Best way to drive up Tribes awareness and bring back players?
I love tribes, but the lack of filled servers for the past... 5 years? lol, has been what has kept me away. I'm sure that issue exists for others as well.
Any thoughts on the best ways to build up awareness of Tribes again, and bring players back to the fold?
To help to this end, I have a solid webserver that I use for several websites of my own. I have plenty of unused hdd space, bandwidth, and processing power, so if anyone truly wants to put effort into reviving tribes but just lacks hosting, I can help in that way.
BTW, awesome job to the devs behind the "Next" patch for Tribes. If you guys were to actually continue your development to further improve Tribes (not just for server authentication, etc), that would really be interesting :-)
Any thoughts on the best ways to build up awareness of Tribes again, and bring players back to the fold?
To help to this end, I have a solid webserver that I use for several websites of my own. I have plenty of unused hdd space, bandwidth, and processing power, so if anyone truly wants to put effort into reviving tribes but just lacks hosting, I can help in that way.
BTW, awesome job to the devs behind the "Next" patch for Tribes. If you guys were to actually continue your development to further improve Tribes (not just for server authentication, etc), that would really be interesting :-)
Comments
Ill be back with new visionary ideas later.
I think something that would be helpful, is to create an article on Digg and/or Slashdot about TribesNext and the free game. Then make a concerted effort to have EVERYONE in this community "digg" the article, leave comments, etc...
That would pick up some attention 8)
And if you reply something to the affect of "what integrity promblem". Fine then, I ask you how many screen names do you use for Tribes forums and playing? and more importantly why!
More to be added: (Just for a start)
Not really seeing your argument here.
Firstly, I guess what I replied in this thread is not directed towards you then.
Secondly, I see that you must play a mod or a server that I dont play. I been playing almost, if not everyday now for about a month and have yet to notice your name on the scoreboard for any of them. However, I have noticed that you have much to say in the fourm.
Lastly, maybe It's not an integerty problem for some but rather an iq problem.
Perhaps folks see what some folks do and choose not to play with them or at all. (get it?!)
Several tournaments have been proposed since the release of Tribes Next. I believe the tournament you are referring to was the Goon Haven tournament that thebeaz was(or is) organizing.
I hadn't thought of that, but that's actually a good point. It would be handy to have some way of uniquely identifying users, i.e. - SteamID, which can then be used to trace any names that player has played under.
The practice of playing under multiple names is called smurfing, and while it might not be a big problem yet (due to hardly any players right now, lol), it has potential to *be* a big problem.
1. Does Tribes in fact have anything similar to a "SteamID" that tracks each player regardless of their "name"? I highly doubt it, which means we need some type of central authentication mechanism to track accounts, connect accounts to IPs, names, etc.
2. Question 1 then leads into the possibility of a quality Stats tracking system, similar to HLStats and the like that exist for Half-life based games. A good stats system would be helpful with building awareness, and would at least draw in the players that like to compete to show their skill :-)
3. What about cheating? Does cheating occur (are there glitches)? If so, what can be done to curb that, as it's a given that more players will bring cheaters back in
Just a few thoughts to mull over
BTW, back on topic, for Tribes awareness, each of us could burn copies of Tribes (hell, even pull out some label makers and label the CDs), and distribute the games locally. Go to colleges, or those dedicated lan party businesses that exist, etc, just start leaving the cds around.
Dunno about the legality involved in that, but apparently it's not illegal to redistribute the game (as everyone *is*, since it's free), so the only issue might come into any use of original art on printed material, in which case we'd just need some fresh artist renditions or just prettied-up screenshots.
Anyone think that's a good idea? If so, interested in pursuing it? (I've had bad luck lately with getting anyone to followup on ideas, discussions, etc, seems to be a bit of an epidemic the past 6 months... lol)
I wonder if there's any way that could be worked out... I know it's a long shot, and would most likely require involvement from Sierra (which might be best to just leave them alone), but that would be awesome though...
Really, I don't see why Valve/Steam couldn't do it, since the game is already free to distribute, so I wonder what they'd need from Sierra (if anything) to make it available.
That's assuming they'd even be willing, since there's no $$ to be made (that I'm aware of).
but in oder for Tribesnext to survive you need new blood, treat them with respect, show them what you can and your player base will thrive imo
hosted on steam is almost like instant success...
hell if steam took it over I wouldnt mind paying $10-25 dollars for their steam authentication system etc.
There's nothing wrong with the authentication system we have in place now. We have a extremely qualified team that is capable of accomplishing anything the community desires. Why fix it if it isn't broken?
this.
Because too few of us are following Kelly's good advice:
Exactly, that's why we need "integrity" to reduce the multiple accts to just one per person
As a fellow Developer I can say that grass roots word-of-mouth and 'viral marketing' while very powerful -- do require capable and motivated individuals behind them providing a sustained effort and support through thick and thin. But there's little to compare to the immediate boost of playership strong and positive attention the commercial print and web 'Press' can provide; and nothing plays as well with the press as 'New Candy'.
To really spin things up to the original potential Tribes 2 offered that was in the opinion of many badly squandered; Tribes Next needs some motivated 'Marketing Weenies' that will put forth a sustained positive effort and 'New Candy'. Some very promising work already appears to be in the mill, but nothing gets attention better then the 'Eye Candy' variety -- and higher resolution and more detailed texture project would really make Tribes Next shine in this regard.
We all know the game feature content and game play shines, making that more obvious and appealing is a challenge that requires considerable effort and contribution.
:-\
Any thoughts on if that's possible?
Well this is taking things rather off topic, but the version of the Dynamix/Torque engine T2 is running on is a very efficient LSE engine in virtually every regard from netcode, CPU, and GPU utilization for the scale, asset, and scene complexity rendered. It's also highly configurable and scales well across an enormous range of very old hardware.
That one can reach quadruple digit frame rates on current gen hardware, and easily sustain triple digit rates on hardware three generations old with all the game's settings maxed makes me wonder what your performance concerns are, or what kind of hardware platform you require T2 to run on that is performing poorly...
:-\
I like this idea, I feel like it would be one of the easiest ways to attract a decent amount of attention.. I just heard about this site/project yesterday from an offhanded mention on the Guru3D forums.
uhh yeah, lets talk to sierra who sold the game to another company because they didn't want it to begin with and ask them 'Hey! Why don't you list a game that you guys sold out on and hated so much you wanted to get out from under it on the master game list you guys use to release your proprietary games just so we can have more players in here who bitch and whine about game integrity!"
Umm NO WAY. Digg idea is the best one i've seen on top of using your other forum's sigs to promote tribesnext.com. Do that and screw Sierra. Oh yeah, did I mention seirra shut down the master game server list on us too...? I didn't? Oh ok...now I did...
GokouZWAR
I'll bet GarageGames would be interested in getting it on Steam tho