The reason why TW died

[KrynetiX]

I remember when I was introduced to Continuum back in 2000, I played ONE TIME and thought to myself "I can't play this, it's sooo stupid... I can't control my ship and I have no idea what to do.." The only reason I ended up playing this game was boredom. One day, three months after saying "screw Continuum", I got bored. Saw Continuum icon, and pessimistically attempted to play again. I admit, I wasn't in a good mood. I was pissed off and bored and didn't like the physics of this game. But something got into me. I wanted to get better. So out of boredom I kept trying and I did start getting better. Once I got the hang of ship physics/movement I was hooked and kept getting better and better ever since.

To address your suggestions, Fork, we could definitely use graphical updates and that is in the works. Slowly but surely we're making TW more attractive, but with population dwindling I'm not sure if we will be too late.

As for donation money, we want to just spend it. Period. Most of it. (reserve a thousand or two for the servers). We want to spend it on any great idea that might being in more players. This would probably be advertising.

[bkgmjo]

I'd say the limits are by the client and no access to the actual game server mostly. If you want to spend the cash on something useful move the game to a server someone can actually work with and get a new client made. There is a time when workarounds just don't make it more attractive anymore and we passed this point when the mootland/ph experiments started. If you add new graphics, you're increasing download size and killing off some players due to a rather ancient gfx engine. If you add new bots you are causing more bugs and make the game far less intuitive and more complicated. More perma-events will rip apart the players even more and permanently changing settings will make learning the game an unnecessary hard task. Also from my point of view commercials for a game that is being messed with constantly is contra-productive as it will push away potential long-time players to get into a game consisting of instability and complaining.

Btw, maybe finding another hoster that does not reduce bandwidth for a big part of the euro players during the main population times might be beneficial as this has driven players away for about 3 years now. Would you stay as vet or newb if your ping was 320 instead of the 120 or less possible whenever the game gets crowded?

[Fork]

I'd say the limits are by the client and no access to the actual game server mostly. If you want to spend the cash on something useful move the game to a server someone can actually work with and get a new client made. There is a time when workarounds just don't make it more attractive anymore and we passed this point when the mootland/ph experiments started. If you add new graphics, you're increasing download size and killing off some players due to a rather ancient gfx engine. If you add new bots you are causing more bugs and make the game far less intuitive and more complicated. More perma-events will rip apart the players even more and permanently changing settings will make learning the game an unnecessary hard task. Also from my point of view commercials for a game that is being messed with constantly is contra-productive as it will push away potential long-time players to get into a game consisting of instability and complaining.

Btw, maybe finding another hoster that does not reduce bandwidth for a big part of the euro players during the main population times might be beneficial as this has driven players away for about 3 years now. Would you stay as vet or newb if your ping was 320 instead of the 120 or less possible whenever the game gets crowded?

Well I can understand where your coming from but if we still get up to 250 players per month currently then we have got to keep trying to get at least 20% of them to stay and not give up. Ok if very little players showed up per month, it becomes an impossible task but its not the case. Plus we only need a small amount of people to make a huge difference: 100 new players sticking to the game would ignite this game. There are still things I bet ph/mootland didn't try that we are thinking about doing like a much stronger link between pub and twd, improving the graphics of at least the rocks to make them actually look like space rocks instead of small similar sized grey balls: ?go thebelt to see these rocks and see for yourself. Though we don't have total control of the game, i still feel players will want to play this game- they just need to be patient to see how this game runs and try squad battles. Trying to win vs other squads can be very tough and u need both skill and support from your teammates.

Now you mention about the download size being to big if they added Hd graphics to pub... 2 things:
1) apparently the pub file can attached to the continuum download so soon as a new player downloads the game, they will be instantly in pub

2) 1 can be hard to do but possible... But u think about big games that takes hrs and hrs to download, would a new player wait an extra 3-5 mins before giving up? ...Well I would think yes. If the number of new players dramatically drop per month since allowing a bigger pub download, then they could work on point 1).

[bkgmjo]

Actually I wouldn't worry about the initial download but having to download every change, new arena, bot graphics change and so on can be disturbing to todays new players, especially when it takes ages due to the speed limits.

Also just see whats on the market and very successful: crappy flash games with 3 fps starships hopping around in an even more crappy design of space and you even have to pay most of the stuff with real cash. They have millions of players. The reason for this is rather simple: those games have minimal to no learning curve, are totally intuitive and fit to the short attention span trained to kids today (besides being 100% compatible with lots of OSs and devices, which becomes increasingly problematic for Continuum). As sad as this might be, today people have serious issues with putting in commands and reading instructions and currently trench wars is going in the opposite direction with all the bot commands and even throw off some old players with it. If there was full access to the server or an ASSS in the background or anything of that sort along with a new client many of those things could be eliminated and kept very easy to handle for the player. Just think about how fast and easy a counterstrike style buy menu would be compared to pming the bot.

I'm not saying what dev did is bad but mostly they do not have another chance but to use this kind of workaround for things atm. I also doubt those numbers of new players. The game detects me as newbie whenever I make a new name.

[cundor]

Guess who's back!

[Bukkake Surprise]

"the short attention span trained to kids today"

"I played ONE TIME and thought to myself "I can't play this, it's sooo stupid... I can't control my ship and I have no idea what to do..""

Hmm...

[Riverside]

As for donation money, we want to just spend it. Period. Most of it. (reserve a thousand or two for the servers). We want to spend it on any great idea that might being in more players. This would probably be advertising.

What a childish mentality. Give it away to charity, if it hasn't already gone to 24's pockets.

[LF]

Or just swallow your pride and give it back to the players since its obviously not going to get used for what it was intended, minus whatever percentage you have spent...should be easy enough to do the math...but I obviously have no clue what I am talking about since I wasn't involved in the donation program from basically its conception, and literally gave it its official wording myself or anything

FYI I did not donate my money to pay for 'servers' while the retards in charge continue to destroy the game I loved growing up

[Oranje]

Or just swallow your pride and give it back to the players since its obviously not going to get used for what it was intended, minus whatever percentage you have spent...should be easy enough to do the math...but I obviously have no clue what I am talking about since I wasn't involved in the donation program from basically its conception, and literally gave it its official wording myself or anything

FYI I did not donate my money to pay for 'servers' while the retards in charge continue to destroy the game I loved growing up

What option did you choose when donating?
You still allowed to switch some amount (in proportion to ...)?

[Oranje]

It's because of you...

Baas!

[Crescent Seal]

Development is doing a fantastic job keeping TW running and handling any/every problem that occurs, as well as developing new/fun events. If these 'idiots' were not here, TW would not be here for you to play.

[2pac]

krynetix is a nobody wasn't elected by no vet from tw, hasn't played a twd in his life how are you expecting another wannabe 00.00 aka 4o to run this shit? staff is fucking stupid!

[roxxkatt]

because usually the dumbest people think twd accounts for 100% of the zone

[2pac]

^ The reason why TW died /end thread

[Demonic]

krynetix is a nobody wasn't elected by no vet from tw, hasn't played a twd in his life how are you expecting another wannabe 00.00 aka 4o to run this shit? staff is fucking stupid!

wasn't elected by a vet? perhaps you had better define vet 2pac heh, because if your talking time played etc I guarantee your wrong. Kryn is doing fine with pub, and has been leading development for years, and probably has been involved in TW since long before you were playing this zone.