Why isn't ZDaemon our friend?

[Ivan]

/hug ^_^/

I personally try to keep on top of most doom ports. It's always interesting to see what each port offers. Skulltag was my favorite for quite a while because it's multiplayer capabilities made it insanely easy to set up over LAN. GZDOOM and ZDOOM are great and all but they do not lend themselves kindly to multiplayer environment where people want to continuously come and go. Zdaemon 1.02 was easy to setup but it lacked all the features and resources that Skulltag offered at the time. Since 1.04C I never really gave it another chance it always seemed to have "less" than skulltag. I never heard of Odamex before, this is the first I've heard that name to be honest.

Risen3d and EDGE both have some pretty interesting features too, but for no multiplayer which kind of makes them useless in my opinion. Vavoom and Doom Legacy have solid multiplayer but it feels lacking compared to skulltag and now Zandronum. Maybe I'll check out Odamex and the newer ZDaemon, but I dunno. Thus far Zandronum seems to be continuing almost everything I liked from Skulltag. I am abit sore still about the resources not being carried over, but as long as you can still include them on your own it's okay with me.

edit; Anyone remember the old Marine's Best Friend or Smack My Marine up?

Zdaemon offers you the best experience in competitive Doom you can ever get... but with Mexicans.

[Metal]

Hello all! A new blood here :D
Now subj related: Personally I'm very dissappointed 'bout this lon'time ragecampaign. Whatever it was, it was lon'go. I know Kilgore from 2007 and he's a cool guy. A bit conservative though, but, I guess, it's ok, due to his age. Maybe he's not the main ZD dev (more like bugfixer), but the job he does there is great. And hard too. And his statement 'bout ZD staying closed port must be perfectly understood. Esp. after all that cheating-hacking shit ZD passed through (and prolly still does). I bet Zandrodevs wouldn't want some homemade freak take zandro source, fiddle with it, turn it to shit and then put it in publicity as the very same Zandronum.

PS. I'd really love to see the Zandro-Oda-ZD alliance come true in order to create one and only ultimate engine :)

ZDaemon and Skulltag/Zandronum have had a long run of differences in the past. Note the word past. That could have been something between Carnevil and Kilgore/Raider, I'm not sure so I can't comment on that. But to this date, I can say that Zandro and it's current staff (Including myself) have no quarrels against ZDaemon as a port. I just personally don't agree with their methods of managing their community, but I do not hold it against them since they have not shown me any of the aggressive behavior that I've seen used on others.

Every video game in history, closed and open sourced will have to deal with cheating/hacking. It's part of multi-player gaming and has been since the beginning time. Age has nothing to do with Kilgore being "conservative" or as most people who know him would say "Cranky" and that doesn't justify it as ok. If he's not happy doing it, if it makes him that miserable and the community drives him to be that irritable, it's not worth it. (No offense)

I bet Zandrodevs wouldn't want some homemade freak take zandro source, fiddle with it, turn it to shit and then put it in publicity as the very same Zandronum.

This has been done already, as well as a completely different master server hosted for Zandronum. We didn't care. If he wants to remain closed source, that's his choice, but ZDaemon may thrive better if it wasn't so slowly developed (See: Lack of devs/activity). This is where open source comes in handy.

PS. I'd really love to see the Zandro-Oda-ZD alliance come true in order to create one and only ultimate engine :)

This will never happen. It will never be "one ultimate engine" due to the fact that all 3 ports have different goals. Oda goes for the complete old school out-take, Zandro is newschool, and Zdaemon is a mix of column A and B. All 3 attract different audiences.

ZDaemon isn't the port it used to be. To be quite honest, the main playerbase on ZDaemon now is South America/Mexico. It's died down quite a bit from what it was, and it's a shame, but there's a number of factors that probably contributed to that.

[ibm5155]

The main base ins´t that different on zandronum too :p

phpBB [video]

The [video] tag is deprecated, please use the [media] tag

Well at least zdaemon can have more options than coop with 10k imps + cyberdemons

[Blzut3]

But to this date, I can say that Zandro and it's current staff (Including myself) have no quarrels against ZDaemon as a port. I just personally don't agree with their methods of managing their community, but I do not hold it against them since they have not shown me any of the aggressive behavior that I've seen used on others.

I don't know if this falls into community management, but they still want nothing to do with Doomseeker.

[Cruduxy]

From a player POV : You can be part of both communities/forums/ingame etc at once and no one will care...

[Combinebobnt]

Yea I play all 3 and everything is fine.

[Watermelon]

From a player POV : You can be part of both communities/forums/ingame etc at once and no one will care...

This is sadly not true.
As a member who plays on all 3 ports, I've been alienated from ZD because I am part of the IDL crowd, and I have been explicitly told this from the ZD administration.
JKist as well got banned I think for bringing up Odamex in ZD territory.

[Cruduxy]

Sorry should've said from a non-competitve play POV.. but those reasons are still dumb as hell imo.

[Metal]

But to this date, I can say that Zandro and it's current staff (Including myself) have no quarrels against ZDaemon as a port. I just personally don't agree with their methods of managing their community, but I do not hold it against them since they have not shown me any of the aggressive behavior that I've seen used on others.

I don't know if this falls into community management, but they still want nothing to do with Doomseeker.

I'd consider that community management, because as far as I know,you can only use things like ZDIRC on IDE or ZLauncher to log into their IRC as well. Which kind of forces people to use their software instead of mIRC or any of the others.

[legion]

zdaemon's past treatment of people, public insanity, totalitarian ways of running things, ect ect ect.

I thought this was all established already?

did anyone ever actually read these items I posted? I posted multiple links detailing the madness and total control zdaemon admins want to have over their port

here are the urls
http://master.zdaemon.org/bans/
http://Please find a source with less issues/kilgorequotes
http://zandronum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1035
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doomworld-n ... -released/
http://www.altdeath.com/fluxbb/viewtopic.php?id=492
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doomworld-n ... 109-today/

[darkstar64]

I remember playing Zdaemon a couple years back, but returned to Skulltag when servers wouldn't accept my doom2.wad anymore.

[AlexMax]

http://master.zdaemon.org/bans/

This is not an accurate list of people who are banned from ZDaemon. Off the top of my head, HumanBones and you, Legion, are both persona-non-grata, yet do not appear on this list. The administration got wise to the fact that people pointed to their huge banlist as a reason to stay away.

[legion]

that is true. when I posted that masterban list months ago it was much much larger than it is now

people are still banned from zdaemon because of completely bullshit reasons, or lack thereof, and not even listed on that masterban list

[Medicris]

The main base ins´t that different on zandronum too :p

Nope, couldn't be more wrong in my experience

A huge majority of the players I can name are from North America or Europe, the largest base is easily in the USA. There's some portion from South America yes, but they usually stick to their Zombie Horde or whatever other server they like to gather and play together.

Either way I find the NA/EU and SA/Mexico playerbases here are almost divided in practice. Actually, seems like a noticeable number of the latter don't like anglophones playing with them based on all the racial slurs I've seen thrown around.

Meanwhile Zdaemon seems to have it more or less swapped. Last time I popped into ZD (before their client failed to start up across three PCs) CTF server, I saw one english-speaking person to talk with and the other 90% of the server refused to speak anything other than Spanish. Take from that what you will, I think that says a lot on how different Z&'s playerbase is.

Sorry, carry on

[Shane]

I can tell you exactly why ZDaemon and Zandro/Oda aren't exactly high-fiving eachother, poking back and forth from their accounts on facebook or taking pictures from old doom archives and giggling about the 'young days!

Kilgore, Raider and AF-Domains are entirely obsessed with making sure that they, and their port is the greatest standing form of doom entertainment to date, although on paper this is a great idea and I do have to put my hands together to say they have held it up just fine even after the years and years of development and building infrastructure. However this also means they have a little soft spot for when it comes to their work, they are very very defensive, they do not accept criticism at all. We're talking about the same guys who were about to throw me out the port, perma ban me from IRC, servers and forums just because I was declaring publicly that my brother was Nightfang, which honestly has to be the dumbest administrative decision I've ever heard in my entire life. It would be one thing if I were impersonating Nightfang, but just saying I'm his brother grants me exactly NOTHING in terms of leverage or knowledge towards ZDaemon or ZDaemon staff! Thats just an example but if you speak to some former ZDaemon players you will hear some absolute silly stories about how people have been banned from ZD without any type of defense or recognition, the admins don't even acknowledge you, explain your ban 'nor even send you a reason on your ban so it's not like you can do so much as try to explain if you have no clue on what you've been banned on.

Kilgore is one to keep grudges, no matter who you are or what you did, if it upsets Kilgore, Raider or AF-Domains they will hold it against you until the day you die. However, on the bright side, Kilgore can be one cool dude to talk to and I mean that in the entire sense of the word. I had the pleasure of talking to him during a [XXX] Lan Skype party one night and he is genuinely easy to get along with, although he still wanted to see my head on a pike he was incredibly cool to just sit there and have a chat with. Same goes to Raider, most people want to paint Raider as the ultimate totalitarian but however I can give him some credit that atleast he has a sense of humor, but his paranoia and short temper get the better of him the majority of the time. It's such a shame that these guys have to act the way they did/do, they can be quite appealing human beings if they just laid off their masochism and dictatorship just a little bit, it gets eerie when the staff issues spies to patrol other doom networks just to see who's bashing on them. Seriously when will we stop seeing all these 'ZD spies'? It's getting ridiculous just how bad the ZD administration has gotten and how they subject and brainwash all their players, and to some of those who still don't know, yes they do use propaganda on their own players to make them believe that ZDaemon is the only and proper port to play doom on.

THEN AGAIN thats just my opinion, everyone has their own and the last bit there was just to show I'm not just bashing on ZDaemon constantly, when actually I just think they need a change of leadership. I hate to see the admins as actual players, probably would ragequit instead of banning.

[ZZYZX]

[spoiler]Is this a troll thread or it's false alarm?[/spoiler]



tl;dr version: ZDaemon isn't our friend because Kilgore, it's lead admin is the most closed-minded person I've ever seen. Fun here, Kilgore there.

Competitor? There are no such things as "competitors" between fully free ports of the same free game. That's just nonsense to me.
Reason why both Odamex and Zandronum players don't like ZDaemon isn't that.
You see, in Odamex admins as admins are almost nonexistant. They generally just run servers and support the port itself. The reason for that is that Odamex isn't much populated and to play there you have to organise your own semi-private match between people that know each other. Though nearly all people playing Odamex already know each other very well, at least I had that impression.
In Zandronum, admins usually deal with rule violations, like hacking (Zandronum-wise staff) or trolling (server, server cluster-wise staff), or other kinds of wrong behaviour. They take part in discussions like most other players and don't stomp everyone with a banhammer once their opinion differs from player's they currently talk to.
That's the situation in Odamex and Zandronum.

Now, in ZDaemon, players are strongly discouraged (literally, as in scared to death) and forbidden to do anything not mentioned in mythical EULA that probably exists in Kilgore's mind. What is allowed: playing, praying to admins for features, playing in ZD staff-organised events. What is not allowed or not liked by the local staff: player-implemented features (see Ladna's IRC bot), organising your own events (see Kilgore's hate on IDL and Ladna's bot), having an opinion on some topic different from Kilgore's one, looking distantly similar to someone Kilgore hates already and stuff like that. Most of things from latter list are a reason for your permaban. Permaban in ZDaemon includes: masterban, IRC ban and forum ban. So, basically, you say something in the forums or IRC and are forever blocked from playing.

Now. For some people it may look like Kilgore is a nazi that just wants more control over his port; that is not true, at least for me it doesn't seem like that. Kilgore is just making classic error: if one is systematically annoyed by 20 people in one day, he will most likely rage on 21st, even if that particular person didn't do anything that wrong. Accumulating rage and disappointment in people + formal distance from the community = Kilgore. Just look how his posts changed since 2003; for me it proves the accumulating disappointment theory. The only reason (again, as I see it) why he's still in ZD staff is, probably, his interest in programming for it, and all the nazi effect is caused by him being "tied" to the port yet hating people that play it.

Apparently you still can play ZDaemon, yet you need to either be a total noob (that doesn't yet use IRC or talk much in the forums) or be EXTREMELY careful about what you say and where you say this 'what'. That's the main reason why people playing Zandronum don't like ZD. It just doesn't offer enough freedom people from Zandronum or now deceased Skulltag are used to.

HI

[ibm5155]

I don´t think being not from south america is a problem, since everyone speak english ingame and noon doesn´t break/spoil/rq on the game it´s ...
Hmm what about playing zandronum? The bad part for someones is most of players´ll be on newschool servers, and the good news is all (or almost all) zdaemon mods can run on zandronum.

[Watermelon]

I don´t think being not from south america is a problem, since everyone speak english ingame and noon doesn´t break/spoil/rq on the game it´s ...

Sadly this is also not true, most games when Americans are gone/sparse is literally pure Spanish and I have no idea what they are saying.
Also the game quality is really bad with these high pingers. They just spam rockets and blow themselves up, it's really bad. Trust me go check it out when there's no Americans and behold the legend of Mhaas.

[ibm5155]

I don´t think being not from south america is a problem, since everyone speak english ingame and noon doesn´t break/spoil/rq on the game it´s ...

Sadly this is also not true, most games when Americans are gone/sparse is literally pure Spanish and I have no idea what they are saying.
Also the game quality is really bad with these high pingers. They just spam rockets and blow themselves up, it's really bad. Trust me go check it out when there's no Americans and behold the legend of Mhaas.

maybe grandvoid need to do a south america server :p
Well, I agree with most of the things, but, I can´t do nothing with the ping '-'

[AlexMax]

Now, in ZDaemon, players are strongly discouraged (literally, as in scared to death) and forbidden to do anything not mentioned in mythical EULA that probably exists in Kilgore's mind.

I don't think you give ZDaemon players enough credit. If they were all literally scared to death there are two easy alternatives. There is a much easier explanation for why there are people who stick it out.

There is a subset of ZDaemon players that are almost completely on board with the administration. Those players will obviously not have any problems...until they do end up with a difference of opinion, then regardless of how long you've been on the admins good side they'll simply ostracize you or find a bullshit reason to ban you.

Then, there is another group of "ZDaemon players" who just play the port and don't actually say a whole lot. They'll duel and maybe sign up for the odd tournament but they aren't exactly active in the community. They're not on the administrators radar, so unless you say something unflattering about ZDaemon on another forum or such obviously they'll be fine.

Then you have the South American contingent which has their own little subcommunit. I'm not being sarcastic when I say that if they spoke english, they would probably all be banned within a month.