Zandronum

Hello everyone!

I felt like I should share my opinion on the topic's title for a bit, if that's okay with you. Franky, I've been checking on the servers of Zandro daily, seeing how the popularity of the servers go either up or down, only to see it go down sadly.

And I could be completely biased and be checking the servers at the wrong times, but is it just me or is the Zandro community slowly dying, of not; quite dead already? I really miss the days where the servers were packed with 20 people in plenty of servers, but now; where the fuck did everyone go?

I find it sad, as I am a bit sad myself over this fact, that this community which I grew up with in the ending days of Skulltag to Zandronum now is (and I hope I'm wrong) dying and might be at the end of its time (which I really do NOT want to happen).

I really hope there's something we can do to make Zandronum (great agai.. no, not that cliché bullshit) lively again for good old times' sake.

Zandro goes through population swings. This isn't the first time.

Yea let summer runs it course a lil' bit longer and after everyone is done dying in the heat the servers will get populated prolly; then fall comes and goodbye everyone again

doom is dead

You know something is wrong when Zdaemon has more priv CTF than Zandro.

I agree with Sly, usually the first month of summer break is when everyone is out doing their summer crap. When July rolls around and the heat becomes unbearable and everyone has done all of the summer plans, they'll be home more and the activity should pick up.

Not sure if there's any correlation between the two, but every since GFA was killed, Zandro hasn't been the same. At least the competitive side hasn't.

Cartel wrote:Not sure if there's any correlation between the two, but every since GFA was killed, Zandro hasn't been the same. At least the competitive side hasn't.

yes blame typical a3 scum ruining everything bring back prison numbers he was right all along.

Real talk tho I find a big contributor to the "doom is dead" thing are the people that endlessly push that sort of message and refuse to play. Granted, people don't have to play if they don't want to, I'm not trying to force people to play a 25 year old game. However the fact still stands that the only people I ever seem to find willing to play something competitive related(eg. Duel, Public CTF, Private CTF, TDM etc...) are few and far-between. Most of the people online usually don't want to play unless a big hoard of people has joined the game in which case they flock to the server like a pack of geese. All too often I find myself struggling to even find someone to have a simple 1-on-1 if most of R is gone. The declining population of this game is caused by the mob-mentality of people spreading the message that doom is dying and as a result most of the community joins in on the banter and as a result doesn't play.

no doom isnt dead only pvp. cooperative !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3.0 future zdoom mods

This has been the trend for years now: servers are super populated one minute and then the next they're a ghost town. It really just boils down to people being burnt out on the same old stuff, but they always come back (most of them).

Take WDI for example. I saw a fair amount of players in that server today, more than I usually do or have here recently. I guess those guys were feeling WDI lately idk.

One thing to look forward to is that Zandronum 3.0 is just around the corner (I think it's 90% there) and I'm sure that will spark some activity again, though the real test is for how long lol.

But to answer your question specifically: yes I do believe Zandronum is dying. I think part of it has to do with the outdated port that we've been playing on for years. The other part being that it's hard for independent communities (like this one) to stay a float and keep players while we have all these triple-A titles coming out on Steam and what not.
We need more mods copy-pasted from popular games!!

Many of my thoughts can be summed up here (too bad no one took the time to read and instead legitimized irrelevant/awful posts).

Plus as previously mentioned and seen, the population tends to oscillate, shift, and such. Competitive DooM, however, seems to be on life support at this moment for Zandronum, given the health of FNF (Euro's dead), the lack of much of a CTF scene that is actually stable, and pretty much a lack of mapping for competitive save for DBAB, Aeon, et cetera. Having a fractured community that sticks to their own wads/mods (Megaman, LCA, etc.) and has very little input on the community at whole does not help either.

TL;DR: The Fruits of Entropy.

Is the community dead? No. Is it in a worse state than prior years? Yes. Speaking exclusively from the forum side of things, there just isn't as much life in these parts compared to a year ago. I'll mainly attribute this towards a lack of drama (which is good), but there is definitely a lack of discussion in general lately. Even those threads in fun and games are dead.

From in-game side of things, everyone should take a look at this website http://zalewa.strangled.net/doomstats/engine/Zandronum Yes, the average is lower than last year by about 8 players within the same 5 month range (2016 vs 2017). That's a pretty big hit.

In my opinion competition (at least in terms of CTF) just feels pointless. As petty as this sounds, there's just no point in playing even if I win; there's no record or reward to show for it like other games.

As for mods, there's nothing new and exciting for people who aren't into survival, so thanks to that I haven't been really playing. It sucks that all of the new mods are just rehashed survival bullshit aside from All Out War 2.2.

I still miss the days when Invasion gametype was the thing, Armageddon 2 and Alpha & Delta Invasions were a blast.

As for the dying statement, i think people is just not joining anymore because literally half of the server list now is Complex Doom with its fuckton of add-ons and nothing more, the other half is distributed between the "always been there" mods like All out War 2, Zombie Horde and Ghouls VS Humans, the Mega Man 8-bit servers and the remaining are scattered around PvP gametypes as well some others which tries to host something new but gets completely ignored.

What happened for me is that people doesn't seem to enjoy the fun of Cooperative anymore, they don't even try to stay alive when playing in one and always go charging at monsters like a retard just because unlike survival Cooperative have infinite lives, i will miss the days when people played Coop for the reward of exploring maps and slaughtering monsters for the fun instead of making this a thing to be challenged with Survival 1-life.

When the gfa died there went a chunk of players who played duel and ctf. When the league died hard everyone realized taking the game super serious was a waste of time. As a result the drama is gone and things are finally quiet. Sadly NJ has been a ghost town although that also means less bullshit for the admins.

Another thing that chased off people is when painkiller forced 3.0 as the zan version for each server. It seems a good amount of players dont want to be testers but they sure bitch when their precious mods break or when 3.0 takes too long to finish!

I have said this many times in the past 5 years: dooms player base rises and falls at a decreasing rate. It will be a few years before it hits rock bottom but a lack of new things to play keeps things stagnant. Zan needs the next big mod to pop up. GvH WDI ZDWARS AOW MM8bdm Complex doom etc. Whats next if there is anything?

Here we go another one of these yey

Ru5tK1ng wrote:I have said this many times in the past 5 years: dooms player base rises and falls at a decreasing rate. It will be a few years before it hits rock bottom but a lack of new things to play keeps things stagnant. Zan needs the next big mod to pop up. GvH WDI ZDWARS AOW MM8bdm Complex doom etc. Whats next if there is anything?

Honestly I feel like the lack of new mods isn't the biggest cause of the problem. We have mods pop up like DnD, which in my opinion are amazingly done mods, but people refuse to play them because they would rather play the same mods over and over, like LCA and Brutal Doom. And I'm not gonna go on this bandwagon again about how these are terrible or good mods, but if people would play more variety, then modders would have a reason to create something that won't just get ignored immediatley, unless a specific group comes up with playing it.

GFA needs to come back with a summer league to give the competitive side of Zandro a spark again.

When my newest mod drops, it's gonna revitalize the community, bigly. Believe me. Nobody builds 'em better than me.

We're also gonna build a great, great wall between us and the MM/BD/Complexers (by giving them their own master server) and we're kicking them out of our forum. I am also calling for a complete and total shutdown of Let's Play-ers entering our community.

We're gonna bring the real players back, folks. We're gonna start putting Zandronum first.

We're also gonna hire more developers so we can catch up with GZDoom in a matter of weeks, and we're gonna make Graf Zahl pay for it!

Are you with me? Are you ready to Make Doom Great Again?

Because the amount of new original projects has seriously decreased people got bored more quickly so yes this is how it ended up with that situation.
The solution is obivious, make a cool funny mod that people will like, add tons of Youtube videos about it showing the new content that no other mods have then post it on ModDB to looks like someone who really cares about it.
And there we go people will start downloading Zandronum to plays it online and in the end the community will be revived.

Most of the time I just do this:
-Open Doomseker
-Check the server list:
--If who dun it server with more than 4 players, join.
--else If bagel/zombie horde server with more or equal to 4 players, join
--else if all out war with more han 6 players, join.
--else if jump maze with new maps and more than 2 players, join.
--else if ghouls vs humans with not so câncer pwads with more than 5 players, join.
--else if some server with a good amount of players that has a mod that I never played with a nice amount of players, join.
--else go to something else.

I can say that 80% of the times that I join doomseker, I Always went into the last else case :(

And I think other players also do that, they just see megaman/complex doom survival mods and just gave up right there

Competition in Doom is done for, but old mods like GvH and such will keep Zandro afloat for a while as long as there's interest in playing them every year.

if people are legit giving up on zan because they see complex\megaman and dont bother with anything else they are part of the "problem"

but that's just an excuse people who pretend to care about zan use