death of ss?

[Cheese]

so things have been looking pretty bad lately

 

 

 

 

ive had to sit and watch zone after zone get infested with cancer and die.

 

the development forums for ss died about a year ago, and have literally not received a single post for 2 months.

the development team for the biggest zone is now dead, and is led by someone actively driving away developers.

3 large ssc hosts have shut down in the last year.

 

 

mavericks statistics pages have the death of this game slated for some time in 2016:

 

 

 

 

and thats just with a continued linear decay, which is extremely unlikely.

personally, i expect an inverse exponential decay near the end, when people start quitting because noones playing, meaning the game could die as early as the end of 2014 if noone does anything about it.

 

 

 

so whats going to happen?

anyone doing anything to delay the inevitable somehow?

any plans?

 

 

 

 

 

 

also, tiny thumbnails are tiny

Edited November 12, 2011 by Cheese

[Hakaku]

The game will inevitably die, that much has been clear for almost 8 years now (speaking of Continuum of course). But it's more surprising that it even lasted this long to start.

 

So what's going to happen? Nothing. All that is will no longer be. No one will care, as everyone will have lost interest and moved on. Even if a new client should somehow happen to magically pop up, it would take a lot to get lingering players to switch, and more to attract an entirely new generation.

[Dr Brain]

The game is dying because nothing new is happening. A new client might revive the game, but as Hakaku said, we'd have to grow the player base as part of that.

[»Maverick]

It's apparently clear that Continuum is dying, no point in denying it.

 

the development team for the biggest zone is now dead, and is led by someone actively driving away developers.

Elaborate, please?

[Cheese]

pretty self explanatory

[Resol]

He means Trench Wars. And I know exactly who he means. The guy thinks that TW is the real war or something and he's still in the military.

[»Lynx]

so whats going to happen?

anyone doing anything to delay the inevitable somehow?

any plans?

 

1. People will move on.

2. No.

3. Come on these forums to read another 1,000 threads about how the game is dying; asking what's going to happen next and if anybody is doing anything to fight the inevitable.

[PoLiX]

This game could be the perfect lesson/example of why a player ran game cannot survive.

 

 

We let one player code everything, and go MIA without any accountability to the community.

 

We never made any central authority to control the game, keep everyone in line, and keep everyone working together for the greater good. Instead we tore our community apart with stupid politics and wanting to be in control of the most players, and created our own mini communities in our game that was barely keeping 1 entire community alive.

 

We setup a system that allowed abuse, discrimination, and no accountability. At all levels this ran rampid. A centralized biller not allowing anyone on, an elitist council "overseeing" everything, and zone owners freely able to cheat and abuse in their own zones at free will.

 

Many zones worked harder at discrediting each other and stealing each other's players, than they ever did actually working together for the greater good of the game.

 

In reality we failed ourselves. We had every opportunity to stop this, and we never did anything beyond bitched and complained.

 

There has been some strives lately to regain what we once had, but sadly I think we'll find it is just too late. The best we can do is just enjoy playing this game as we all slowly leave and move on. It would take a miracle for us to rise out of the ashes again, and I honestly don't have my fingers crossed.

 

Just my jumbled 2 cents.

[Dr Brain]

I disagree with every point you made Polix. All of those things made us stronger, and without them we would have died a year or two after VIE. We're the perfect example of how a player run game can survive. We've been running for ... 16 years? Probably closer to 20 before anyone will be able to declare us dead.

[Avast]

You guys have serious issues to think that combining the populations of EG, Chaos, Power, and DSB would change anything.

 

If Entropy went to someone with the power to set that up, and told you it was a good idea to have each zone on each others arena list. Then you just made a mistake, and you are actually not doing DSB a favor by doing this. Once again this is Entropy taking the easy way to fix the problem of DSB. The easy way will never work, and DSB will always remain a dead zone. The fact that you agree to do this, is like being an enabler, you are enableing more fail in DSB since you are accepting their "quick fix" ideas. There is no quick fix.

 

DSB's success actually requires someone to code and Dev. We all were happy when Entropy became SYSOP because of that very reason, we all thought he became sysop because he WOULD code and dev, we thought it was a good thing because hoch was never around and could NOT CODE and dev. And what does Entropy do instead? He becomes the next Hoch, he stops coding and devving, and generally sits on his ass, and spends time policing people. Everything he does code is generally half assed. Yes that means he is still sitting on half his ass. Anything that was accomplished in DSB since he took over, was not by Entropy, it was by anyone he dictated to. So even then Entropy accomplished nothing, barely coded, and PUBLIC has been the same for 6 months since my ban. I actually got unbanned entered DSB, saw pub was the same, and started laughing, because they have no idea how to fix their own zone.

 

So about the coding should I give you at least one example? Sure. DSB held babl league not to long ago. Me and Sever took an initiative and made 12 bases for Babl league. Entropy did nothing. We tiled those bases. Entropy did nothing. We put all those bases on the same map. Entropy did nothing. We gave them to Entropy. It took Entropy 4 months to finally put the idea up for vote, and decide to use them. (Half assed) When Entropy finally used the bases, he uploaded one base in the arena every week for the babl league. As opposed to making a simple code to warp the player to the required bases. And yes we gave him warp coordinates. Being DSB's only coder, and league coordinator at that. And being accepted to Sysop by the population largely because of the hope he would code and improve dsb. It makes sense that he take 30 minutes to code a proper babl league. Instead he opts for the lazy method. EVEN Devastation zone with 10 population, has 10x more development than DSB. Even they made a module to warp players to bases in their Baseduel arena. How come a zone like devastation with barely any pop has no trouble coding something so simple, and entropy does? (never mind coding, he could even borrow such a simple and common code from another zone) This is the clear image of why DSB will always remain shit. It is simply because Entropy treats it like shit. If you don't improve every little thing you can, you will never get close to having a zone people want to play. Stay half assed and your zone will remain so.

 

To further this analogy. Another reason why this whole idea of arena sharing is wrong. And could potentially harm all four zones. Not just DSB now. Lets assume DSB is a homeless person. If you spend everyday thinking about where you will sleep, then you will always be homeless. You are dreaming the wrong dreams. You have to dream bigger than where your going to sleep tonight. That is the only way you will ever escape. Of course no one understands this because you are not educated. Go and educate yourselves and maybe you can become successful at something as simple as a 2D game. DSB constantly short hands itself and tries to accomodate its 15 player population, not realizing that doing this will just keep making the zone smaller. Aim big to get big. Stop being a hospice where people go to die as cyanyde once said.

 

It also doesn't help that nobody will ever like DSB. Especially now, their actions on how they handle players, dev, and staff policy gave them the image of being a troll. Of all the zones DSB is the troll zone. No one wants to touch it. The only way you can ever hope to get new players in there is to change the name of the zone. Just the name. Then people would not associate fail zone or fail staff with the name of Death Star Battle. The only other way is to keep the name and change the staff, and actually change the zone (pub and league) to something sucessful. Which you will never accomplish.

 

This is once again another reason why this idea of sharing the arena list is a bad idea. You thought, "we have a low pop zone, lets share arena lists with four other zones" You are trying to bring players to your fail zone. Instead of fixing the fail zone so players come on their own. ANYTHING TO GET PLAYERS EXCEPT FIXING THE ZONE. You are stupid beyond belief.

 

Also asthetically speaking, of all these four zones on each others arena lists. People will still want to play the zone they like. They will not go to dsb just because they see it in the list. If they do it will be to harass the failures there. Choas EG and Power thought they got the better end of the stick, and they did. Their zones far outclass DSB on terms of development, and fun. You may actually lose people. Since in comparison with these other four zones, you are bottom tier DSB.

 

Once again DSB is stuck with a zone owner who doesn't give a shit. Also known as Liito. Who logs in once a week, does and contributes nothing with his presence. Is capable of coding but does not. Why are you here if you are just going to be a statue? SS is dying? Yes it is, because of people like Entropy and Liito. DSB a once promiment zone of 150 players maintained for over 5 years at that level of population. Has been reduced to decay, in a little over a year, and it had little to do with "SS is dying" and everything to do with who killed it by both their action and inaction.

 

And fix my f-ing arcade. Or give me access to do it.

Edited November 13, 2011 by Avast

[No_Remorse]

tl;dr

 

It will be a sad sad day when subspace dies -- like a childhood friend dying. :-(

[PoLiX]

I disagree with every point you made Polix. All of those things made us stronger, and without them we would have died a year or two after VIE. We're the perfect example of how a player run game can survive. We've been running for ... 16 years? Probably closer to 20 before anyone will be able to declare us dead.

 

Except that in the first 2-3 years we did exactly opposite of all of what I listed.

 

We put together a central biller, got ourselves hosting, revived some of the dying zones, put together a central group to communicate and work together, got hosting organized for the vie zones, created a new client, etc. etc.

 

We actually did work together, and prospered. It was after such time that the competition for the huge influx of population began the driving seperation, and the developer of our client went mia. Things have been downhill ever since for the total population. Some zones have come in and thrived, but overall the population has been on a decline with some bump ups, but mostly from zones adding bots.

 

Had we continued what we started doing, actively developing the game and working together to promote and move forward, we'd be in a different boat right now. Just my honest opinion. Could I be wrong? Sure. It is an opinion. But just looking at what happened in those first 2-3yrs compared to the later (beyond the luck of ZDTV), it is almost undeniable that us working together rather than against each other pushed us further.

 

Do you think HS and HZ would be in the same place they are now if you guys didn't work together at some level?

[Cheese]

hs is a good microcosm for ss in general

it prospered when dr b actually did stuff, but now its just decaying away

 

 

also avast, theres way more to this game than just dsb

 

also dr b/polix, that may be the current state and events prior to now, but what can be done to change things?

[Avast]

Yeah but some of what i said applies to subspace as a whole. Like Analogy of a homeless person, and dreaming bigger etc. If you just do things to accomodate small populations, then you will always accomodate smaller and smaller populations until you have zero population. You have to aim big, and do things to attract many people at once. As well trying to bring players to a bad zone, as opposed to fixing a zone to get players. DSB is a classic example of what not to do to keep subspace alive. I also pointed out lack of dev in zones which kill zones, and staff who are just statues and do nothing and don't even care. Instead they get rid of people who care, and keep themselves in power so they can shit on the community and the zone. Get rid of these people please. A zone needs staff like tm master, who login everynight, plays the game, and devs, and codes for it or actively gets people to participate. As well a good zone will dev every small thing, they will even care about 1 tile, and improve it. If you are not always improving something, even something small that takes 1 minute and hardly matters, then you missed the point of not being half assed. Small things add up. If DSB actually got off their ass and fixed the around 50 small things that take 10 minutes each to fix. they would have a half decent zone by now. Obviously they are lazy and think those small things wouldn't amount to anything if combined. EVERYTHING MATTERS in zone development.

 

DSB is a good example, and a perspective i can talk from. Most of the other zones haven't sunk to it's level, yet.

 

We setup a system that allowed abuse, discrimination, and no accountability. At all levels this ran rampid. A centralized biller not allowing anyone on, an elitist council "overseeing" everything, and zone owners freely able to cheat and abuse in their own zones at free will.

This is all i really think is true in what polix said. Everything else i don't agree with.

 

I also agree with polix when he says zones should dev together more? If that's what you are saying. If all zones shared the same dev team, each zone would do better. DSB would contribute nothing of course. But at least the zone would stop failing.

[Dr Brain]

We're paying for those choices now, Polix. That centralized biller and replacement client is what's killing the game. If the biller had been less centralized, then things would be very different today. One of the stated goals of the SSCouncil was to prevent similar zones, removing all competition. Want to know why there were only a handful of zones to make it to SSC after about 2000? Look no further than the billing access rules. Same goes for the client (though I understand the legal motivation behind why things are the way they are), if it weren't so centralized things would be much better.

 

Do you think HS and HZ would be in the same place they are now if you guys didn't work together at some level?

 

Uh, work together = share hosting? I think if there were a decently designed biller (rather than the lets-pretend-there-are-no-bugs-and-hope-no-one-exploits-it insanity we've got) then HS would have had a lot more hosting options. While SSCE has worked out extremely well, it was a lack of any other option that forced us there.

 

Cheese: what can we do now? There's only ever been one solution in my mind: attract more developers/zone owners. Unfortunately, a game with no client development isn't likely to appeal to the budding game developer. Without a replacement client (with new features that can create new gameplay), the game will die. Probably a lot sooner than your prediction.

[Avast]

We're paying for those choices now, Polix. That centralized biller and replacement client is what's killing the game. If the biller had been less centralized, then things would be very different today. One of the stated goals of the SSCouncil was to prevent similar zones, removing all competition. Want to know why there were only a handful of zones to make it to SSC after about 2000? Look no further than the billing access rules. Same goes for the client (though I understand the legal motivation behind why things are the way they are), if it weren't so centralized things would be much better.

 

Cheese: what can we do now? There's only ever been one solution in my mind: attract more developers/zone owners. Unfortunately, a game with no client development isn't likely to appeal to the budding game developer. Without a replacement client (with new features that can create new gameplay), the game will die. Probably a lot sooner than your prediction.

 

This is true on a zone aspect. Of course, but assume everyone could have hosted their zone without the restriction of billing access rules, and one biller. Would more zones and freedom for the community in that regard, necessarily mean more players? Maybe everyone would get to do what they want, and competition would increase, perhaps more developers would exist, but they would be focused on their own interests. So not much of a change in that regard. You can't really predict that the population would get bigger because of this. It can't be disproven either though.

 

As for your solution I agree, more Development, a new client, and more zone owners, or at least better ones, there are so many people who really do nothing for their zones at all.. except wear the title.

 

You would need more than one person actively advertising the game and getting new players into the game as a whole, that wouldn't happen without a new client. If we stick with what we have, we are lucky to get one person to devote the amount of time needed to do that. And one isn't enough. 100 people introducing just 1 player to subspace would be enough though. Other games reward you with in game items and levels for bringing new players..

Edited November 14, 2011 by Avast

[Kilo]

It's true, HZ and HS are LIKE BROTHERS.

Because they both start with the letter H.

[kevinz000]

once i tried to make a zone,it worked great until someone said the zone was red,i couldnt seem to find the problem so i brought it down.oh and it has nothing to do with config files i completely checked them.

besides,even if it does work,no host

[Avast]

Well Richard is one person and he already has an editor with better features than DCME. Took him no more than a month most likely for that editor. Meanwhile people here coded some ancient dinosaur called DCME. And never thought to have the features that Richard has? Come on.. Anyone could have and probably did think of those things. Richard did after all. So one example is the place a tile with left click, and right click to erase. In DCME you have to actually select the eraser on right click for it to erase. But richards program does this automatically. This is what I call conveniance, and desinging something meant for heavy use by new players. If the community dies you only have yourselves to blame, for either being dinosaurs with no good ideas, or just being lazy. Perfect example is DSB. I could write essays on all their flaws, and all they need to fix, and how many times people told them to fix it. HOW many opportunities they had to fix those simple 5 minute things, and how many times their pride shit on the zone. Edited November 22, 2011 by Avast

[»Lynx]

People contribute to the game for reasons such as `I find it interesting` and `I find it fun making things`. Surprisingly however, they don't create things for the game because you're calling their hard work shit (even though DCME has been a godsend for the community - we used SSME before that...) You want DCME to be a little better? Check out the source code and change it (even though I think the functionality you're talking about is already there). Once you've done that, open the door - step outside, and get laid. DSB isn't everything, fag.

 

Back to the topic; I've been coding another game now for the past few months (in C++, using OpenGL and no game engine) and I have a pretty good foundation on that. I'll be learning how to implement networking and learning some good security practices next semester. My initial plan was to actually create Subspace (this is a University assignment) but my tutor dissuaded me as he said I wouldn't have earned enough marks for it. Anyway, now that I've got most of the game-play down, I actually believe coming up with the first step in creating the client will be easy (although Jab has done the same with his client). The current source I can't release until after December (because of plagiarism concerns) however it's heavily commented and will come with a lot of materials on how to extend the client. I'm pretty confident I can get a Subspace clone up pretty easily; but of course that's not enough.

 

I propose that if a new client is going to be made for Subspace, we need to have an open source effort (because nobody ever finishes anything around here, and we don't want another Priitk) but we need people who have the know-how who are willing to put the work in. That means somebody who has a good idea on how to handle security and networking who's willing to either code it, or write it down descriptively enough for somebody else to code (There are plenty of people who are bright enough to do this, even if their time is now limited). I intend on getting the ball rolling some time in February. Realistically, it probably won't be polished enough for a release for at least a year (assuming that real life doesn't get in the way) - which may even be too late.

 

Of course, there are other attempts out there - and it's a shame that Jab has stopped work on his client, I figured that this thread might have pushed him towards working on it more... and not forgetting Richards client (closed source in an obscure language, however), and Discretion / Subspace 2 - and Cieu is working on something with the MS games development kit (XNA or something). Not sure what's happening with any of these now, though. It shows, though, that people are willing to contribute.

 

tl;dr, I am also going to work on a client (in C++/OpenGL/OpenAL/Open Source) / my two cents.

[spidernl]

The most important part about releasing a new client is advertising it or getting it reviewed or anything like that. It's nice to move the population we have left to a new client and have new toys to play with like client-side plugins or a less limited protocol, but what we really need is new population, which will only come if we get some publicity.

[»Lynx]

Then it's a matter of finding somebody with deep pockets. =S

[spidernl]

I'm sure that if you set up a nice, fancy site with a trailer and all that good stuff for a new client, as well as give it some (settings for) shiny graphics, you can get a few reviewing sites to do a review. With some luck you'll get a couple hundred thousand VIEWS at least if multiple gaming sites do a review. There's bound to be at least a small percentage that checks the game out, and if it's actually good, a few hundred should stay.. I hope.

[Avast]

DCME is a god send, and whoever made it coded it already because they 'found it interesting' and 'fun making things' Otherwise they would not have coded it. I only say when you do something do it right, and to the full extent of what it could and should be. I point out when people are half assed. Sorry but this game needs people like me to give you a kick in your complacency.

 

As for DSB. I did help them so your point about doing things is irrelevent. I did more mapping, for DSB, and contributed more to league with my squads than most of DSB staff. All staff did was prevent things from getting done, or do everything half assed. And they spent more time policing people than developing the zone. More time in spec than playing.

 

And the whole point of being a troll god is to stay inside all day. Whatever you are a be a good one. I'll take your insult as a compliment.

Edited November 22, 2011 by Avast

[Cheese]

any way to hide avasts posts for other people besides myself?