05-02-2013, 11:41 PM
Quote:We need an Alpha again.Shazam!
--hallu
Just some of my humble input (if I can remember anything)...
In the days that alpha served it's original purpose, there were 300 people and 4 pub arenas. The original, original alpha had no real sysop or staff. There was one admin who was responsible for (on a business professional-ish level) a number of the SVS zones, including chaos and others. We asked for 3 of us to be granted sysop access in alpha, and that sysop was glad to hand it to us and he took more and more of a backseat role in all the zones overall. Eventually all the server and ownership issues and crap all happened and we found ourselves with no formal ties to anyone or any other zone, aside from the friends and acquaintances along the way. We mostly followed chaos and was hosted wherever they were, as well as DZ and some others others... this is how the community was originally partitioned. Later on, TW was started and hogged all the players and newbs because the action level was higher and the gameplay was stupidly easy and straightforward... the learning curve consisted of how long it took for you to memorize the map. Point being, the SS community has always been a rag-tag group of hosts and admins and websites, AND their vets. That's really the only reason the game is around now.
So, onto a new alpha... it needs to be about the players, not the gameplay or learning curve. The reason that players stick with the game is due to their overall experience, and different people want different things, but what ALL players want chat. Chit-chat. Why have so many people stayed around in spec? Why did the players with 8000ms pings from australia stick around? One thing that alpha had, was that there was always a player or 10 willing to shout out help to people and be 100% newb friendly, like a welcoming squad.
We had talked in the past about using bots to create training scenarios, and advancing through a training course, as a subarena function. This game's simplicity and capability is just nuts, and that's what a lot of others got hooked on. A lot of people want to contribute content and man hours to help a cause. People wanted to learn and share back then, and they want it now, too.
Vets or no vets, that never mattered as a newb. It just gave you goals over a longer period of time, a list of players to beat up and dominate.