People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

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TankBeef
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People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

Post by TankBeef »

I don't know about you, and I also don't know if I am allowed to mention server names, but I have been playing online almost every night, and I can always find someone to play with. And I know they are real players, I have learned to detect the fake ones pretty well. :lol2: Sure, the game is not as popular as when it launched 20+ years ago, and you will find the same people most of the time, but yes, you can have your online fun. So why do people say the online is dead? Don't expect Fortnite volume, but if you want to play online, you sure can. Or not? :?
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Re: People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

Post by Pikko »

I mostly play LMS, and its not that many servers or players left here. Im in Europe, so maybe theres more on the other side of the ocean ? :)
- Building Maps instead.. :D
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TankBeef
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Re: People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

Post by TankBeef »

Pikko wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 5:54 pm I mostly play LMS, and its not that may servers or players left here. Im in Europe, so maybe theres more on the other side of the ocean ? :)
- Building Maps instead.. :D
Well, I agree LMS and Domination are not very popular modes, unfortunately. I don't know much about discord, but I have heard you can arrange very specific game modes that way.
I can tell you this, in Europe you can try the Gibblets servers (also Psycho Servers, also no0ne's maps, also who knows what else... :lol2: ), good experience. I also started playing on the ComboGib Grapple London server, liking it so far. These servers mentioned use Zeroping or Newnet, some people don't like it, but I guess it depends on the server, some have better performance than others. They work for me, at least. :tu:
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Re: People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

Post by Buggie »

Depends from Gametype and mutators. Some things popular some not. So if player want exact this combination for gametype + mutators it can be "dead".
In general - all enough online.
For example on Barbie server mostly 24/7 someone play. And sometimes server even feel overcrowded.
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Re: People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

Post by Feralidragon »

Well, I also see a fair number of servers, with real players, but not even I hold on to that and I don't consider that a stable player base to play with, and the number of players is getting smaller, not bigger.

The most popular gametypes are stuff like Siege, IG, pretty much anything to do with either CTF or DM.
MH is still fairly popular, but not as popular as those, and it splits mostly between NW3 and non-NW3 servers (there was a DM server before with NW3, for example, which was fairly popular maybe 2 years ago, but it disappeared).

Having that said, if the game was ever released by Epic for free (not only UT99, but maybe all of them), I would wager that we would see a lot of incoming players.
First a brief record-setting peak in years, to a quick decline, but stabilizing at a number of players (and potential mappers/modders) far higher than now.

Also consider that UT99 is now an "old people" game, as in most of us are probably already 30 years old or older, there isn't exactly much young blood around playing this game as far as I know, and all young people are getting into more modern games (like the infamous Fortnite, for example), meaning that the game will likely definitely die when we all leave it for good at some point.

Having that said, I always wanted to personally do a few things to improve the game experience and attract people to it, be it new players, or returning players.

One of them was already pretty much done by Shrimp, with the UnrealArchive, which was built almost exactly how I imagined that type of repository to look like, with all the automation, metadata, multiple mirrors, great presentation, dependencies lists, search mechanism, color schemes, and so on and so forth.

The others I had the intention to do were stuff like an universal manager to deal with everything about the game (manage mods, maps, game patches, easily, no more umods or knowing where to copy stuff, or what to delete to uninstall), in-game news and events about the community and the game overall, editor plugins to search, share and download resources with the rest of the community, as well add more useful tools, save and retrieve common configuration profiles, maybe even an automated (small) pool of servers people could matchmake in and play with whichever mod configuration they wanted (maybe to the point to click in a "quick play" in UT and just enter a server), etc, etc (you can imagine).

And in a way I haven't exactly completely give up on that front, it keeps popping up in my mind, and I have been developing something that would help me get there for the past few years (as well be useful in RL, which it has been, greatly so already), but I am still very far away to be able to actually do something about it, be it in terms of resources, time or even motivation at times, because I also see things in the community that leads me to think "why bother", which is something I believe constantly crosses everyone's mind, but immediately after you just run the game, play it, and you do then remember why. :mrgreen:
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Re: People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

Post by MEAT »

TankBeef wrote: Tue Sep 14, 2021 5:28 pm I don't know about you, and I also don't know if I am allowed to mention server names, but I have been playing online almost every night, and I can always find someone to play with. And I know they are real players, I have learned to detect the fake ones pretty well. :lol2: Sure, the game is not as popular as when it launched 20+ years ago, and you will find the same people most of the time, but yes, you can have your online fun. So why do people say the online is dead? Don't expect Fortnite volume, but if you want to play online, you sure can. Or not? :?
Well, I was around 20+ years ago (still here) when the popular servers were "standing room only". Meaning that you had to wait around until someone left a game before you could enter.
That is, if the admin setup number of Players to Bots to Map size ratios...long story/irrelevant.
Anyway:
Plus, with UT being the new hip game we had more players back then but the downfall was we also had less servers to play...so of course the popular and not so popular servers were always busy.
Fast forward 20 years...we're now on the downside of the bell curve...meaning, we have way more servers than actual players now.
So yes, a lot of servers are empty (no players)...and some have the occasional "lifer" that still plays when they can.
These are the people you ran/run into now.
For example:
My server is roughly 16 years old now. Back in the day I had 50+ regulars on a daily basis. Depending on the map I had 6 to 10 players playing constantly.
But now (because of 100 different reasons and totally a different topic) I'm lucky I have 5 regulars still playing and most I would say are "lifers".
So in my opinion UT isn't necessarily dead...but maybe just on life support... :noidea
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TankBeef
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Re: People say "servers are empty", "there are no players", but...

Post by TankBeef »

You know the interesting part? I live in the caribbean, meaning...back when the game came out, when it was the "new hip game", like you said, I had dial up internet, you remember how awful that was, plus being far from the servers, the connection was really bad, the ping was unplayable all the time. :? I wanted to play online often, but the conditions made it practically impossible. Now that in recent years the internet is much better, faster and efficient, it is when the game is not the "hip thing" anymore, we have less players, and yes, it is hard to keep up with pros that could play online from the beginning until today, it is a struggle, but I am happy to at least have this experience recently that I was unable to properly have before. This is why I am just happy to be able to play online, and I will take what is available while it lasts, as much as I can. More than winning, I care more about the journey, about those things I missed back then, so far I am enjoying it, and to me that is all that matters. 8)
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