Psychedelic Rhino wrote:
The only answer I can come up with is those people who love RTS' may not have wanted to deal with the FPS aspect. . . and visa-versa. But I wonder how many of the FPS fans who never tried BZ realized BZ evolved to be 60-70% DM FPS.
I don't know if that was it, exactly. There were TONS of stratters. I don't know if it was the decline of the community that drove them away but I suspect it played a part. I assume many of them went back to just SP or IA or other games altogether.
There may have been a lot of hard-core RTS players, and they could be readily identified by their use of the satellite view. That always screamed "starcraft player" to us.
Many of them tended to be consummate base-sitters. They'd sit there commanding their forces from their unmoving tank and then get pissy when you'd just jump up an overlooking ridge and snipe them.
It was such a mixed bag of people I'm surprised the community didn't collapse in on itself faster.
I was never much of a DM'r so I can't comment on how that aspect of the community was. If at all, I played occasional games of stomp because it was ludicrously fun. You just couldn't take that type of game too seriously. If you weren't in that game style to have fun, you were just wasting everyone's time.
Strat was more difficult in the earlier days - even with that many players you had slower net speeds to contend with and lag was ALWAYS an issue. You could be playing a neighbour but once your game got up to a certain length, the sheer number of units in-game would run the playability down.
So I suspect that wearied a lot of players, and then they got hit with XP, which, from personal experience, crippled my ability to play until we got a hold of the xp patch.
Apollo wrote:Not sure why you would think making another server could stay out of "this whole split business", it devides players into many locations thus defining a split.
I also can't see a server that bans players being neutral, Activision didn't ban anyone, that is the way it should be, atleast.. not at the server level. Banning at the server level is a recipe for abuse no matter the intent
This is also true. But it also assumes that if another server shows up people are going to leave the one they are already on.
Let's propose a scenario;
Say someone from
that other server gets banned for whatever reason (and I think we all know there doesn't really need to be one). They load up BZ, if they have the wherewithall to replace their servers.dat file, or make their copy 0777 (
) they'll see another three. What they might not see is any players on those servers.
Eddy maintains the 911 servers for 1.4 and 1.5 sessions, as well as bze sessions. They're uncensored, unmoderated and open. In the past six months I may have seen a few people on them, and maybe one game that was probably for testing (excluding 1.5 session, which has more activity, and the bze session, which has it's regulars). That leaves the 1.4 sessions that are empty.
Unless there is something (i.e. a forum/website) that people will actively visit and participate in that promotes 'neutral' servers, they likely will never see any activity.
The other challenge you'll face opening up another server is that you'll surely be
asked nicely 
to take it down. If you refuse, you may be labelled a "dummy" or a "hacker" and the smear campaign will begin.
Which isn't to say I don't support the idea, but given the dysfunctional state of the community, you'd have plenty of challenges against you.
The one thing I think BZC is doing right is having all games on the same session (albeit a different one from stock). That way, anyone who uses an installer from BZC will see other players no matter what version of the game they are in. This, at the very least, reinforces the sense of a community. Even if they aren't going to all play the same game together, they can chat, change the game they can make arrangements to play one version or the other.
Damnit I've gone off the rails again.
