Decreasing playerbase

[focus]

I suggest to create a rank "Honoured retired admin". And fill this group with several people.

[Azarael]

I'm not gone yet.

[iZumo]

The problem with the other two servers is that they're uniquely designed to cater for the unskilled. Race is what sustains AS/Race, and nothing like it exists anywhere else. Invasion, similarly, is riddled with flaws and loved because of that.

Many of the named players in previous posts had skill.

[Azarael]

Yes, but that wasn't my point. My point is that Race and Invasion will hold their playerbases because said playerbases are composed of people who like the flaws in the works, which no game developer will try to replicate in the future. BW has competition from every other FPS with a degree of depth.

[iZumo]

They are indeed targeted for such players, but that's rather very common today. They have the same competition between "crappy" servers as well. Just looking into UT2004, every INV server is like ours (find a cover, stand'n'spam). Most of custom ONS stuff is about extremely OP vehicles (just look the servers), or have stuff like berserk mod on (=spam). UT3 has even an official addon "Titan" which is just like that crap, it's stinger is even moar powerful minigun (u can spam it on vehicles). And I could continue ...

[Calypto]

One philosophy I have is not only to keep old players, but rather keep the new players. Most new players have no idea what they are doing, and are put off by the seemingly daunting complexity of Ballistic Weapons. One problem new players always have is opening the weapon selection UI, and this almost always occurs because they are unfamiliar with the key configuration. A helpful tip for new players would be to show a keyboard as a loading screen with arrows that point actions to their specific keys.

Something like this:


The alternative is to have this in-game, something like a player agreement when they join for the first time. The keyboard should exclude any key lettering that is not directly related to the mod itself in order to focus attention where it's needed most.

[focus]

I want to say this.
We have a planet now, with 7 billion people here.
3 billion use internet.
The task of getting people to the server is equivalent of
getting some subset of world population to play here.
Everyone could play the server if one knows about it.
Ads are helpful. If one played UT2004 before and liked it,
maybe one would be glad to play BW. Each human is different
in what he like.

There are core players, who play here constantly.
There are players, who play here from time to time.
There are players, who know about the server, but ceased to play.

Everyone have his own opinion about the server.

google: internet marketing

[Greedisgood]

Internet marketing costs. We either need to organise a cyber-squad of spammers or pay someone to do it for us. But i agree, putting enough effort into this, we could bring lots of new souls. Actually, i could just assemble an archive with BW downloaded and LDG in favourites, put it on the local tracker with descriptions and soon we will be drowning in players. I just need a symbolical permission from big bosses.

[Aberiu]

internet marketing

We don't have anyone experienced in this in our team. I can do art, screenshots, posters etc, but I have no idea where to post it or how to promote our game. Don't forget that you have to convince someone to
1) buy a 10 years old game
2) download the latest patches and other content
3) get used to the UT2004 favorites system which is not common at all these days - you don't have to type IPs or edit inis just to connect somewhere in current games
4) wait for eternity until the rest of BW pro and other mods will be downloaded from the server
- just to realize that this is an ugly looking extremely complicated game where everyone is better than you.

I can only recommend this to someone who wants to broaden their horizons by observing some old nerds in their natural habitat...

[Greedisgood]

Only a certain percentage gets hooked, as always. The pattern is still the same: just attract as much attention as possible. All the content can be packed into a simple form, with everything up to date, maybe even a launcher directing you to ldg directly (can it be done with a batch file or something?). What other technical issues can be encountered? Im not sure about the keys, if ill just upload my cleaned up version, will it connect as it should?