The economics of Spring mod users

[el_matarife]

I decided to write this up because I am sick and tired of all the stupid fallacious thinking and blame games that go on around here. The truth is, mods fighting over players or legitimacy of content is a TERRIBLE idea.

I started played Spring several years ago (2005-2006) and since that time our peak player or average count has NEVER grown. Spring on average has 110-150 players online at non-peak EU time. During EU peak, we go up to 300 players. What does this mean? Mods with "small" percentage player bases get screwed, games are enormously difficult to get started, and we all spend our time fighting over the same 100ish guys.

The key fact for everyone to realize is that Spring users are not a zero sum game. Just because someone is playing BA doesn't mean they can't also play CA or Gundam occasionally. What's the point of fighting over our very limited player base? Even if you did manage to "steal" 10% of BA's users, you'd get maybe another 10 players at offpeak times and maybe 30 during peak hours. The OTA based mods should be viewed as assets that BRING IN players to Spring due to their popularity, not negatives because "they steal all my player base and prevent new mods from taking off with their giant size" or whatever the current popular argument. For what it's worth, I agree with many of you that it is a shame that there isn't a super popular 100% GPL "free" mod, but blaming each other isn't going to solve that.

Now, imagine what would happen if we got player count up to 300 all the the time and hit 600 to 1000 players at peak US and EU time. That would easily triple your mod's player base, maybe more. I suspect you'd see a much bigger boost since the general problem for the smaller mods is being able to get a game together. People will be MUCH less likely to get frustrated and just quit if they can get a game together in 5 minutes even if it is 4 in the morning.

Clearly, what needs to happen is an overall strategy from ALL the mod authors and developers to get more people playing Spring. We need a good marketing campaign including promotional media like screenshots and video. We need refined, articulate posters to go out and convince players on other forums to play Spring. We need to make Spring available on all the biggest game file sites like Fileshack and GamersHell. We need to make an easy to use Spring installer with a bunch of content in it and get it on every big torrent site. We need to make Spring more newbie friendly.

What don't we need? We don't need a ton of bitter forum war veterans talking smack about how the majority of Spring players that play OTA based mods are pirate criminals. We don't need people threatening to "Take their ball and go home" with either their player base or their content. Infighting ALREADY cost us Google Summer of Code this year. How much more damage do we need to do to each other before we figure out how counter-productive and STUPID this all is?

I apologize for the massive wall of text post, but I really can't be brief on a topic that's this important. The bottom line is, a project that isn't growing is dying and everyone seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Spring's overall player growth should be everyone's number one priority. Now let's start talking about how to achieve that growth.

[BrainDamage]

I started played Spring several years ago (2005-2006) and since that time our peak player or average count has NEVER grown. Spring on average has 110-150 players online at non-peak EU time. During EU peak, we go up to 300 players.

Get your facts straight at least, the peak now reaches 400 users, so it did grow, it's also very stagional because it depends from holidays, etc.

Now let's start talking about how to achieve that growth.

I've seen thousands of threads like this, all full of good intention and such, but nothing gets ever done by the thread authors/posters, I'd like instead less threads like this and more work in all the user friendliness problems that spring has as project which are obvious to everyone.
EDIT: added "as project"

[zwzsg]

We need refined, articulate posters to go out and convince players on other forums to play Spring.

Ok. I guess you consider yourself a refined and articulate poster, so feel free to go convince players on other forum to play KP.

We need a good marketing campaign including promotional media like screenshots and video.

Here and here are tons of KP screenshots and videos made for promotional use.

We need to make an easy to use Spring installer with a bunch of content in it

Here is perma (until jobjol die) link to an easy to use installer with all the content KP needs.

We don't need a ton of bitter forum war veterans talking smack

Now you stop talking on Spring forum and go advertise KP on other place. Go forth, nao!

[el_matarife]

Get your facts straight at least, the peak now reaches 400 users, so it did grow, it's also very stagional because it depends from holidays, etc.

Great we've grown all of 100 players during peak times in like 3 years! That's some real success. I guess it doesn't mean much I've seen all of 100 people online during some of the recent offpeak hours. Seriously, can you agree that 400 people during peak time which is essentially EU players only is completely unacceptable and that we need to grow and grow NOW? Don't nitpick, either tell me I'm 100% wrong and Spring is growing just fine at an acceptable rate or agree with me that we need a lot more players and let's start finding a place to start that growth.

We need refined, articulate posters to go out and convince players on other forums to play Spring.

Ok. I guess you consider yourself a refined and articulate poster, so feel free to go convince players on other forum to play KP.

Clearly I am far too abrasive for this task, and we need a lot more than just me.

Here and here are tons of KP screenshots and videos made for promotional use.
Here is perma (until jobjol die) link to an easy to use installer with all the content KP needs.

This is GREAT but what we need is stuff like this but with footage and content from more projects. We also need it all over the web not just on JobJol.

Now you stop talking on Spring forum and go advertise KP on other place. Go forth, nao!

You're right that I need to put my money where my mouth is. I'm thinking about running a few "contests" or "prizes" where I ship a person who's done a lot to grow Spring either a tin of good Mrs. Fields cookies or a bottle of some nice Macallan scotch. Details to be announced once I come up with a good plan. Obviously, everyone else is welcome to join me in this endeavor or to start something similar.

[zwzsg]

We also need it all over the web not just on JobJol.

I'd rather not have the same file uploaded to ten different website, because then having to trace back and update all those tens version at once when I make a new version release is a pain. But with moddb it's also on filefront (not a permalink this time.) Anyway, the download location doesn't matter, what matters is that YOU go spread the word.

[el_matarife]

I'd rather not have the same file uploaded to ten different website, because then having to trace back and update all those tens version at once when I make a new version release is a pain.

I understand, but the problem is that JobJol and ModDB and Filefront don't get nearly the amount of unique visitors per month that we could get by having a Spring installer everywhere.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/jobjol.nl ... rshell.com

If we got a nice unified Spring installer with content from all the mods plus some maps and Lua widgets and GREAT documentation / ease of use, you wouldn't have to distribute it yourself. We could have a "release team" who maintains a list of all the sites to upload Spring to every release.

[Gota]

IMO this is BS.
Spring is not unpopular cause we don't have good marketing or advertisement.
If spring was uber in 3 years word of mouth alone would have given us much more players.

The problems are :
Small installer with not enough maps set on default to download.
Should be :
Installer should allow to download many maps and have tons of map set to be downloaded by default.
in terms of mods,either include none or all as an option including OTA mods cause nobody cares about the legality of it.When someone does care it can be removed.

Lobby.
need a working lobby that is bug free,looks less like an irc client(with minimaps showing in the game list and mods having icons as names in the list) and includes explanations about itself and spring and need the spring downloader to be explained as people join the lobby.

Tutorials and explanations need to be more evident and screaming at the player instead of being tucked in somewhere.

Forum access needs to be more screaming at the player as well and he should be linked to the forums with a message telling him to sign in.

Need to restrict smurfs and allow hosts that just host games withotu ranks and rank balance for those who wish to play like this.
Autohosts need to be on demand,with players hosting their desired game when they want and an autohost is chosen randomly to host their game.
Autohosts should not be clogging the player list.

lobby username,forum username need to be linked together with an email address whe ncreating a user and renaming should be restricted to x times per t.

Mods need to make sure they give out a full working package in terms of widgets and effects without asking the player to tweak options all the time.

Wiki and documentation needs to be worked on and improved considerably.

No need to advertise and market...if the experience is good enough spring will market itself by word of mouth...WE have time,this is not a commercial game release and we need to make sure we hype it enough untill release date...
The spring experience needs to be more user friendly and streamlined and than we will see much more players joining in.

Players also need Profiles with statistics achievements and personal information that they can add in like photos screenshots and links to videos etc.

Also needs to be more interaction between the lobby and spring downlaoder.

[el_matarife]

You're right too, Spring needs to become an order of magnitude more user friendly. Better documentation is a great place to start, since practically everyone who can write at all can contribute. I think including a good HTML manual would help Spring a lot. We need a newbie guide, a list of keyboard shortcuts, an explanation of game concepts, and maybe more. Starting to update the wiki or starting a new wiki from scratch might be a good place to start.

Lobby ease of use is another serious roadblock. The good news is that there's several new lobby clients being developed right now, in addition to SpringLobby and the newly resurrected TASClient. I'm hoping we get a really great, easy to use, fairly bug free lobby client for Windows users in the next few months. If Sefidel gets a Mac OSX lobby working we could have a Mac OSX release on par with Windows / Linux and a pretty large new audience.

[zwzsg]

No need to advertise and market...if the experience is good enough spring will market itself by word of mouth...

Common misconception. It doesn't work like that. With advertisment you can sells turds, without, even the best game remain unplayable (except a couple exception that got hugely luck on the wheel of random fate). A couple games managed to get know thanks to their rabid fans, (like Dwarf Fortress, which also disprove any point about ease of use), most of them remain unknown forever.

[Gota]

That's cause most of them,99%,suck ass.
If you want to be noticed u need to be exceptional..
Or invest exceptional amounts of money or effort into advertisement.
I think since spring is not in nay rush it should invest in being a quality product.
If its possible to create an environment where a new player joins in and feels comfortable and at ease we will have tons more players.
If the experience will be frustrating as it is now we won't.

[TheMightyOne]

No need to advertise and market...if the experience is good enough spring will market itself by word of mouth...

Common misconception. It doesn't work like that. With advertisment you can sells turds, without, even the best game remain unplayable (except a couple exception that got hugely luck on the wheel of random fate). A couple games managed to get know thanks to their rabid fans, (like Dwarf Fortress, which also disprove any point about ease of use), most of them remain unknown forever.

if the game sux but the hype around it is immense it will attract ppl who will check it out and then leave it. we need ppl who will come and stay.

[el_matarife]

I think the key is to see what happens when you get a new player to try Spring. Try asking one of your real life friends to experiment with you. Show him a forum post on Spring or some marketing materials and say "I want you to try to get this installed and see what it plays like without me helping you at all" and just see how far he gets. My guess is that they won't make it without some handholding immediately after install.

The newbie channel helps but it doesn't fix the various newbie unfriendly aspects like the lack of documentation. Maybe we need a good Youtube video tutorial on installing Spring plus how to get mods and maps and join games. Maybe TASClient and SpringLobby should give you a tutorial when you start the first time. Maybe we should just simplify some interfaces. I'm not sure, but I think we actually need to do some research on how actual newbies respond to Spring and get some feedback from them.

[[Krogoth86]]

In my opinion there are 5 major points of why Spring isn't more popular:

1.) Graphics
2.) It's an RTS engine
3.) "No one" knows about it
4.) The games / mods available
5.) We have few players

1.) Graphics
This probably scares away the group which would have the most time to actually play: The youngsters. Spring's main game base still is around TA mods with 3do units which will make most people say "OMG how crappy is this!" and leave. The only projects delivering some nice stuff in terms of a complete set would be P.U.R.E. (which probably won't add players here because of servers of its own & stuff) and Imperial Winter (which will be released in like 2666). There is Spring 1944 though but you won't get the ultimate GFX battle there but rather icon pushing...

2.) It's an RTS engine
Well let's face it: RTS games aren't the most popular games around. I mean count the RTS AAA games which have a serious success in terms of multiplayer (for an AAA game) - there are just a few of them...

3.) "No one" knows about it
I always have the feeling that 9 of 10 lists of good Open Source / free games don't list Spring. Everybody knows of the 10th Open Source Quake style shooter but pretty much nobody knows of Spring. Heck - it's not even in the engine database over at Devmaster so how should anyone know except for accidentally stumbling upon it?!

4.) The games / mods available
Well at first next to everything here is about Sci-Fi - that might not be everyone's taste. Then there's the fact that most things around here simply are too complicated. I mean take all those TA mods for example: Here a faction's T1 tree contains as much units as entire factions in other games with tons and tons of things to think of (Hovercrafts here, airdrop there, omg this thing can cloak). There simply are no games of at least medicore complexity unless diving into "pseudoreal" games like Kernel Panic (which doesn't make things that much more easy as it's hard to anticipate what a rolling ball should do / behave like)...

5.) We have few players
This especially goes hand in hand with point four. Having "few" players itself is a big hurdle. You're not just thrown into games with high complexity as a newbie but also get to fight against highly experienced players which just wipe the floor with you. You then also get to hear all those nice things like "You suck!", "Damn it do something!", "OMG WTF are you doing?". It just has to be quite frustrating and only those dedicated either to RTS games or OTA stay in the end. I don't know if the lobbies actually support it now but a "max rank" limit for games might be a good idea to have some servers for newbies around (if a smurf won't ruin things)...

To say the truth there actually have been some efforts around newbies: The installer has become way more clean and you don't have that entire "otacontent" problem anymore plus with things like the tutormods newbies will get a more gentle entry...

[smoth]

1) spring is not userfriendly
2) spring is iffy on performance
3) there are tons of conflicting feature lists because people think that all the widgets work for all projects when in actuality many of them break other projects.
4) the engine is less than modern
5) a project doesn't need to be 100% gpl, get the hell out of here with that.
6) it is stupid to try and pull people from the *a base, they are here for that.
7) that guy who wants to take his toys and leave, his work is iffy so I wish he would just go and frankly I am going to stop there.
8) drama is going to happen here, there is a strong troll culture that has been allowed to permeate this forum and community. Realize that this forum will never be a place for reasonable people
9) IIRC: said drama had nothing to do with gsoc but I bet you that stolen content had a lot to do with putting a bad smell on spring
10) also it is hard for most people to host, I have no fucking clue why, they can host all of the other games just fine, spring is just a bitch.

finally: projects do not need to be ip-free or gpl, they just need to stop being made of that stolen old shit. Seriously, you guys make me sick, I was going to do an ip-free project and really put some time and heart into it. I was going to make your stupid gpl-compatible shit but the GIMMIE GIMMIE attitude around here makes me sick. So why would I devote probably more years of my life so you guys can just leach that also? I am not your slave and I suspect others think the same.

[Licho]

Spring players battle is zero sum game..
So far no mod has achieved significant influx of players by advertising outside, only a trickle at best, and those few that persist are often drawn to BA, because only BA games are available at all times.

It makes much more sense to convince few already established BA players to play your mod than trying to recruit newbies who end up playing BA anyway :)

[[XIII]Roxas]

...Pretty much.

[smoth]

Spring players battle is zero sum game..
So far no mod has achieved significant influx of players by advertising outside, only a trickle at best, and those few that persist are often drawn to BA, because only BA games are available at all times.

It makes much more sense to convince few already established BA players to play your mod than trying to recruit newbies who end up playing BA anyway :)

10) also it is hard for most people to host, I have no fucking clue why, they can host all of the other games just fine, spring is just a bitch.

[AF]

The spring installer is hopeless at pulling in players, because it is not aimed at pulling in players. It isnt intended as a starting point for players, its a starting point for developers.

When you download the spring installer, your nto downloading a game, your downloading an engine!

What we have here is not a failure of spring to do its installer or website properly, we have instead a failure of the BA developers to do anything other than push out an sdz, or even attempt to recruit people who will do the rest.

Regardless of what the non BA mods are doing, BA itself is failing to attract players itself, and suffers greatly.

As for mass marketability, the mere presence of content such as BA CA or their forks, is a huge NOGO sign to filesites and listings. Most places outright refuse to advertise spring before they hear a word because of this.

[KDR_11k]

Spring players battle is zero sum game..
So far no mod has achieved significant influx of players by advertising outside, only a trickle at best, and those few that persist are often drawn to BA, because only BA games are available at all times.

It makes much more sense to convince few already established BA players to play your mod than trying to recruit newbies who end up playing BA anyway :)

You're running a *A mod anyway. Your target audience has to consist of *A players because anyone else will just go "WTF" at any *A mod due to the extreme complexity and lack of easily available documentation.

[Regret]

Regardless of what the non BA mods are doing, BA itself is failing to attract players itself, and suffers greatly.

Do you actually play online? Or at least idle in lobby?