Responding to you is always a tiptoe through a baitfarm. Part of me finds it amusing.
Player numbers for evo have increased by several thousand percent.
New modders probably get scared away by the way that people like you treat them.
It was a pain to update evo, but in the end, it only took a few hours. I just needed someone with enough knowledge to give me a hand. Big props to hokomoko for that.
The vast majority of the new stuff in evo has been done by me. Sometimes I've had help getting started, but if you bother to look over commit histories, you will find that 95% of it has been all me. That must sting you a little bit. That said, when I have been supremely stuck I have had community support, most notably, code_man, smoth, gajop, hoko and flozi. At other times, I've just needed someone to bounce ideas off of so that I can solve the issues myself.
Or that a gadget by KDR_11 from 2008 is frontpage-worthy, with the changes being made to it being totally lolcode.
That's pretty offensive. When I started with it, that gadget was beyond primitive. Now it is actually useful and receives a lot of constant loving from me. It was front page news because evo's gameplay was entirely adapted to it. The people that helped me with CV were code_man and smoth mainly, but smoth has had health issues, so I've had to figure out how to do a lot of it on my own, with some help from various other people (usually documented in the commit messages what they helped me with). I've been working with/on it since February, and what I had accomplished is taking it from a general concept to a fully fledged idea.
You required steam, frontpage spam and all that to get ~5 people to play for ~5 hours on one day. How is that is a success, that used to be everyday normal even for non-BA mods.
5 people? There were more than that, and it wasn't the same people all day, but say what you will, we all had a LOT of fun doing it, and people are already talking about next Saturday. We tend to have a lot of conversation on discord, and no one talks in the lobby (for the most part). I have found it to be an excellent medium for conversation with players.
You know the best part of it for me? In February, I gutted Evo. Ripped it apart, got it working on 103 with hoko's help and have since been rebuilding it. Since the original release of 10.x, I have had almost zero reports of players with issues. A lot of this is due to 103 being awesome, but another part of it is due to Evo finally being rock solid again. There are some rough edges still. Nothing is perfect, but I'm filing those down as I go along, and the user experience right at this moment is excellent.
So sure, doom and gloom all you want. BA probably loses players due to the fact that it has been stagnating. ZK possibly due to the constant flux that it has been in (or at least that is my personal perception) for the past X months wrt steam, lobby, etc.
One thing that KoyoteKamper said that stuck with me... "You have to keep making changes. That's what keeps me/others around, because it stays relevant and interesting."
Essentially what he is saying is that you can't let your game get stale. Behe kept BA going through sheer willpower by adding all kinds of features, but while BAR shows all kinds of excellent progress, it has stagnated as well, for no real discernible reason. Possibly due to feature creep and moving goalposts. Personally, I operate under the philosophy of release early, release often and try like hell not to release anything that is legitimately broken.
