Productive Discussion on Population

[DUMBRIT!]

OK, I read some of your other posts in this thread. I skim read and saw a load of advertising ideas (kthx had good ideas) so I assumed it was for that

[DUMBRIT!]

My take on why people are leaving is pretty much the same as everyone elses, most people who have grown up with the game are leaving due to life/career. And the younger generation now are used to (and expect) the kind of multiplayer games you get today

[Jason]

so all we have to do is make the game easier and put in a rewards system so you consistently rank up and feel better about your no-life-8-hour-a-day gaming habit!

ez pz lemon squeezy.

all the kids of today would be happy.

anyway, i really love kthx's idea. making this happen might be a nice stop-gap, at least.

other than that, eph is not only wise beyond his years, he's got a lot of years on a lot of us. (had to get a stab in at ya, bud!) couldn't agree more with him. until things are opened up once and for all, from the center (priit being at the center with ultimate control) moving outward, all changes will be temporary. you won't see lasting results.

[Xog]

Damnit, this is what pisses me off. People start making posts that are off-topic and the thread gets derailed >:O

[Lizard Fuel]

Try rewording what you want to achieve, Xog. Like "Instead of creating new ideas for advertisement, how about we focus on the problems we already have in game, and address them accordingly".

From what I've seen in this thread so far, "The SSC council has other things to do"...Well then REPLACE them, or ADD some people that are willing to tackle these issues. We are entirely community driven, yet only a very small number of people in said community have any influence. Seems kind of backwards to me. If the players are expected to act on their own behalf, then don't make the players do backflips through rings of fire to get anything done around here. We couldn't even create our own forum account without approval until recently, and the democracy only grows thicker the further up the chain you go.

Summarized: If you want us to fix it, let us fix it without all your bullshit policies and procedures in the way.

[Xog]

From what I've seen in this thread so far, "The SSC council has other things to do"...Well then REPLACE them, or ADD some people that are willing to tackle these issues. We are entirely community driven, yet only a very small number of people in said community have any influence.

Based on what you said I can tell you probably don't even know who they are:
http://www.sscouncil.com/members.php

Seems kind of backwards to me. If the players are expected to act on their own behalf, then don't make the players do backflips through rings of fire to get anything done around here. We couldn't even create our own forum account without approval until recently, and the democracy only grows thicker the further up the chain you go.

I'll re-iterate what PoLiX said for the 2nd time in this thread:
I gotta say, I have kind of had my fill in recent weeks of everyone saying "This community is dying" "noone is doing anything" "noone works together" "the people with power don't care".

Well, that is why SSO and SSF have been made the way they are. Plain and simple. EVERYTHING on SubSpace Online is community driven, and can easily be updated with any input. I have sad/shown this from day 1, and plan to eventually make sections totally updatable by forum members.

The news is 100% community driven, as ANYONE can post news (just has to be approved to control spam, but I have yet to delete anything).
SSForum has a downloads script capable of becoming a HUGE archive that can easily be updated, added to, and accessed with the membership you have here to bitch about everything.
There is also now a Tutorials section being installed/updated that you can post FAQs, Information, and TUTORIALS for newbs on how to do the simple things and get them started. It is a live, 100% community driven FAQ/Guide for them.

There are other sites just for this yes, but you bitch that they are never updated or anything is done to them. Well here is your chance to do something without them. These scripts are all here, all open, and 9/10 just require us to quickly approve it, which I check for daily. So it is either you'd rather just be lazy and bitch about the work people who have been doing this for almost half their lifetime (sad as it is) do in their spare time. Or you take all of this that you can add to, that is totally self promotable, and help build something.

Summarized: If you want us to fix it, let us fix it without all your bullshit policies and procedures in the way.

Your summary holds no weight now. If you want to do something, you can. It's very simple. Very VERY simple. All you have to do is DO IT (jee like i dunno, advertisements like what LC and I did?). I don't even know what you're talking about with procedures and doing backflips through flaming assholes.

I'm going to say this again. If you want to improve something, get down to it and do it. Everything is available to you. I'm doing what I can with what I want to do. I'm not capable of creating bots or editing the new discretion client nor am I capable of conducting computer surgery on ASSS crap (but I have been learning over the past couple months). Like I said, the information is available. If you really don't know where to get the information, all you have to do is ask.

[daresound]

tutorial: i see this necessary for player maintenance. Who reads the paragraphs of text in the bottom left corner when they first start? Every friend i have shown the game to (or watched play any other new game) completely ignores it. Even when they are spamming the item loot key and the game is spamming them back "Inventory full" in bright red letters, they still don't understand why they can't pick up the item... I didn't find out how to use a rocket by reading the monotonous help messages - I asked the pub what the things on the left side of my screen were a few, maybe several times.
Look at the newer games - before you are able to play with other players you are required to complete a tutorial arena. Seems quite necessary for today's fickle minds, as it has been sad before, and witnessed too many times, that people quit within minutes or with hours of usage. I am for a tutorial to new players!

[Epinephrine]

1) Over the past several years there have been countless other games the players here have decided to prefer rather than this one.

This game was old before it ever even came out. I remember the horrible rating it got in PC Gamer when it was released.

2) The graphics are old and outdated. The advances in technology in this day and age have left Continuum in the dust.

Games like Infantry and Cosmic Rift had far better graphics, but it doesn't matter. No matter how good the graphics are, the basic mechanics of this game isn't the 3d experience that people are looking for these days. So I think changing the graphics overall is not necessary.

3) Constant player harassment could discourage some players to stop playing. Such behavior is ultimately a factor in real life and not just the game - in fact some players may be harassed outside the game and come to here to get away from it, only to be harassed even more.

This doesn't matter. There was always harassment. There's harassment in all online games. That never stopped people from playing before.

5) Learning curve is too high, lack of tutorial

The learning curve will always be high, another moot point. Tutorials are not that useful. How many people actually use those things? Maybe just a basic thing showing what keys do what is all we need.

6) The people that will never grow up and amount to anything plague the game and discourage newbies from starting.

That's increasingly a problem. Because people who actually are busy in real life play this game less and less. So the people who remain of the older players are people really with nothing better to do.

7) Way too much staff emphasis on all the wrong things (More stupid events/maps, stupid rules [racism, teamkilling, etc])

What's 'wrong' and what's 'right'? There is no real answer, and as such I think this is a moot point.

8) Not enough emphasis on more productive things (TWL Offseasons, pubs, marketing, etc)

See above.

9) Server instability. Its an old game, but we don't have to stay ancient. Swallow your pride and upgrade to ASSS already. If you don't want to do all the work, contract some of it out to your player base. I don't know shit about coding, but there is plenty of technically savvy people in TW that could work to fix this zone.

Well if PriitK didn't pay for our server perhaps that could be done? I think he's in control of all of that.

10) Not enough squad activity

Plenty of squads. Just not enough players.

11) Lack of motivation

Moot point.

12) Lack of updated features to the game

Need PriitK to release the source code if we want updates to the game.



I think overall the most important point is this:

4) The game was most popular between 1999-2004 (keep in mind that's 11 years - 6 years ago) and mainly grabbed the attention of people in their teens. However since then we have all grown over the years and more important things in life have taken over such as family, life tragedies, jobs, school and careers.

I wonder why the game was so popular at this time. Certainly 2001-2004 were the best years ever for Subspace/Continuum as a game.

Considering the game lost all official support by 1999, and JeffP and others had moved on to Infantry over at Sony Station which created a similar game experience with far better graphics, support and large corporation interest. I think this is the most crucial factor of all.

By this point I was already playing this game so I can't really comment. But for those who started in this crucial period, how did you find Subspace, and why did you stay playing it?

What led you to play a seriously outdated game (yes in 2001 Subspace was ridiculously outdated) and spend so much time doing it?


I think the only way that this time period could be misunderstood is if perhaps the number of new players was actually decreasing, but the old players were still hanging around, thus the nadir of population growth had actually long passed, and once people really stopped playing for good we get to our situation now of gradual decline.


=========
Personally I think the decline of Subspace could be summarized with the following factors:
1) Old game which sucks cause
a) Fallen out of the collective consciousness of the internet
b) People in general like 'new' things

2) The death of PC gaming in favour of console gaming and now mobile gaming.

3) One of the best features of SS being the 'meeting people from all over the world' part, which has become increasingly obsolete as social networking, online forums, and other games like WoW have increasingly created a better way for people to meet others than over our text-based interface

4) Lack of control of the game as our creator has better things to do and isn't releasing the code to be updated, and same with the servers. This has meant that many of our ways of adding to this game have been increasingly buggy and patchy (i.e. using bots to do everything rather than have something hard-coded in). Look at how we haven't been able to update the server list forever as one of the problems. Or how bots are programmed to do very simple things that a simple game patch could deal with if someone actually cared.


What we should understand is that the actual gameplay and simplicity of this game should not be seen as major problems. People will play simple games as shown by things like the iPhone. More complicated versions of this game (in terms of gameplay) have never had the same traction (i.e. Cosmic Rift). While needed add ons and changes to the game are always welcome, it's not the game that's at fault, rather the failure of the game to adapt to the world around it. For instance the ability to work seamlessly with outside websites rather than using clunky bots to do the work, or having a totally text based mod/BanG system when a point and click system or a separate window to show things like lists of altnicks might be more useful, or having point and click menus in-game to change settings on the fly and so on. This game was fine in a world where MMORPG meant a MUD, but not so much in the modern world where people these days don't remember what DOS was or know how to use a command line anything.

[curse]

lack of motivation....atleast for me, i started in 2008 and dded tons to get better...even tho im captaining a squad right now...i have no motivation at all to play the game anymore...dont even care if i go negative in dds or anything, rather troll the forums and sign onto tw to talk to a couple of friends

ya

[Ephemeral]

The game reaching its highest point of popularity during the early years (2000-03) was most likely due to the game’s only innovation (prediction algorithms) that made a large multiuser game possible over dialup speeds. The number of broadband Internet homes experienced a huge jump by the end of 2003 (well over a 50% rise from 2002).

[leonardo91681]

The one thing that really got me interested in this game was the make your own zone concept, unfortunetly this is a rather uphill battle, more so now than in the early years. I have not seen much interest in creating new zones from the playerbase these days and the few that try to make one dont get much support from the players. This leaves the players with very few options to play in and it will ultimetly lead into growing bored faster and leaving the game.

[not in game]

(I glanced and skimmed the thread)

I agree with Turban. For all the people I've introduced this game to, the only people to stick with the game for quite some time beyond a week, has been after I gave my own personal tutorial of game play, league play, and basically the depths and numerous options TW (the only zone I've remotely explored) has to offer.

For the many, many of my introductees who have quit, they quit because they got bored of the game. I didn't have the time to show them game play or league play. Who cares more than a week's worth of getting base while levianthan's are killing you randomly? They never got pass pub; they didn't even know the difference between pub and pure pub. Some didn't even know there were different ships!

Yes, a few of those people I introduced and stayed have quit because of more advanced games, but at least they made that judgment with a full understanding of the game.

Another thing is when I began playing TWD, there were plenty of terrible squads to play against. Players at my own level. Now, when I'm trying to get my squad a JD, the only active squads are relatively decent/amazing. Hell, even my "newb" non-dictionary squad can own a bunch of new players to the game. But they choose to jd us, because they have nobody else to play, and even when Deliria is at the bottom of the ladder, we're still going to destroy a completely new group of kids. New players start playing and get dominated. I mean, absolute domination, talking about 50-20 scores. For the new kids, they have nobody at their own level. We got new players trying TWD, just to get dominated every game, and harassed after losses. Why wouldn't you leave?

Those are my thoughts on why our newer community is leaving. As for the older players, my own experience suggests that we've just prioritized. And because there aren't many newer players playing, I feel like every game is the same game, because I'm essentially playing the same players in the same game. I swear, every single time I JD Dark, which is a lot, even if the players aren't the same, I feel like it's the same game over and over again. Hell, I feel like every JD is the same nowadays; the same 15-25 teammates/opponents over and over again. There's so little variation. There's nothing exciting about getting a jd anymore, because I know exactly how the round is going to play out.

Sorry Xog, if I went off-topic. I felt like I stayed on topic as to why people were leaving. If not, let me know and I'll delete this post.

[Aquarius]

what happened to the rotating zone banners we used to see on many sites as an attempt to promote smaller zones?

[Eugene]

Good work

[Xog]

I'd support this Fludd, so if you could, delete the post and start its own thread (i know, this idea's been done so many times lol, but it really doesn't hurt anything). I'll post in there. Thanks

PS: This is a prime example of how the community can help.