Community for online/multiplayer games

[yeah]

The community currently has become rather fragmented and seems somewhat on the verge of falling apart completely. Hence this is somehwhat of an appeal how to proceed for now. Since Gameranger despite some shortcomings seems to be the best solution to facilitate online multiplayer games, it might be a good idea if everybody were to use it for scheduling online games rather than using other means such as Teamspeak servers, going back to older 1.2/1.3 versions, email or websites. Though individually these other choices are fine and may work for you in the short run, they are creating a problem for the community as they fail to create any visibility towards other players. In particular for a small community it is important to have a central place to find everybody and even if you even just want set up a game among a closed group of friends, it might be better to do that via Gameranger. Why? Because it creates visibility, we can only only attract new or returning players if they see an existing regular community. Even if they just see you playing a closed game, they can't join, they still see that people are playing regularly and might try again another time. But if they see nobody playing games a couple of times they probably will stop looking and just give up. That's why it is important to use a central place to organize games, even if you just play with a closed circle of friend or even if you don't use the actual matchmaking and just want to exchange IPs, use gamaranger for that nevertheless to create a visibility of the community towards others and signal new or returning players that there is still a community at all.

yeah

[Zero Angel]

The strat community is doing fine, its a little harder to get players but we can still arrange 5v5s quite often during certain times of the day. We have 3 main meeting places (bz2maps, ugonland TS3 server and the facebook group). We find that games arent as fun until they include as many players as we can get in em hence the level of organization.

The MPI community is considerably less organized because the games are often done in a 'hot join' fashion so less organization is typically needed. In this situation, MPI players should have a gathering place or other way to maintain contact until the situation improves. I would recommend the bzscrap TS3 server as a place to 'idle' when you guys are up for a game and willing to join one. Also, consider changing your TS3 names to your IP when hosting, so that players that just joined will know what IP to join.

[Axeminister]

There is a new build for public that let's everyone join through Raknet. Check it out

[yeah]

The strat community is doing fine, its a little harder to get players but we can still arrange 5v5s quite often during certain times of the day. We have 3 main meeting places (bz2maps, ugonland TS3 server and the facebook group). We find that games arent as fun until they include as many players as we can get in em hence the level of organization.

The MPI community is considerably less organized because the games are often done in a 'hot join' fashion so less organization is typically needed. In this situation, MPI players should have a gathering place or other way to maintain contact until the situation improves. I would recommend the bzscrap TS3 server as a place to 'idle' when you guys are up for a game and willing to join one. Also, consider changing your TS3 names to your IP when hosting, so that players that just joined will know what IP to join.

But that approach basically works fine for small more or less set groups in the short run, but in won't work for the overall community as it creates no visibility and won't attract new strat players either. Having 4 different meeting places rather than one is exactly the problem (in the long run). However if the new build (raknet) works out and we get a new stable ingame solution for matchmaking, then this discussion becomes moot obviously

[TwinShadow]

Well, like ZA said, the dedicated strat players are very organized, where DM and MPI typically are not. Once RakNet proves useful, I'm sure the next public beta will have it available and we can go back to using the in-game method again like it should be.

[Red Spot]

Having 4 different meeting places rather than one is exactly the problem

All I am going to say here:
That is not the problem, it is the result.