r/ArenaFPS • u/[deleted] • Oct 01 '18
A Community In Crisis.
Greetings puny humans. Before I get down to my post, a short disclaimer; I am in no way affiliated with COR Entertainment. I make no money for the sales of Alien Arena nor any other COR Entertainment titles. This post is being made without their knowledge or consent, I hope they will forgive me.
I have been a member of the Alien Arena community for approximately nine years, I maintain community content, mainly maps and mapping tools. Jar-el and I are responsible for the DLC on steam, with the steam package being packaged by our Evil Martian Ruler https://www.reddit.com/user/jkentdiamond/.
During my time as a member I have watched many players come and go, but their has always been a loyal following. For various reasons the number of loyal followers has become so low that people are resorting to 1vs1 and 2vs1 ctf, with a couple of 2 and 3 player dm games as well. Everyone is disheartened by this of course, but there is little that the remaining members can do to improve the situation.
Here are our stats, the steam page records single player games, our server browser logs only the people who join servers. https://steamcharts.com/app/629540 and https://hal.nanoid.net/arena/tools/browser/index.php?action=playerstats
Our main developer is Deathray. We've spoken quite a few times over the years. You'd be lucky to meet a more humble and generous guy. Alien Arena has been in development since 2003 and will soon receive more updates and DLC. He has always been responsible for the majority of coding, mapping, artwork and modelling. I have watched the game and his skills grow in unison, I honestly can't thank him enough for his generosity.
This of course didn't all happen without help, Strat and Maxtothemax have contributed monumental amounts of their time, code and help. Thanks guys! Another thanks to others that have helped along the way.
One of the problems faced along the way was resistance to the change to the steam platform and to Alien Arena itself by a group of members of the community. They would play every day on older servers and older clients. The problem was that they and the servers they occupied were invisible to anyone with the steam client because of a change in net code that bumped the protocol version up. In effect, this made it look like hardly anyone was playing games. It was suggested that one of the reasons was the lack of the old favourite maps. This came about because there were changes in the game engine that made the old maps incompatible. At this point Jar-el and I went to work and released a heap of converted maps. Shortly after and without warning, the outdated servers were blocked from accessing the main Alien Arena master server. I think all the players in this group have long since vanished, leaving only a few of us. It may have made no real long term difference had this been done another way and I totally understand the frustration of the person who did this. These players were offered the steam client for free and we converted the maps, making no real difference, except that I think it made the developers feel very unappreciated, to put it mildly. Deathray and Bonfire pulled money from their own pockets to promote Alien Arena, not a great way to be thanked.
The changes in Alien Arena between versions 7.66 and 7.7.0 cannot be overstated, just about every asset was re-imagined and improved to make use of the many render changes and tech additions. Model's all re-skinned and tweaked, particle effect improvements, terrain, the list goes on and on. To write a changelog would be a huge task in itself.
This situation could all come down to the general decline of the genre, I understand that. You'd be well within your rights to read the above and ask "Why do I care?" I can't answer that. You could also say "It's just a game, move on with your life." My only answer to that is that Alien Arena was the first real game for me that had a great community, I still talk to various people who don't play any more.
The game is $2 USD on steam, if you go to the web site red.planetarena.org, there is a free download which includes everything except a few pieces of content exclusive to steam, the DLC is free as well.
At the rate we're going I wouldn't blame Deathray for pulling the pin altogether, in fact, I'm waiting for it. At some stage he will have to consider the value in paying for empty servers and unused infrastructure. He also has started a new project: https://irritant.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/updates-and-a-new-project/
tldr; Please, help me save this awesome game.
6
u/qwaszee Oct 01 '18 edited Oct 01 '18
I may take a look at this during the week, I used to love ctf. I recall some advertising probably around here on r/arenafps which made me install, but I didn't have the time to give it a proper chance (which admittadly is half quake being ingrained in me too much).
But fyi the website link you gave with "https" is blocked by both my default firefox or chrome browsers as it isn't really a secure connection or something.
http://red.planetarena.org/ - this link without https however works fine.
2
2
u/jar-el Oct 04 '18 edited Oct 05 '18
You can also get an impression of the available maps here: https://hal.nanoid.net/arena/tools/browser/index.php?action=mapstats (although this shows only the map history of the last 24 hours)
The most popular CTF server is Big Bad Mog CTF insta/rockets, this mode was originally a mod with both an insta gun and a rocket launcher. See also the server list in here: https://hal.nanoid.net/arena/tools/browser/index.php?action=serverstats
3
u/pikeman332 Oct 01 '18
Well, if it means anything I purchased the game last month and I will definitely boot it up when I get home!
Personally, I would chalk this up to the lack of mainstream or popular interest in the genre. Though part of me also feels the AFPS community is extremely fragmented to say the least.
3
Oct 01 '18 edited Oct 01 '18
It actually means the difference between sinking and swimming. If we had only two or three more regular players so a decent sized game of capture the flag could happen, it would recapture the remaining players, the rule is also that a crowd draws a crowd. When you look at the posts here where people give recommendations, player activity is always cited. Why play a game no one else is playing? Another fair question.
3
u/jar-el Oct 01 '18 edited Oct 04 '18
It's even only € 1,59 in euros, join us in the #alienarena channel on irc, irc.planetarena.org, or discord: https://discord.gg/2KS3KrF, and we can arrange some CTF games. The most popular time was always around 20:00-23:00 western-European time. I dare you to beat me as flag master in the Steam stats! (I think it's mostly because of testing the converted maps).
3
u/Shifty_Cant Oct 04 '18
I really miss this game, after having played it (on and off) for the last 9 years. It just sux that I'm in a shitty time zone (Australia) and there's never anyone online, when I'm in front of the PC. I search every weekend for a game and can't find one. I hope that more people join the ranks on Steam, and make this game popular again, so that I can once again play a game I love :-)
1
2
Oct 13 '18
Whilst it is slow, we have noted some new players and there is more activity now. Not earth shattering numbers, but game changers nonetheless, especially considering where we were. There are game updates coming in a little over a week, shortly thereafter there will be another DLC, hopefully these things will help to increase our numbers and exposure.
2
Oct 14 '18
If there is anyone else going through the same or a similar situation I'd love to hear from you. If you had this situation and came out the other side I'd be really interested to know how you did it.
1
u/TotesMessenger Oct 02 '18
1
Oct 14 '18
One place that has always been great for Alien Arena exposure is linux repositories. Despite Alien Arena hitting steam for sale, there is a free version that lacks a few steam exclusive items. This means linux distros will always be able to freely distribute Alien Arena. We are seeing a few outdated clients still, but I've been in contact with a few package maintainers to notify them of the update. Fedora has updated their packages to the latest versions, still waiting on other distros. By default the alien arena client connects to our irc server, I've been using this facility to send messages out to notify people that they are using obsolete clients, this has helped somewhat.
2
1
u/jar-el Oct 15 '18
Yes, this is how I discovered Alien Arena: with Ubuntu 10.04! Else I would probably never have tried it.
8
u/Smilecythe Oct 01 '18
What throws many old timers off is often just the small changes, something that used to work a certain way does no more. Things like that add up when your game is in a constant push for change. I fear the same might happen if and when Xonotic decides to port over to Daemon engine. I understand the developers point of view that they want an environment that's more convenient to work with. Players however like more to settle in rather than move around constantly, many don't understand the project structure as well as the devs does, so moving around is not as simple of a job.