no respect for spring

[Felix the Cat]

I was thinking separate lobby client which can be as specific or general as needed while still using the main Spring lobby server.

Even better, separate user interface that incorporates a separate lobby client that connects to the same Spring lobby server.

[AF]

Nobody has ever approached a lobby developer and told them what they would need as a bare minimum to brand a lobby client for their game. Its not that lobby developers aren't interested in this field, its just there is no demand and so development has gone into other areas.

[Vadi]

I disagree with the lobby per mod idea. People can use the same one just fine.

What we're wanting here is marketing the mods separately - not playing them.

[AF]

Ultimately it is the game owners decision not ours.

[smoth]

I love that the mods all run in the same lobby it is one of the things I REALLY like about spring. Unfortunately the player base virulently hates anything they feel might pull players from their favored mods. The problem we run into for new players wanting to try something different is that the current base tells them that their choice game is fail and they are discouraged by the hatred.

This sort of behavior drives these community splits and in a gaming world where the driving force is competitive nature. A world where gaming has become the new sports. Casual gaming is on the decline and frankly the players see it as a new way to be competitive douchebags.

I truly hate this place but I continue to work on my project. Now when my project is done you can bet Vida Guerra's sweet ass and hanai miris giant juggs that I WILL NOT bother within this community. However, when I do go out and recruit the gundam playerbase that the project shall deserve I can bet on these jerk offs driving off the players I do manage to recruit.

whatever, I hate so much about this "community." Anyway, I will bother to advertise separate but I am not sure the people of this community would allow a sub community to grow without harrasing them.

[LordMatt]

I truly hate this place but I continue to work on my project. Now when my project is done you can bet Vida Guerra's sweet ass and hanai miris giant juggs that I WILL NOT bother within this community. However, when I do go out and recruit the gundam playerbase that the project shall deserve I can bet on these jerk offs driving off the players I do manage to recruit.

whatever, I hate so much about this "community." Anyway, I will bother to advertise separate but I am not sure the people of this community would allow a sub community to grow without harrasing them.

I hate you too. Get lost.

[Felix the Cat]

I disagree with the lobby per mod idea. People can use the same one just fine.

What we're wanting here is marketing the mods separately - not playing them.

The objective is to bring all aspects of the game/mod into one coherent, functional, and independent user experience. I've already detailed what makes this necessary and/or desireable: Spring is essentially a TA community, and so naturally enough the majority of Spring users tend to play *A mods. Since this phenomenon has shown no sign of ending, IMO it is necessary for non-*A games/mods to act as independent games in order to secure an independent userbase of players that are there to play that particular game/mod.

[smoth]

he he yeah I am probably taking a bit from spring's community for a while. I am pretty tired of the community stuff. a break from this place would be good for me.

[Vadi]

Independent? Where are you looking?

Do you see Xbox Live as "independent"? Steam as "independent"?

No, I don't want to close one lobby, and start another just to play another Spring mod, when I can have 1 lobby to play both. I can also keep my chats open, friends lists, not have to register in umpteen places, and many other things that are bringing in the before mentioned services billions of revenues. Making it very hard to argue against the idea of unifying the gaming experience.

[Nemo]

note that steam/xbox live have products that would draw people regardless of a "unified" gaming experience or not, so using their financial success to support the idea seems a bit shady, to me.

as for this debate...It really all depends on how successful you think the various mods will be in bringing people in. if you're pessimistic, it seems likely that the trickle of players brought in by advertising any mod will inevitably be converted to *A because those are the available games, and ANY new players heading into #main and asking how to get started will 100% of the time be told "download BA". with this mindset, isolating your players as fully as possible from *A (to the extent of hosting a completely separate lobby server) makes sense; unlike xbox live/steam where you have to buy a game in order to join matches for games you don't already have, in a free setting people will almost always go to where they can find matches; namely, BA.

or, if you're optimistic and think that the various mods can pull in a massive influx of players in a fairly short period of time, players who are conditioned by the nice looks of the newer mods to be disgusted by *A, keeping the unified server makes sense for the reasons of convenience.

That said, the spring playerbase is small enough that inconveniencing the (very) few who would play anything other than *A doesn't strike me as a particularly great disincentive to setting up an independent lobby server and such.

[Warlord Zsinj]

gnomerica ftw! >_>

Perhaps a solution is to allow mods to distribute their own modified lobby login system, which runs through a private .exe, which still logs onto the central server, but defaults to their own mod-specific channel (instead of #main) when joining, and mods can have the option of filtering out other mods (or having an 'allowed' list - f.ex I might want to let S44 and KP appear, as they are in a similar position to SWIW and therefore not a 'threat' as an enclosed and 'bigoted' community).

Then there would be options to switch to the standard Spring lobby (which would be like a 'generic' lobby that displays all mods), or the S44 lobby, etc.

An easy way to do this could be to allow players to filter mods in the 'current games' list through the lobby (Which makes a certain amount of sense - most players currently that are playing a single mod don't want to sift through unwanted mods to find their own games). Then simply allow mods to provide their own custom profile that automatically filters some, all or no mods as the modder wants.

I can understand the reasoning that fellow modders are raising regarding the perceived 'bigotry' of the main *A mods (specifically BA, but before that it was AA, and in the future it may well be CA). I am also concerned that new players interested in SWIW will arrive at an environment hostile to people who want to play mods other then their own. On the other hand, there are several clear advantages with sticking with the current lobby, as well as reasons tobi ran through that leads me to not want to start on a private server.

Allowing people who don't know any better (likely a significant part of SWIW's userbase) to load through a custom lobby (or simply a custom lobby profile that simply alters the default lobby settings) distributed with SWS allows me to keep my potential userbase focused on SWS, but with the ability to widen their modding horizons through altering their 'filtering' options.
It also means that by staying with the current Spring lobby, current Spring players are still competing on the same server, and so would be able to see all the SWIW games, and still take part in them, as well as seeing all their other games (BA etc).

That seems to be a succesful middle ground that allows some seperation of mods (as is probably necessary) without fully fledged community fracturing.

[SwiftSpear]

Give me a goal of Spring, a mod website that sells, is easy to get on Linux, Windows, and OS X, $0, and I'll get you more players.

Last time I checked OS X development for spring is somewhere at the half way point. Not to be pedantic... but I think vs the number of players we can expect to get out of the mac community vs the amount of work that will go into completing mac compatibility with PC platforms playing spring in full, puts it at a place where it's really not one of the axioms we are relying on for our future success.

I'd be very surprised and pleased if we were to get more than 200 mac players in the first 2 years after that element is completed. Not that lunix was too much better from the player standpoint... but we got several valuable development contributions that came out of the lunix community interested in our project.

[Warlord Zsinj]

just noting a major edit of my earlier post, incase people miss it.

[SwiftSpear]

Ya Zsinj... that was sort of the same suggestion I was trying to make.

It'd require some signifigant modifications to the current lobby client, but it should be possible to make the lobby client able to boot with command line entries that allow customization.

So if you boot lobby with the lobby icon downloaded in the pack with SW:IW, for example, rather than logging into #main and #newbies, you log into #SWIW first, then maby #main and/or #newbies. I'd also like to see something along the lines of the lobby being set up so SW:IW games would be listed at the top of the list, and other mods would be greyed out (but still playable if they are in the spring folder).

So spring fans, and people downloading spring projects as applications for the already downloaded spring engine would just load up with the normal spring client and everything would be like it currently is, but new users brought in by separate game development communities can experience the same environment relatively protected from the rest of spring until their interest in the other stuff grows.

[koshi]

keeping a new playerbase away from main as long as possible is the safest bet to get them to stay imo

Zsinj: most of what you suggest wouldn't be hard to do with springlobby right now, you should come talk to us in #springlobby sometime

[Felix the Cat]

Zsinj's suggestion is almost exactly what I was thinking as well.

The proposal begs the question, though: would the lobby server owner allow programs to connect to the lobby that disallow their users from accessing all information available on the lobby server?

[koshi]

i was thinking toggleable filters, not blocking games altogether

i'm not cool with blocking and i suspect others won't be either. if one was going for blocking one should go through the additional troubble of maintaining an own lobby server imo. nevermind the utter confusion it will create in a user when hears of other games being played and he can't see them no matter what filter he turns off.

[det]

Warlord,

I don't see any hostility towards non-TA mods in Spring, just a lack of interest. I do, however, see all kinds of hostility towards TA mods from content developers. Go read the Maximum Annihilation 1.0 thread to see what I mean.

[Vadi]

There haven't been many Linux players, or Windows either, because of OTA content.

Like it or no, this is a) seriously hindering advertising of mods that depend on it, b) distribution, and c) not even all players will go through the trouble of getting the original TA game / are comfortable with getting OTA illegally.

As for Macs, sorry, my bad. Wasn't so informed.

Also, keep in mind that we're open source. You can't really force a lobby dev to not make a generic lobby that can do-it-all. As an example, give Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im) a try - it's a multi-protocol IM messenger. Then see what's easier - keeping an MSN, AIM, and a Google Chat client all at once or just 1 program that supports multitabbing.

As for having your players be converted, you missed the 'website that sells' point. If the website does what's it supposed to do, the player should not join #main/#newbies and get BA recommended, in case of *A related mods. If it's not even a *A related mod, and if the player gets recommended an *A one, then, well, your website was a complete failure in providing the proper instructions.

And look. I, as a player, might like to play one mod in this hour, and next one in the other hour. I don't see anything wrong with my freedom to choose, because this is my entertainment. Attempting to force me to play a specific mod will annoy me, and could easily backfire. What we're going at here is equal promotion of mods, so that the player can properly choose which one is best for him.

Edit: that's a long post. You better read it all before you reply tho!

[Felix the Cat]

I'm one of the few people who actually reads Argh's epic posts fully, so your post was refreshingly short

I'll respond when I have some time later...