Urban Terror and popularity
#1
Posted 29 June 2016 - 05:40 PM
Personally my favourite things to blame are:
CS:GO and other 'realistic' games that have annoying gameplay and social features that people are flocking to.
Poorly configured servers without admins about anymore can kill off the desire to play there.
Bots that never leave as players join.
I have the feeling 4.3 will give the game a (small?) boost in popularity for a while. Perhaps URT-HD will be popular due to the better graphics and new engine.
Thoughts?
#2
Posted 30 June 2016 - 01:29 AM
fragged, on 29 June 2016 - 05:40 PM, said:
First we should clarify which dip in popularity I am referring to:
According to all data available (from urban-zone, urt-stats and experience), the playerbase had its peak late 2011, early 2012. In the second half of 2012 and the first half of 2013 the competitive scene had a massive drop. which ended in a downward spiral until today (with little heights around special events like nation cups). So I do refer to the initial drop after summer 2012.
Reasons:
Other Games
- CS:GO (release 21.08.2012)
- League of Legends (started to get a real e-sport in 2012 with its first >1.000.000$ price pool tournament)
- CoD Black Ops 2 (released 13.11.2012, first CoD tournament with 1.000.000$ price pool 5.4.2013)
New version
- Bugs: When 4.2 was released, the early versions where nearly unplayable, and furthermore the updater had bugs as well.
- Changes: many players thought 4.1 was just fine and the changes where unnecessary and not in the interest of the playerbase (i.e. goin hitbox, auth, weapon spray,...)
- Drama: With the release of 4.2 some drama went along. First there was the leak drama (I dont know too much about this one) and second there was the player cheat drama (some players who were accused and banned for cheating are insisting that they played clean still today).
- Desperation: After the community got 4.2, with changes most of the players didn't like, and lacking of very crucial changes which would be needed if the game should compete with new games (new design, better graphics, better anti cheat, better registration / auth system, in game social,...) like the one mentioned above, the player base went desperate and lost hope in UrT and FS. (Thats not my personal opinion, but my observation after conversations with many other players)
- Split community: After the release of 4.2 the community split into three parts: The first part went on playing 4.1 (competitive part), the second started playing 4.2 (most of the public players and new players) and the third one quit urt out of the reasons above. Which lead to smaller communities for each game and enforced the feeling of a dying game.
Summer
Summer is in general the time, where PC gaming is not very popular. The players return in the time between August / September but they didn't like what they saw / they saw better stuff at different places.
Atmosphere and activity
The atmosphere was quite bad with lots of players quitting or ranting about the state of the game or FS. The problem is, if you play a game where a significant part of the community is toxic, the fun is limited. And furthermore, competitive play was really hard to do. When the count of competitively active teams is below some barrier, it dies, because you don't find any practice partners with reasonable waiting time. So you stop searching for practice as well, and sooner or later pcws are to hard to find to even try.
Summary
So I think, that the summer of 2012 was the worst summer in the history of this game (for the reasons stated above), followed by the second worst summer 2013 were clan-base died and urban-zone switched to 4.2.
The timing of 4.2 could have been perfect. 4.1 was at its peak before and the new games gained attention with new features like reward systems, matchmaking, market places, skins,... 4.2 could have boosted UrT if it was able to compete, but in the end it wasn't able to in any possible way.
Of cause we are speaking of a game developed by some independent developers in their spare time for fun. The fact that they where able to compete until 2012 was really amazing. But I think, the reality is, that competitive online games have to be more than just good game play mechanics and ok graphics. People want to get rewarded and buy skins, watch only tournaments with massive price pools (which are mostly sponsored by the game company) and star players like sport stars. Requirements not even a indy development team like FS can meet.
So 4.3 will change nothing :( but HD may have some impact because of the steam integration (skins, warehouse, communication,... is possible), the ur4 engine (better graphics, better physics,...) and I heard rumors that matchmaking has some priority.
This post has been edited by ringel: 30 June 2016 - 01:32 AM
#3
Posted 01 July 2016 - 03:48 AM
Not sure I've ever seen an obvious cheater on URT, but I'm sure I spotted a wallhacker at least once.
This post has been edited by fragged: 01 July 2016 - 04:04 AM
#4
Posted 02 July 2016 - 10:51 PM
ringel, on 30 June 2016 - 01:29 AM, said:
Atmosphere and activity
The atmosphere was quite bad with lots of players quitting or ranting about the state of the game or FS. The problem is, if you play a game where a significant part of the community is toxic, the fun is limited. And furthermore, competitive play was really hard to do. When the count of competitively active teams is below some barrier, it dies, because you don't find any practice partners with reasonable waiting time. So you stop searching for practice as well, and sooner or later pcws are to hard to find to even try.
Nailed it, urt needs to strengthen the community but there are a lot of players chasing others out.
#5
Posted 02 July 2016 - 11:43 PM
For that matter I believe numbers started to dip around the time Google bought YT in 2006 and started to push context based advertising based on sampled interest so if you have a habit of browsing Google for free games so our competition is the more than 3000+ free games available today on a broad range of different platforms.
Getting a banner ad on an Angry Joe Review, with view averages of 4-5 million, would, should, push the payer base into what I would at least expect to be pre 2006 numbers.
Sure there are a number of contributing factors but becoming popular is a factor of a large number of people even knowing that you exist in the first place so we either need to "buy" promotion and advertising or start our own Gamer Gate.
#6
Posted 03 July 2016 - 12:13 AM
But the question was why the popularity declined, and the advertisement argument can't tell why players left. From my experience and the players I know and talked too, this are the games they left urt for.
But again, regarding the recruitment of new players advertisement would help for sure. On the other hand, holding the players and getting them involved in the community, in competitive play and in clans can be hard our easy, depending on the game and its social features - which are not existent in urt.
#7
Posted 03 July 2016 - 02:13 AM
ringel, on 03 July 2016 - 12:13 AM, said:
Yeah I wish I/we had an answer for that. Social feature will/would help a lot but would be of value to retain the current player base. Once again money I feel is the answer as far as competition goes and to crack into the e-comp community prize money in lew of direct advertising would go along way.
Knockout would be ideal as it seems the easier format to set up.
#8
Posted 03 July 2016 - 02:55 AM
A server with wrong cfg == empty.
I'm testing my server now with poweradmin plugin (b3), I'm using the map rotation that change the nextmap for big, medium or small depending how many players you have logged on server. Working? Ok, yes...
But the popularity of this game is crashing down because the game industry is moved by graphics, not fun...
I hate CS GO, for me the game is more stupid than ever... Urt is a fun game, you can fell the emotion playing this game. you fell the competition, the adventure that is jump over your enemy... is a game for surprises and tunrs, you can turn a 5x0 round to 5x7 or something like that... I can't play a slow game before urt, I press E to run sometimes in CSGO. hahaha xD
But... you know. Money talks.
I think that is good keep a website or a place for server admins help each others to configure your servers.
#9
Posted 03 July 2016 - 07:37 AM
Why old players don't stay is the wrong question to ask. People always leave, no project lives forever unless it can continuously bring in new players. The question is, why would a random person find and want to play Urban Terror over any of the alternatives? Why indeed.
We'll still have to figure out our place in this brave new world.
#10
Posted 03 July 2016 - 10:46 AM
"Sorry, Urban Terror does not contribute back to ioquake3 and long ago decided to move to a closed source engine. They may not have moved to that engine yet, but it doesn't make sense to link to them until either of those things change."