0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
This could be a bad thing.Allow me to tell you the sad tale of Sonic Robo Blast 2. A fangame started by SSNTails and Sonic Team Jr. to build the 3D Sonic game Sega was too incompetent to make, it was slowly cobbled together from the Doom Legacy engine. Demo after demo was released, and a community formed around the development process. These people were united by their desire to see a classic Sonic game in 3D that they could be proud of. However, the message boards' membership was composed of, as one regular put it, "90% 8-year-olds, 8% lurkers, 1.9% oldbies, and 0.1% people actually able to contribute to this project." (Paraphrasing here; I can't find the original thread.) The community still managed to keep together, more or less, since the 8-year-olds, having the attention span of 8-year-olds, soon vanished after asking their questions and abandoning their stupidly overconfident expansion ideas. Soon, the developers realized that the official maps had become outclassed by what the game's active modding community (many of the members of which were also developers) was putting out; a revamp was in order. After three years of feverish development and polishing, SRB2 2.0 was released, marking a new standard for mods. 2.0 also marked the point that the old guard had begun to outgrow the game - SSNTails was now a married man, and with a baby on the way he couldn't spare the time needed to steer the development of a Sonic game. Furthermore, the strong push to get 2.0 out had pushed the ragtag Sky Sanctuary Team to its limit, leaving them completely burnt out. Lastly, the markedly increased quality of 2.0's maps revealed an unsettling truth - only a handful of people actually had the talent to meet the community's standards, most of whom had expended all of their creative energy working on the release. Things began to wind down.Then, the tipping point was reached. Spazzo, a developer and moderator, had become frustrated with the lack of progress on the next version of SRB2, and lashed out against Sky Sanctuary. The exact details escape my memory, but the issue first became apparent to the community when Spazzo began sending private messages to message board regulars, telling them a distorted picture and encouraging them to raise hell. The end result - Spazzo was made a persona non grata (albeit recently admitted to the MB) and people began to realize that the game and community had stagnated. It's by no means a ghost town, and things are improving - the noobs keep rolling in, the oldbies still make small talk, a few decent mods have been put out, and STJr. has made some encouraging progress towards 2.1 - but the sense that the game is in its twilight years remains.
Also, Stonefunk, Use proper English when posting.
One of the main issues I'm seeing is that there are only two groups of active people for the most part right now.The first group being the "Let's play Saxton Hale and never leave the server ever" group, which isn't awful because a lot of the people that play in there are very nice people for the most part. The problem is that it doesn't give new players the chance to experience other game modes, like vanilla, online with other players.
The second group would be the "Go to any given server and spectate so we can role play." I personally think that it's just ridiculous to occupy a server to give someone the illusion that you're playing, then to just go in there and see "Here let me give you a hug XD XD XD." (yes, I do see this) Imagine a new player seeing, for instance, Grandvoid's DM server. They'll go in wanting to play DM online, and what they'll find is that they'll be playing alone because the other 7 people in the server just want to spectate and roleplay. I say if you're going to do that, make your own server and password lock it.
Wait, people are still doing this? I thought that scourge got nuked when the "Vampire Wedding Crasher" fiasco made Flanny go nuts.
I notice that a lot of players who are 'scared off' the game aren't actually scared off by people on the forum, more so those who play the game a lot and don't really use the forum at all. That, combined with the difficulty of getting into populated servers due to mods really makes it hard to become an active member of the community. I'm sure there are lots of players who enjoyed singleplayer but just didn't join the community afterwards. Keep pushing and advertising for new players!Quote from: "Balrog"Also, Stonefunk, Use proper English when posting.He's French, he tried his best.
I don't play Shadowman anymore because I get kicked for stalling every time I do.
