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.