Against Gathers?

[jerich]

I am totally against gathers. It is not BE killing the game. It's these stupid gathers that ruined the public and competitive community at the same time. Gathers are truly the downfall of soldat as much as all these people keep on praising it.

I agree with you, actually. I never liked gathers much because they were somewhat of a middle ground between strict, competitive play and fun, public play. The combination just didn't work for me. It was too serious to be fun, and it was elitist enough to drag players away from public servers, which was where I lurked most of the time.

What is a gather?
It is exactly what it is called. It is a gathering of random people via IRC to play an organized match of whatever gamemode, typically the popular 3v3 CTF.

Funny, gathers are the only reason I still play Soldat. You don't have to be in a clan and find a cw to play a match that's more interesting than your average pub.

Gathers are the reason many people still play soldat. And by many people, I mean basically our whole dying community since mostly everyone plays CTF. But that's because gathers became the norm. The balance of soldat in a competitive and leisure standpoint was completely ruined when gathers were introduced.

Why do most of the community play gathers now? Well, since it is advertised in every soldat site, many people came to become part of it. Now, what happens to the foundation of the game, the public? Well, less people play it because now they play gathers. In turn, it becomes less servers. Now, the less populated servers are not attractive to new coming players that see few people in a server. Remember, first impression is important. There used to be many servers I went to and played with all the competitive players. Now there are barely any servers to play in, my spot I usually join is a EU server when I'm NA which does not make sense.

All the competitive players now play in these gathers which teams are dictated by an automated bot picking in random telling you what what map to play with all these rules. Honestly, you can do that the old school way with mixed scrims. What is the difference between a mixed scrim and a gather? Mixed scrims are not just random people, it's people you like to play with and there's no time limit and bot telling you what map you have to play. The people decide the rules and it had the same concept as the gather but it is more lenient. There is no need for IRC or registering. Remember, this is a very simple game that people download because it's a small file/free. No one really wants to download extra things just to play. F that, find people on other public servers.

Competitive soldat used to be playing with a group of friends or people with a niche in soldat, a clan per say. It was fun playing that clan war just because it was hard to set up matches back then. When gathers came around, clans were not exactly needed anymore. People came just play at their own time. Sounds good? In a way, but the whole point of a being in a clan becomes almost pointless except for league play.

Finally, gathers are overkilling the game. You see many leagues being run at the same time with a ridiculous amount of games played per day. Then you see people playing 3+ gathers per day. Um, gathers take at least 40 minutes and playing that many games is more than enough. Top it off with your league matches and you just have seen a guy who dedicated at least 4 hours of soldat in one day. In the big scale, gathers may seem beneficial and a good idea. But to me at least, it is the tumor of soldat that will inevitably kill it.

Sure Waco, gathers may be the reason you're still playing soldat, but that doesn't change the fact the number of people playing this game is going downhill. And I couldn't blame them for leaving.
I know that you, or xurich, or whoever will never agree with me, but this is how I felt the last 2 years of soldat.

[Veritas]

I'll keep it short and sweet since this is basically opinion v opinion:
a) Correlation does not equal causation
2) I'd personally say the decrease in activity is due to the large amount of time between updates as of late, as well as the lack of bug fixes (seriously, 614 days to push out the fixed version of Nuubia?)
Poop post ahoy:

[-Major-]

clans are good to play cws... the level of gathers are rather low compared to clan wars.

even tho gathers aren't very fair (because the admin can do whatever he want), it still does do a lot of good things to soldat, I would rather blame all sub game modes as the cancer of soldat.

[TheV]

playing gathers and playing pubs, i have found that skill level is the same and people who say AMAGAD NO WAI GATHERS IS WAY BETTERZ CUZ THERE IS NO NUBZZZ... This simply isn't true, any noob capable of getting irc, can in fact join a gather.

Pubs are fun and exactly what this game is about, simple fast paced gameplay, where the gameplay speaks for itself and the graphics don't matter.

Sub game modes have not only kept me playing soldat, but are usually interesting and creative. Hide and Seek for example IS AMAZINGLY fun.

But... the only thing that I see that is deteriorating the game, would be the fact that the game has simply gotten boring, along with every other game out there. Thats why you don't see anyone still playing Gran Turismo, the original of course. Games get old, and with age comes boredom. You don't see anyone out there still playing a ps1 because there are people are capable of purchasing a ps2 if not a ps3. Soldat hasn't gained anything other than weapon mods and slight bug fixes, the game hasn't gotten that special something to keep players playing, updates have been lacking and no gameplay elements have changed or been added to bring that creative simple spark back to the game. The reason I still play is hide and seek alone, I rarely play anything else, and If I do its going to be in a Climb server, or a M79 boost server. The game needs MM back, and not an Enesce substitute. The game needs to have priority, but without funds, this won't happen.

Basically the game needs to be accessible for people to play with it, and those people could get with the programmers, Enesce, and help him instead of him heading the project by himself.

IMO it needs to go opensource. or atleast semi open source.

[SDFilm]

I don't think it's killing the community, but I still don't like the feel of them.

[Madow]

on the other hand there arent any 3on3 public servers arround there.. so if I want to warmup i prefer gathers cause they re 3v3 like CWs

This. Although, I agree with you, jerich. If more players spent more time playing clan wars then gathers, then that's good for the game competitively. But for the players that only play Soldat for gathers, they're pretty much pub players (usually skilled) looking for games with a cw structure.

..btw a gathere doesnt take at least 40 mins Oo

Depends really. If a tie breaker needs to played then 40 minutes is easily reachable.

[n00bface]

You know what is killing the game?  All of these stupid mods.  Last time I looked for a public server to play on, I couldn't find ANY vanilla game of Soldat.  Just a crapton of stupid half-assed scripted modes.

[CheeSeMan.]

I have had the most LOLZ ever on gathers, blablabla rules you can play how you want on them its just a form of public where people dont randomly leave/join the game. I'm against mixes as you ruin the cw for the opposing clan, people don't always know each other in mixes and quite often rage quit after seeing their team mates arn't any good.

[Leo]

Ban stupid bot.

[Nixer]

More like gathers are keeping Soldat alive.
I like them more because they're organized and actually, more challenging and fun.

[Snow]

I never play gathers. I don't want to or think I should. Plus, I like playing on servers where up to 16 players can connect and then it's fun. Most gathers I see have no more than 3 vs. 3... not enough for me.

I just like to fire up Soldat and get right into the action ASAP. Out of all the things I love about Soldat, that is one of the game's biggest attractions... I can be online and playing on a server in less than 30 seconds. Most games I play or have played lately don't have all the abilities and simplicity that Soldat offers. Take the Halo series for example. Halo 1 isn't online except for Halo PC.. decent but suffers lag problems. Can't play Halo 2 on PC and they took the xbox version offline. Halo 3 is fun IF you happen to be on a good map playing a favorable gametype - such as CTF or Team Slayer/Deathmatch. The downside of Halo 3 is, despite being a fun game.. the only way to play online is through matchmaking. Matchmaking!? What the fuck is that? It's a system designed to match players of similar skill AND to ensure that the player does NOT get to choose what gametype the want to play or what map to play on. It also ensures that the player waits for a period of time between matches that is longer than playtime during a match itself. This way the player is lucky to play 4 or 5 matches per hour, where as if Halo had the traditional client/server and browser system, players could play continously. Bungie dosn't want that, they want their players to wait in frustration and feel VERY lucky if they manage to play ONE team slayer match within 3 hours. The majority of Halo fans everywhere continue to bow down and kiss Bungie's ass. How very sad.

So yeah, in Soldat, I can play any gamemode I want and be on any server.

Soldat will never die, but I am surprised that most pubs are empty these days. Despite the new stupid poly types and more mucking around with weapon balance, the game is still currently fun.

You guys also have to understand that Soldat's first generation of players are moving on in life and playing less and less .. if at all. This is not a bad thing, but the time to advertise and get new players into the game is long overdue. If you want the community to be strong, we've got to welcome any newbie we can... and not treat them like noobs.

So a bit off topic.. but still related: We REALLY need to get an official trailer for the game out there.

[darDar]

We REALLY need to get an official trailer for the game out there.

F12 for that
there are enough people here who are good in creating trailers/movies
the ingame trailer could be remade too

[DragonSlayer]

This is complete bull.

1. You mentioned that you're NA and you can't find pubs to play in and you have to join EU servers. When was the last time you saw a game in #sna.gather? Yeah, it's inactive as hell and #soldat.gather doesn't have that many Americans playing there that it would empty the pubs.

2. It's obvious that what's killing the activity is the lack of support. New versions take way too long to come out and you also have to take into consideration the fact that Soldat is an old game and since it's not even getting any updates whatsoever, how exactly are new players supposed to hear about it? If there was a constant flow of new players, there wouldn't be a ton of empty pub servers. The problem is that Soldat isn't getting enough new players, not that the old players aren't playing on pubs. And I dare say that the vast majority of Soldat players are still pub players.

3. Gather has done a lot for this community. It's a fact that gather is a very simple and easy way to play organized cw without any hassle. Some of you people need to realize that while you might find the more random games on pubs fun, there are also people who actually find gathers more fun because you don't have to worry about unbalanced teams, people leaving in middle of the rounds, random votekicks and all that. I enjoy playing on pubs from time to time but it's definitely a lot more fun to play in gathers in the long run. Gather has also substantially increased the activity of the clan community by attracting new players, thus increasing the amount and size of clans. And this way clan community has grown and that will in turn attract more players who are interested in clan wars instead of random pub games.

You claim that first impression is important but you also need to consider that once new players find out that pubs are all there is to Soldat, they might not continue playing if they are solely interested in competitive gaming. But if they find out that there's quite a big clan community (given the size of the game), they might be inclined to play more. Of course that's just an assumption but your theory that gather is killing Soldat is no less far-fetched.

Just by looking at the amount of people playing gather, it's obvious that it's doing a favor to this community. People aren't playing gathers because they are forced to, they are playing gathers because they want to. They find it fun. You see, if it wasn't for gathers and the still active clan community, a lot of the players who are still around would actually have stopped playing by now or at least would be very inactive. If it wasn't for clan community and gathers, you can be sure I wouldn't be spending that time on pubs. Those people who spend 4 hours a day on clan wars and gathers wouldn't play 4 hours on pubs. Gather is only increasing the activity, not in any form killing it. That's just a lousy assumption with very poor basis.

[demoniac93]

You people are forgetting the fact that, in any given game, the number of people playing for fun, actually IS higher than the number of people playing for competition on the other hand of the pivot.
What we need is advertisement, simple advertisement, like say, getting soldat on to the cover/a page of a magazine or e-magazine, or whatever.
We have to put Soldat on the map, and let the newbies decide whether they want competitive, or "random" gameplay.

[mar77a]

haha what? competitive is less fun than pubs? why do people play it then? for the money? gimme a break

the actual people playing for fun are the ones playing competitively the others are just shooting things cuz they had a bad day

[demoniac93]

haha what? competitive is less fun than pubs? why do people play it then? for the money? gimme a break

the actual people playing for fun are the ones playing competitively the others are just shooting things cuz they had a bad day

And what fixes a bad day?
FUN.

[Snow]

haha what? competitive is less fun than pubs? why do people play it then? for the money? gimme a break

the actual people playing for fun are the ones playing competitively the others are just shooting things cuz they had a bad day

That's not what I do, and I have a ton of fun. Soldat is one of the last things I fire up if I had a bad day.

[mar77a]

you didnt get my point, im saying you can't compare the fun of organized played vs some randoming in public. don't try

[Horve]

haha what? competitive is less fun than pubs? why do people play it then? for the money? gimme a break

the actual people playing for fun are the ones playing competitively the others are just shooting things cuz they had a bad day

other way around

[DarkCrusade]

How can serious gaming be considered as fun, it is SERIOUS