WHERE ARE ALL THE PLAYERS?!

[hunterX]

Got some cool mods here but there's nobody on! We gotta convince those normies over at RenCorner and MPF to try out these mods. I guess a lot of them don't have the W3DHub launcher and are still using Renlist or something?

[Teddy]

I've been thinking the same thing for a while now. Despite being pretty new (BFD) and newly revamped (TSR), the servers for these games are almost always empty. You're lucky to get a game even on weekends. If I'm not mistaken, in the past servers for new releases tended to be fairly full day after day for months maybe even a year, but just a few weeks after BFD and TSR 2.0 were released, they are ghost towns.

[WNxHeadShot]

It's because the Renegade community will always only play Vanilla. The others have a very small playerbase that join during events and game nights with the exception being IA but that one is also getting smaller and smaller due to some things.

The game used to constantly have 30-40 players for hours and hours every day.

Edited October 30, 2023 by WNxHeadShot

[hunterX]

It's gotta be the launcher, I bet you a lot of those guys don't use W3DHub.

[WNxHeadShot]

It's not the launcher. A lot of people use it just to play vanilla or clanwars because it's nicer and more convenient.

[miblet]

The game is complex for a vanilla player, there are some mechanics like the weak spots on tanks, uncrushable units and a sandbox more massive than the 5-6 tanks in vanilla, needless to say, there were regular Interim Apex players but to reasons like the game balacing or "bad" decisions from the developers they just stopped playing and came back to the vanilla servers.

Sometimes in Interim Apex there are 20-30 players and when game nights events the player count rise to 40 and even more, but IA is the most played of the mods and with a stable playerbase 

[Einstein]

The community around these games (both here and in previous places leading up to the formation of W3D-Hub) has been on a gradual decline since roughly 2009-2011 (kinda difficult to say) with surges of major activity mixed in. The W3D engine is over 20 years old now, and despite our best efforts to modernize it and even after making some gigantic strides of progress, to some people "old" just kills any interest, regardless of how far it has come. "Normal" gamers are always chasing the latest and greatest new thing. The rest of us hang out at W3D-Hub and MPF, etc.

[wolf]

There's simply a lack of creative talent and not a whole lot of new content being created. Most people have moved on 

[Teddy]

On 11/8/2023 at 10:10 PM, Einstein said:

The community around these games (both here and in previous places leading up to the formation of W3D-Hub) has been on a gradual decline since roughly 2009-2011 (kinda difficult to say) with surges of major activity mixed in. The W3D engine is over 20 years old now, and despite our best efforts to modernize it and even after making some gigantic strides of progress, to some people "old" just kills any interest, regardless of how far it has come. "Normal" gamers are always chasing the latest and greatest new thing. The rest of us hang out at W3D-Hub and MPF, etc.

Well I guess what I've noticed is that even the core community, folks that have been playing these games for a very long time, many of them devs and moderators, rarely make an appearance these days. So it doesn't seem to be confined only to those "normal" players who are only interested in what's new. The disinterest, IA notwithstanding, seems to be with players across the board. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If anything, I'd expect player counts to be higher around now since there is a relatively new mod out there(BFD), and a newly overhauled one(TSR).

[Einstein]

5 hours ago, Teddy said:

Well I guess what I've noticed is that even the core community, folks that have been playing these games for a very long time, many of them devs and moderators, rarely make an appearance these days. So it doesn't seem to be confined only to those "normal" players who are only interested in what's new. The disinterest, IA notwithstanding, seems to be with players across the board. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If anything, I'd expect player counts to be higher around now since there is a relatively new mod out there(BFD), and a newly overhauled one(TSR).

You are not entirely wrong there either. Unfortunately many of us now have families of our own these days, and the responsibilities that come along with that. Some of us have burned out a bit and kinda float along. Others are discouraged at the low numbers, as you are. And others are still working on new content, although at a slower pace and at a lower volume than at times in the past.

@ wolf is partially correct - Many have moved on. But we still have plenty of talent here. The problem is simply that most of us grew up, and this has always been a labor-of-love hobby project; Most of us can't spend all day here like we did 10-20 years ago.

That said, there are a lot of things happening behind the scenes still. PR has never been our strong suit unfortunately, so we do miss a lot of "news" opportunities I will admit. Some things can't be talked about, but I can tell you this: I get commit notifications for the projects and there are a dozen a day sometimes, and even more I've noticed lately. The internal communication channels are always buzzing as well, to the point that I simply can't keep up with it all. We are still alive, I promise

EDIT: Also, there have been two scheduled AR tests in the past 5 days