Clans...R2R....Leagues

[wazmeister]

Hi all.
My first forum post on GAME.net and its in BF section.


Lets introduce my self.. hmm I am quiet well known in CS for being the joker I occansily write for ESR and was with a sponserd ut2k3 clan for awhile.

Now I am here to see how BF communitys going

Firstly Leagues... I would of thought BW/Game would have a few up and running of these?
Perhaps a big team one like 14 man clans.. for the proper hardcore with shrapnel in your face and also a small 5 aside league... hmm a think?

Also clans.
Basicly some real lifes mates up for a laugh who well are quiet noobieed opened a clan called #BrotherPuddies on quakenet.org. IRC.
If anyone fancys joining them or actully thinks they can join up to train em and make em a buet then go ahead, pop in channel or reply here.

Now thats out the way I wanna bitch a bit

I read about Road to Rome ages ago.. rumor's first me being a prat thinking Motor Bikes are in the expansion pack... and still did.
I pre-orderd it and many friends as I gave them the.
"MOTOR BIKES! images that lads.. we can run over team mates in bikes now..."
So we all pre-orderd it, but turns out no such thing.. ah well anything like this coming in the future?
Sometimes I really feel like sniffing my own fingers (don't understand that statement? you will do after March ).

Anyway, Cyas all good luck with stuff and keep a eye out for a online series called.
"Sniff the Finger"

Cyaz!

 

[Gumbo]

Why oh Why......

 

[Scooba Da Bass]

heh, be nice Gumby

 

[cjc1665]

And here's me thinking that the BF forum was for bad spelling, infrequent posting and flaming.

How wrong can one man be in one lifetime?

But seriously though *serious face* BW, BF and a decent community? Pshaw. I've developed more sense of community by paying twelve pounds at my local brothel.

And there were more communal games.

WHERE HAVE THE MOD AND LIASON GONE.

cjc.


*Vote Scoobs*

 

[Will]

Its easier said than done, cjc. The servers need to reach a critical mass of players to be busy, and we don't have that yet.

 

[cjc1665]

Well, if the Game reward cards are anything to go buy, the servers won't reach critical mass.

The number of times I've stood behind people in Game / EB who refused to take reward cards even though it would work out cheaper for them (buying a console and the like) I seriously doubt major numbers will be swayed by the whole Game.net thing.

Just my opinion. Game.net / BW is doing fuck all for BF at the minute, quite frankly. Where have the 'mega games' gone? Up the pipe with Dav. Who *is* the BF liason? Make yourself known. Why am I paying money to tell people this when no-one who has the power to change things really listens?

Rar.

 

[Senses]

Well I for one would like to see our mods changed. I think I can hazard a guess that alot of subscribers in this community feel the same.

 

[cjc1665]

As the chap in charge of the op flash forum on BW, Will, what are your honest thoughts about this?

No leariness intended in the question, just a vested interest, and a hope that someone will sit up and pay attention.

I understand (or assume) that being a mod / liason isn't a paying job, and therefore might not be incredibly important when people have other things on. However, letting a community run on the assumption that it's self-sufficient, particularly in the realms of non-persistent games, is a severe lack of commitment. Persistent worlds allow players to come and go as they please, and build up a relationship with the other people in their realm / shard / server. Non-persistent worlds don't have that luxury.

If you don't have that commitment, then surely you shouldn't be in charge of holding a community together?

I'd just like to point out that I'm not having a go at anyone. I'm just saying that if you're put in charge of something, then have a good go at it, and if you're not up to it let someone else take over - from when I dip into the Op Flash forums, Will certainly seems to be making the best of the limited resources he has.

That is all.

 

[wazmeister]

Cool

I been reading all your post's and its incredible stuff, your thoughts and opinions are cool to read.

In my opinion I think BW/GAME could do million things to get more subscribers... yet they do not do much about it as if they don't care.


Just hope things brighten up for them.


Great stuff

Cyaz

 

[man like tong]

As an employee of Game. I can tell you reward cards are nothing to do with the problem of empty servers, we're kind of performanced based on how many reward cards we sell so you'll find we sell loads to people that don't even want them, maybe the people cjc saw refusing didn't like the strange lad looking over their shoulder breathing heavily .
Back to my point, If it wasn't for the fact I'm from the Barrysworld old school I wouldn't even know what barrysworld was. Game hasn't told me to mention it at all. Every time I sell a copy of BF I mention about barrysworld and the community but everyone I've spoken too usually get turned off by the price tbh.

The problem comes stright down to why pay for a service you get free? I pay because I played on bw for about 5 years, 6 quid is more than fine for 5 years of free access and some damn funny games of action quake and the ftp access is great, I've used it hundreds of times. On the other hand I've played on the BF servers about 3 times in all, due to a sheer lack of players, They're no faster than other servers and apart from teh people I can see no other reason people would choose to play on a bw server over say the jolt servers or even the offical EAUK servers...

As far as making the most of the resources we have I can see where people are coming from...I fully agree with everything the foo's at [G] say......except that thing about sheep and needle nose pliers...thats just wrong

 

[Gumbo]

I'll add my voice to the calls for a new liasion, and nominate Scooba Da Bass here.

You don't even have to fire the other ones, Davross at least made a good effort before he got involved in this other game, though I don't remember ever seeing the other fella. Let's just have another one apointed who at least plays the game.

The fact that when anyone plays on the BF1942 servers, almost without fail Scoob is among them, and after experiencing his organisational, and motivational skills over the last few months, he would seem a logical choice.

Sorry Waz if i didn't give your initial post the time and respect it deserved. It's just we've seen so many 'wtf are BarrysWorld doing?' posts over the last few months you get a bit jaded after a while.

We are currently playing in a very active league on clanbase, and after waiting to see what BW/Game.net could offer in the way of servers, to no avail, we are purchasing a server from one of the other myriad companies that do seem able to. (cue automated 'doesn't fit into our system' response).

You know, this is the first time I've posted negatively about this whole p2p deal, I fully understand the reasons for it, I'm just getting bored of the waiting for these new players to come, and I'm beginning to wonder what's going to happen when the renewal for those of us who subscribed straight away comes around.

 

[Embattle]

A lot of the time it is an automatic response when asked if you would like a card, people get offered so many nowadays it seems that the brain has sorted of counter acted this by just refusing to accept them no matter what they offer. It is sort of like how many peoples brains filter out Banner advertisements without actually realising it, esp ones which always seem to be located at the top of many webpages.

Free servers will always exist in some form, that's why BW/GAME have to offer extra benefits such as fast updates, downloads, etc and part of that has to be customer service, people need to feel their requests will be listened too and hopefully fulfilled in some way.

Sadly it still seems that BW/GAME are still sorting out the infrastructure of the full subscriber service, one which many feel is most probably taking a little too long.

 

[Will]

I think, that if EA hadn't put up its own severs, then the Barrysworld servers would be full. Newer games require better spec servers, but more importantly, require a lot of bandwidth. Gone are the days when you could set up a server on your company pipe, so there are far fewer servers than for the Halflife mods.

What the hell am I getting at? People will take things for free over things they have to pay for, unless the paid service offers significantly better value. But the EA servers ping fairly well, and have a steady supply of people. The people that played during the demo days at BW will remember how good that was, and we all bitch about the lame TKing on the EA servers. But the EA servers aren't bad enough to get people looking elsewhere. And there aren't enough of us in the know to keep the servers ticking over enough for a casual game.

The return of the megagame or [G] vs. the world would see some us getting some use out of the servers, which would be good. An active liaison would be a good place to start that. When player numbers are this low, its hard for casual games to just start up.

The thoughts are flowing tonight...maybe there are more subs than we think, but they don't use the forums, or IRC, and so all they see are empty servers. I remember during the GvsROTW games, a lot of people showed up who didn't know what was going on, they are the people we need to get in contact with. I wonder if a monthly events email might be a good place to start, or weekly. I wouldn't object to one piece of email a week telling me what was going on.

Do continue to discuss, I'll check in tomorrow morning.

 

[Embattle]

I don't think it would of helped much if the EA servers weren't put up because BW isn't currently pushing hard enough and servers still exist elsewhere.

EA servers always have a good number of players but at the same time the twit count is higher and at weekends the servers seem to be overloaded and can chung a little bit too much.

 

[cjc1665]

Originally posted by man like tong
maybe the people cjc saw refusing didn't like the strange lad looking over their shoulder breathing heavily .

Give me the points, give me the points!

No, really.

 

[wazmeister]

hmmmm

True about EA having own servers.

Also I being a very old skool BW player, I paid for subscription for any other old skool Bw player reasons so I wont go into that.

Whats quizzing is getting all them Thousands and thousands of old skool BW players to subscribe..

To be honest its feels quiet a disgrace to call my self a "gamer" if...

Gamers used BW when it was free at one time.. totally loved it and wouldent have a bad word about it. I remeber when CS servers was so packed your be waiting ages to get in anyone, I remeber everyone knowing everyone in a clitch community.

As soon as BW got in a glitch and ask for a small fee.. sorry thats an understatement.

A crumb of a paper round weeks wage then every gamer turned their back and said "fuck paying that when its free".

I surppose they was all spoilt far too long and still are, I would of thought every BW player woulda subscribed but from looking at the way things are they diden't which is quiet a disgrace.

Thats my opinion anyway.....
Just a stun how many geeks out there can't afford just 12 pounds is a joke.

Perhaps a few combos and offical leagues like BY have now and then may boost subscriptions.
To subscribers only have prizes in leagues and perhaps get other companies involved like BY do.
I.E their PCGAMER UT2k3 league etc.....

"Everyones a Winner with Game!"

lol well the losers get t-shirt and semi losers get a t-shirt and mug, the top get a game or graphics card
LOL


Correct me if I am wrong but did the BW CS league go Pay to play? I think it did.. as the clan I know all paid for subscription because of it.. Now that was the best move so far, I bet alot more people paid then.

Perhaps get a few more easing on to that way.
Anyway... this discussion could go on for ever and I bet its been brough up before, it only started with me posting a message for my mate


Nighty Night.

Waz (Thats pronounced WAS.. like was was here....)

 

[wazmeister]

Yes....

Another thought is Humans are like sheep in some cases.

Do something and the rest will follow...

I start using the CS servers and I bet a few pop in.. thena few.. and if we can get that Few of subcribers to start playing regurlary i bet people start signing up.

Also a weekly e-mail news letter for competions or speical nights would be cool... not selling games
Well not at this point hehehe

EDIT:

Also I was thinking, get involved in lan events like i15.... hmm i just had a bright idea for the t-shirt I was going to give away at i15...

on front: 100% Pure Geek
back: I play on BarrysWorld

lol
mines
front: 100% Pure geek
back: If sex counts as cyber then I aint a virgin

 

[cjc1665]

Waz,

Sorry to hijack your post, but it hit a sore point.


cjc.

 

[bigfoot]

Until there is support for the game on our server system there isn't a great deal we can do, for example we can't run leagues as they would have to be Subs Only but there would be no way of making sure servers were actually there to run them on. General get togethers would be a start and if you people, the paying subscribers, feel the liaisons are not doing their job of organising the community that could be there then let us know and if there are suitable people there to take over we will replace them, Liaisons can be a bit hit and miss as it is to some extent a thankless task and it requires a lot of time to make it work, Will is by far one of the better ones but we don't have access to the CloneAid technology yet. Bookables would be a start and I know they have been promised for a while but GAME have other priorities and there is only 1 person working for BW / GAME who can code this kind of thing and as he does shop work too (by that i mean work relating to the shops, not actually working in the shop) that is deemed as a priority for his time because that side of the business does bring in a hell of a lot more money than BW / GAME.net.

That said he has been testing things and has his own dev box set up now (from what I can tell, I'm not a server admin myself remember) so I'm hopeful that bookables will come at some point. BW fits into the GAME.net product but it is an overall product and therefore the people telling the server admins what to do have to balance out things like specific game support with the bigger picture, Tribes 1 for example was a bit of a disaster but obviously the people managing the server admins thought they had better things to spend their time on than supporting a game which had limited appeal.

With regards to leagues themselves I mentioned that they would have to be Subs Only and we have only just started this week our first Subs Only competition, the BWCSL. This league had a decent history behind it and a sizeable amount of interest and whilst it hasn't been a roaring success in its first week we will learn from this and correct any mistakes made for the next competition we run. Even a project such as the BWCSL, a pay to enter league bringing in new subscribers, hasn't been given that high a priority when it comes to certain things, it took over 2 months for the HLTV's to get sorted and this was only in place for sure on the day of the league starting. I'm as disappointed at this as anyone, but I'm also the pleb of BW so I have little influence over what anyone else does in this company.

As for pushing the BW service in game stores, it is like the Ted-blurb says, people recognise the GAME brand not BW, so until the Game.net product is in place fully (and it isn't yet) there is little point pushing a different brand in the stores, this is why for example the company that started out as EB UK is now called GAME when they did run the stores (EB UK & GAME) side by side for a few years, the GAME brand was felt to be the best one to move forward with and that is what they are doing.

Anyhow I went on a bit there, if you do have workable suggestions for what we can do then by all means suggest them here, if anyone feels they can do a better job of organising the community then get in touch and we can talk about it.

 

[Will]

I don't know whether to feel complimented that I'm considered one of the better liaisons, or scared that GAME are considering cloning me.

In all honesty, Operation Flashpoint is a very different game, and is much more suited to the current situation on the servers that any of the other available games. People can't just drop in and out of games, and so a busy server is less important than it is meeting up on IRC and getting three or four people to join the server at once.

I really think a weekly or monthly events email would be an excellent idea, though you'd have to be careful it wasn't weighted towards selling products. You don't want it deleted as spam. I've always been against mailing lists that are automatically opt-in with an opt-out option, but I know if something like that turned up in my inbox, I'd be happy. Unlike the Jolt "Pay for our league" spam I occasionally get, with no unsubscribe option.

 

[throdgrain]

It strikes me that making the effort is one of the ways to sort these problems, plus of course the numbers of people.
In Counter-Strike we have a separate irc channel just for the raising of players for the servers, but in all honesty it just seems to be just another place for people to idle. The thing that fills the counter-strike servers imo is people like me and me mates going on the servers, and using them. If there are three or four of us on BW 1 it seems to fill up in no time. Almost like theres people out there just waiting, but are too scared to be the first at the party Right, thats my BW (newly-appointed) CS admin bit done.
Im also the Day Of Defeat Liason for BW, and no matter what I do, I cant get people on the servers. Ive even been on certain other servers pimping ours, but to no avail. I just do not know what to do, I put it down to simply a lack of players to go around atm.
However this is not the case for Counter-Strike, niether is it for BF.If 4 or 5 people went regularly onto the BW servers, I would hope they would fill up quite quickly ??

 

[throdgrain]

Actually sod it, I have no CS practices or matches on tonight (for a change!), anyone fancy a game on BW3 ?

 

[cjc1665]

3 or 4 people playing BF's not much good - you really need bigger numbers, which is why we need the organised matches.

 

[throdgrain]

Yeah I know, but 3 or 4 fast becomes 5 or 6, whcih fast becomes blah blah
Tonight BW3 ??

 

[cjc1665]

I'll be there if it's after 7.

 

[Gumbo]

unfortunatly, they've recently become a maximum of 8, and 4v4 BF1942 is not really what the game is about. Especially if the map is stuck on El Alemein.

But I'll try and come along tonight and see.

 

[Embattle]

Originally posted by Gumbo
unfortunatly, they've recently become a maximum of 8, and 4v4 BF1942 is not really what the game is about. Especially if the map is stuck on El Alemein.

Which always seems to happen

 

[cjc1665]

STF-uk.net, and EAUK I think, have different themes on their servers. While this could split out the community even more (!), there's some maps that could probably be dropped until the group grows in size.

I wonder if they'll introduce a map voting system in the next patch ....

cjc.

 

[Scooba Da Bass]

Map voting already exists, however it's pretty complicated and I don't think that BW have it turned on

 

[Athan]

Low players, big map -> cycle it

If there's 8 players on El Alamein then talk to each other and let one side just take all the points and cycle the map through quickly...

-Ath