The question is

[Vater]

What exactly made Devastation successful back in the old days? Is there a difference between today's Deva and back then? I think I only started playing around 09 on and off and started playing full time in 10-11 so I've got no idea. I enjoy the zone and the community here as well way more than any other zone. TM's a great guy, even if he doesn't really dev, he brings in the pop which makes the zone tick. When he's not here it's like dead, so kudos to him.

But anyway, here's my take on what should be done:

 

1. It seems that every time the server's down we lose a lot of the population. I think we were hitting in the highs of pop near 20 and even mid 20's every night for a certain period and then the server went down for a day or two. So it wasn't put back up quickly enough. I heard rumors of a server change/upgrade, if that gets Deva a better host then that would surely prevent downtime for days which would in turn keep the population hopefully stable.

 

2. Getting the forums active. It seems the only means of communication with players old or new besides getting into the game. If we get more people to actively participate in forums we can better set up bigger games days or weeks beforehand. This would also help with setting up league as well.

 

3. When we do have the population to play, it should start off with a flag game. The type of flag game I'm looking for is just to win it. When we're playing flag games, it seems the objective is not to win but to just keep it going which just bores me. I know I've heard other people talking about winning the jackpot and even myself and TM just says > Why?, we got a good game going. Well mate, I want the fucken creds and it's stupid because I've got to log off sooner or later and some dude can just log in without playing and win the damn jackpot. After the flag game, it's best to follow it up with events to keep people interested and jesus christ, not the same shit over and over again please. It seems when we play an event, we play it for the whole night, we should only be playing an event once or twice at max.

 

Anyway, there's my take on things in Devastation at the moment. It's certainly not hard to get population when we have around 15-25 every night, we had that for a week I remember. It's a great zone with a great community and it'll get the people. I'll be looking to help again if I'm allowed since I've got a bit of spare time nowadays. Ending my long rant now. Comments? Improvements? Suggestions?

[Hakaku]

Just a few comments I guess.

 

1. Yeah, the zone crashed due to someone's mishap, so it was down for a good 10 hours or so not long ago. But this had happened during non peak hours. Other than that, neither the zone nor the server has gone offline.

 

2. Couldn't agree more, I'd love to see more participation in the forums. And even, more base and idea submissions like we use to get in the past to add variety to the main pub map. Though I'm still not sure how we could pull off a league; we'd almost have to force limits on teams, so that we don't have 90% of the zone on Obsidian fighting against one or two people on their own.

 

I'm going to look into finding a way to (re-)establish a MySQL database connection, possibly with my own server when I get the time. This way I can get credits to start behaving properly instead of constantly resetting, and start recording time records for things like races and mazes.

 

3. I lol'ed. This has been an on-going problem in Deva. On the one hand, it's frustrating not being able to win the jackpot and gain credits when everyone is telling you not to do it and whatnot. On the other, winning the jackpot will cause a lot of people to drift off and leave. We never really did find an adequate solution to this issue.

 

So what do you do? Take your pick. In tm's camp, the jackpot gets milked forever, and ultimately everyone is allowed to win. In XDOOM's camp, you just gotta tank the base, grab the flags, and run. It adds a little flavour, and a little rage as well, but don't be afraid. Just ask Mage+ about the good ol' days with doomie

 

As for after events, if they're too repetitive and boring, tell him. I'm not around when he's on, so I'm not even sure what goes on, but afaik he's been hosting elim events and baseduel, while others have been promoting hockey. If you wanna have a race competition, run a maze, play jugger, kick some paintball ass, or whatever, request it. Yell it out in pub to get everyone riled up, it's not hard.

[No_Remorse]

I would have to agree with most of what Hakaku said. Especially like the idea of race times being recorded again.

 

And here is a classic screen of xdoom and some bacantors(nrg.ini's) raping the flag game and tm's reaction.

 

Enjoy.

 

http://i169.photobucket.com/albums/u214/rottenronald/screenshot8.jpg

[etropic]

"...a small group of people getting together for a common goal (having some fun)..."

 

http://forums.ssgn.net/topic/17018-omg-you-have-to-be-kiding-me/page__p__184757#entry184757

 

etropic - obsidian - deva