path you aren't paving the way for other mods to see that it is possible to do. But I don't think I can fault you for mabies that big

Forboding Angel wrote:THe most effective tool imo is vids on youtube.

Last night I gound out that a lot of people were anticipating evolution, simply because of the vids I have posted. If one vid gets attention... the others do as well, and it has a sort of snowball effect.

THe installer has helped evolution out quite a bit.

I won't necessarily agree it's the "most effective tool" but what it does give you is an AWESOME hook to catch new users from the lobby.

Spamming the forum doesn't work too great because it has a limited audience of people who aren't generally as active players as lobby rats. Spamming the lobby doesn't work too great because who is going to listen to a mod creator pimping his own project? Linking youtube vids to lobby... either your project looks good/interesting and people want to try it based on what they see, or they aren't paying attention to lobby anyways.

The best tool IMO is word of mouth. If your project is just so great that good players and the lobby regs basically outright recruit lobby players to play with them so they can get a game, THAT is a project that will succeed in spring. That is what EE had during it's success, and with the exception of maby comm shooter (which isn't traditional RTS by a long shot, but is tonnes of fun) I haven't seen another mod hit on the same success since.

SwiftSpear wrote: What many modders don't realize is that first impressions matter an epic cockload, and with a small community like spring, if you poison half the community base with a sketchy beta release, you'll take a metric forever to win those people back. Mods kill themselves, and in the process they kill potential modders simply because the impression is made to people that the modding scene is fruitless.

Heh. I argued this with my teammates and was overruled...and now we have a crashy beta doing just that. Ah well. C'est la vie.

Also: I wouldn't take S44's releases as an example of modders under-promoting their work - that's entirely deliberate, since we fully realize that 60% of people who pick it up and play it in its current state are going to say "hay where's tigerII". Thus no massive advertisement in or outside of spring besides the occasional #main spam in order to scare up some games. That said, we've been remarkably consistent in our download counts between updates, which shows we've retained at least a core group of people playing it.

SwiftSpear wrote: In turn this frustrates modders who want their work to be enjoyed, so they end up quitting projects and going and doing other things.

Roger that!

Argh if you got P.U.R.E ready for .76b2 you could have it in the installer. Additionally, there might be other times in which the installer could be rebuilt without making a new release, however a rebuild of the installer is required to add (or subtract) mods. Also the installer doesn't allow each mod to have an extended description and screenshots, things that would be nice to have as well.

I really do not know if P.U.R.E. will be in a state where I want to see it generally released before 0.76b2 is released. That really depends on a lot of things, including my thus-far messy RL situation.

Also, I'm working on my big LUA stuff now, and I'm sidetracked with the map-manipulation things I wanted to get done. The second side was supposed to rely on a lot of LUA, so it's finally become a priority to learn that and get things working, but it's going to take a minute, LUA is still very hard for me to deal with.

I do think that the installer needs to have more interesting things happen, and needs to strongly encourage people to check out the new mods that are in it, though. A page added, just listing the new mods added to the installer choices, might be a good start, as well as having the names be a link that opens a new window and shows pictures as well as text, so that people can make informed decisions and game designers can give them decent eye-candy. But, as I've always said, I think the main solution is to put the advertising in the Lobby Client, where the players are- everything else, the Forums, etc., is just not reaching the playerbase. Maybe a flashing icon, saying that "new games have been uploaded to UF, please click here to check them out" and a better frontend for presenting that on UF might be a good workaround...

Maby when people load up BA games it just randomly loads some other mod instead, and then flashes about how new mods have been released

No.