Over the past 10 years I have seen dozens of players that I played with side by side move on for different reasons... I have seen great server after great server move off-line... what do you guys think the reason is for losing players and what can we do to stop bleeding current players and get some new blood? By the way... if you are reading this...

Rincrast
Sarducci
River Rat
bobthebuilder
Gemini
Jherg
Slim Shady
Eminem
Traitor
big12ozhog
Kemper3
Psion
Stockton

that list can just keep right on going... come back... I want to #sd# you.

Removed....

Rin and Sar I never knew. River left because he got tired of the work involved, think he moved to another game. BtB is still around. Gemini, not sure. Jh left when a bunch of ppl went to WoW, iirc. I've ran into a few of them, they're around in other games. Slim went to another game, took a few others w/ him. Eminem, aka Bud, is still around occasionally but his family and work obligations (yes, he's a dad now) tend to keep him busy. Traitor never really leaves the game, he just goes thru various stages of lurkerdom. But last I heard he was tired of the way red play had been entirely automated, and was just too bored to waste his time anymore. Oz used to play at nights when he was at Coors, but that entire plant was closed iirc. Think he went to play WoW (maybe it was EVE, I never can keep those separate) with jh. K3, he occasionally posts here, but I think he just got burned out from running the forum, and like a lot of ppl, this game gets pretty boring once you reach a certain level. Psion, think he left for another game too. Stockton, real life and poker are funner than TW.

Basically the reasons boil down to time commitment and boredom. You reach a point where you have to dedicate a lot of time to TW, if you can't, you leave. If you can, you get really good really fast. Then you get to a point where you're bored to tears and leave for another game, usually with your corpies or other friends. Enter other, funner, things, and poof... off you go. Heck, I only play about a half-dozen games a year now, mostly I just lurk on the forums because I enjoy the competition.

oh come on dude. you already broke it posting that.

Alexio
Uncle Sam

Most were very good players when they played....

Some left because of life situations probably, some because they felt they had been there, done that. I have played one game in probably 6 months because I needed a break.

Relationships and jobs can suffer because of gaming. Sometimes the best way is cold turkey, quit playing - others just cut back and move away from hyper competitive games. Going to bed with a fig hit alarm set to wake you up, just might mean you have issues (yes, I have - scared the hell out of my dog one night around 3-4 AM, and he started barking, woke the wife, wife wasn't happy...).

How to bring people back? As much as I give JP grief on the new settings, it might be the only hope - I don't mind eating crow (with BBQ sauce) if it works, hope it does, had to eat crow before. I would love to see a CLV with more than a corp of 3 and 3 or 4 solos runnng around for targets. Hitting up the players that used to play and letting them know of the changes might be a good start. I still show some active when I open ICQ (seldom on opening it).

TW is a great game where I usually learn something - either mechanics or by seeing something another player does out of the ordinary. Games-in-a-box really don't allow the freedom of play that TW allows. Booger said something in another thread about a game where scripting is allowed and even encouraged... that attracts a lot of would-be, programmers (myself for instance).

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

I always thought it was being marketed to the wrong group.

I liked it early on when the net was new and exciting. Maybe you've all hit it on the head, maybe everyone grows away from it eventually.

This game would be the perfect venue for the junior high classroom and a good math teacher ........

What always surprised me is how, over the years, I hear from people who've left the game but always seem to come back to it after whatever other game they're playing. But yeah, the commitment is way too high for most, and a game shouldn't be a grind.

I came across an image of the TWGS console grid from Eleq's server from a few years ago. I wish I was at home so I could post it. But it was filled to like 45, 50 nodes. Eleq filled his server more than any I've seen. Lots of great names on that list.

But I remember my earliest days working on this game, when I'd join a game on Metropolis BBS to chat with players about bugs and features, those games were loaded with players. I remember chatting with players like Hosem, Edwin D. Boogie, and I think the Rev was there a time or two. That was like 1994, 1995. But between then and Eleq's server a few years ago, there were still some major games going on well into the 2000s. Now days, not so much. I have a hard time believing new games and other options are the reason so many have gone away when this game was way more active even in the mid 2000s than it is today. 2005 was hardly the stone-ages of videogames, or even online gaming. There were plenty of alternatives then as well. I just think the game changed. It did become too much of a time drain to be competitive. That's what Eleq attributes his retirement to, and Guardian.

I don't think there will be large gatherings like that on a lot of servers, but on a few, it's not impossible. Maybe Ice9 or UltimateTW, if the timing is right and a lot of players converge. But I also think that the game needs to be enjoyable with fewer players like it was back in the early 90s when no single game had more than a dozen players and nobody played at the same time. The post-MBBS days created an expectation of large, interactive games. But the smaller game had its fans as well, and they were lost with the transition to the multiplayer game. There were almost 100K TW games running in those early days, and who knows how many players.

As Sing said, yeah, TW had a corner on the online game market that it doesn't have today. Those days are gone. But just like Risk is still fun today, that game that was played back then is still fun, and there are still lots of small groups who get together in private to play it. But lots of small, private games just don't have the wow factor of one or two games filled with hundreds of players. TW started out a very diffuse game, with lots of sites having few players. MBBS, with its smaller site count but larger player base shifted that to massive games. Today, we're back to smaller, diffuse site, but of course not nearly as many as there were back in the glory days. I'd say there are probably 300 sites actively running today. 64 that are running v2 as of yesterday, but adoption of v2 has been slow and steady since I don't have any way to reach out to my customer base and announce it. They're finding the new version on their own, little by little.

I don't have any answers for the challenges facing the TW community these days, but I can tell my story:

I played from c.1991-1995ish, and when the BBS scene died I knew of no way to play Tradewars other than making a long distance phone call, so I was forced into retirement for a while. In this era of my play, I started to make my own SALT scripts for TELIX and eventually found the SALT scripts for TELIX pack if anyone remembers that pack... I seemed to own every game I played with or without scripts, but I knew back in 1991 that the ability to automate repetitive tasks was going to be huge in TW.

I stumbled across the internet version in c.2002 and played for (I think) about 2 months or so. I felt like I was playing mostly against robots at that point in the game's evolution. I don't need to dominate constantly to have fun, but I felt like I couldn't even take one step out of the MSL's, so I departed. Maybe I was just unlucky in my choice of servers--not quite sure.

I got back into it when a friend of mine relaunched a local BBS a few months ago, which I hear is in a renaissance phase presently. I started poking around and found several more games to join that were all enjoyable from an oldskool perspective. Right now I have one game in which I'm getting my tokus handed to me by Amra. Which I don't mind at all, I'm trying to learn how he does things and what I can do better, although he either isn't interested in chatting, can't see my messages through all the noise generated by his fighter grid, or Amra is 99% a robot. So I have to just keep trying stuff and see what happens, deducing what I can about Amra's technique. Even though that particular game is thoroughly lost at this point. The other games I play I believe are what the locals would refer to as "TradeHugs" and I'm mostly owning them. But if I don't play against anyone who will compete at least somewhat aggressively, how will I ever learn anything?

I think there has to be a realistic balance between being n00b friendly and being competitive. I think playing against robots is lame and wouldn't stick around in such a game. I can see the oldskoolers' perspectives of being disappointed in the hypercompetitive nature of today's TW games, and I can see where those who are super-aggressive would be forced to eventually stop playing or at least pare down their playing because of the time commitment TW demands.

Today I think my biggest problem is finding a stable server. I've found a couple games that I was starting to enjoy and the server went down... (I was thinking of writing a few feature suggestions, one of them was going to be displaying the duration of consecutive online time on the TWGS login screen.)

I don't know what the answers are for any of this but I think we can all agree that fresh blood is needed. I am hopeful that TW fans are encouraging new players to try it out. The "WoW" factor I think has little to do with TW's decline in use, actually--there were options that were flashier, and with more bells and whistles in 1991 as well. TW is a math game that requires a lot of thought, and most games aren't like that (if you follow the video game scene, you may have noticed the decline in puzzle and math games, or really anything that doesn't involve either shooting or sports, over the past two decades). The players who would be attracted to TW in the 1990's would still be attracted to it IMO.

There could be a million reasons why players leave a server.
1. Server not stable. Up and down alot.
2. Lack of time for the player's personal life, tradewars is a time consuming fun game and life right now is down right busy.
3. Lack of interest. I have 2 teenager kids that I tried to get to play the game and it doesnt interest them. With xbox, playstation, highdef tv, the kids in todays world are obsessed with the newest of games, high end graphics, etc. My two teenagers that I know told me the game was really cool but it wont hold their attention.
4. Millions of games to choose from. Right now, you can find many free games on the internet. The gaming market is flooded.

That's four ideas off the top of my head, but i bet there are millions.

I like tradewars because I have very fond memories in the past of the game. Memories of BBs's etc.

May tradewars live forever

I just thought of something that might keep players away, and it is fairly simple. Game bang times/days.

The vast majority of games are banged between 6-9 PM Central and during the weekday. There are a few games that are banged on a Saturday/Sunday, but those seem to be truce games for some reason, with the truce ending during the week.

I know I had players that could not get in on a fresh bang during the normal times, and appreciated a midnight bang or weekend bang.

Typically these issues are for people who work the off-shifts , or are just looking for a quick weekend game. Probably not a lot of players, but then when you only have 1-5 in a game, every player counts.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

And by now, I thought I was the last SALT writer! Good to see you. I remember that pack, written by Phil Crowne, in Telix for DOS I think, released around '93 if memory serves. Would be very interested in a copy of the pack if you have it, I cant find it anymore. I have a decompiler to convert the .slc back to .slt if you want it, but the result is arcane, no comments, and the variable names are meaningless, Gint1 for integers etc.

I still use Telix for more or less everything.

It is not difficult to screw up the bots by hand btw, so dont lose heart.

I remember when resets were announced a week or so in advance, so you had time to think about it, make time to play it if the settings suited you. Now it's like blink and you missed it too fast.

Ill give you a prime reason why people quit playing TW! Example i was playing a dupe edit game at sages server, and 2 of the corps i noticed keep switching corpies through out the week, also noticed when i was gridding i found sectors with both of there cashing planets in one sector. I tried to ICQ sage a couple days sgo to look into it for me , no reply. Well last night I had one of the corps trapped in a sector with 2 of their planets and every one #SD# except one guy. Next thing i know someone from the other corp dropped the corp and joined his and mowed in and landed on the planet , so they could get them out. I confronted them, They said corp swapping isnt cheating. ROFL, well I tried ICQing sage twice again lastnight and explain it to him and send him my game logs and screen shots, no reply. Safe to say I killed off all my assets and CBY'ed and thats the last time i play at his server and I wont play again til a tournament comes around, where i know the game can be better monitored!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Iam not trying to start a samck thread nor trying to belittle UTW server for the record.

I hear that butcher, I would not have been very happy myself... I do know that some ops are desperate for players, so much so they will man the keys almost 24/7 to make sure they games are going right, intrested in a dupe edit to be banged fresh hit me up!

You guys just hit on something else.

To run a good server, you must be constantly available to deal with situations like you just mentioned. There are very few out there that do take the time to make sure each game progresses the way it should. There are many more (like my own) where the time just isn't available to be that devoted to managing each game.

This fact alone can cause lowered player levels because people get tired of playing the same ones all the time.

Maybe this forum should create a new section where possible server sysops could be married up with server providers creating more quality game environments ???

Just a thought. I would love to have someone manage mine for me. Would make things a lot easier.