It's been a while, where's the Deathmatch?

[3Dfx]

Hello everyone,

It's been several years since I played Zandronum and in recent days I decided to run IDE and see what was going on. I have been hoping to play a nice game of Deathmatch, LMS or CTF like I used those many years ago but there has not been more than 1 or 2 of these games played that I could see and even they had only bots or the odd player in. I see many survival, cooperative and various custom team games.

Has the Zandronum scene moved away from these more competitive gamemodes or have I just been looking each day at the wrong times?

[Jenova]

if you want to play classic doom, try zdaemon or odamex (nobody rly plays odamex unless theres an event going on though).

the sad truth is that people only play zandronum for the mods

[Medicris]

Eh. All it takes is to get a group of two or three people onto a server and people will start joining. You'll get a good hour or two of gameplay from this until some inevitable aliaser decides he wants to stomp a server, beats everyone by triple the score and takes most of the excitement out of it.

This discourages potential new blood from stepping back into deathmatch if they come to only ever expect brutal stompings. If you have triple the frags of the next guy in a DM, just go organize a game with others of your skill level and let the new blood learn on their own natural curve and feel what it's like to win now and then, it helps them grow. If someone's skill level is that high to begin with, obviously they've been here a while and have a network of contacts to get another game going with. Getting stomped isn't fun for most, it's not a "learning experience" through which you should expect them to endure for weeks/months when it's so easy for them to simply pass over Z& for another game if they're not having fun with it. It's just harmful for a few matches of cheap satisfaction.

I don't personally mind too much when this happens, it can be plenty fun to train against someone much better than you. Can still understand that the majority of any playerbase just isn't interested in high-end competitive or playing enough to jump the wide and widening skill gap present between average pubber and comp. It's all unfortunate, but almost inevitable in an community as old as this.

[Arctangent]

Friday Night Fragfest typically has mods that are fairly tame, though, usually variations on standard FPS game modes like instagib anyway. Think it also just runs mapsets with the default game modes sometimes too.

Only on Fridays of course, but I wouldn't say it's a complete departure. There's some effort in trying to revive normal deathmatch, too.

[Marcaek]

Personally, I think that, back when Skulltag was more Doom oriented, people came to it to play stuff based on Doom(like the actual Skulltag gamemode, as flawed as it was). Now that Zandro has the flexibility for complex mods, people come here for that so newbies are attracted to mods and the Doom-centered playerbase lacks a steady influx of newbies to compensate for people who move on. I'm not sure how you'd attract people who want to play Doomy stuff to Zandro unless you actively advertised it. Stuff like AOW seems to have promotional venues through various subcommunities and youtube videos and so on.

People still do play DM though, FWIW I just registered a #deathmatch IRC channel at irc.zandronum.com not long ago but haven't got around to promoting it yet. It's basically a topical channel where people are allowed to highlight anyone interested for games whenever.

[mifu]

As everyone else has said, getting a group together will increase your chances in an awesome game of DM.

If you are trying to start a game youself though you can do other things while you wait as there is a connection sound now, so you will know when someone has connected!

Also advertise the shit out of the server. Anyone is welcome to come on #zandronum and post the server name on there and ask if people want in. It's how I got some games started. Hope this helps!

EDIT: Oh and join #deathmatch

It's a pretty good idea :D

[Ænima]

Welcome back, 3Dfx!

Eh. All it takes is to get a group of two or three people onto a server and people will start joining. You'll get a good hour or two of gameplay from this until some inevitable aliaser decides he wants to stomp a server, beats everyone by triple the score and takes most of the excitement out of it.

This discourages potential new blood from stepping back into deathmatch if they come to only ever expect brutal stompings. If you have triple the frags of the next guy in a DM, just go organize a game with others of your skill level and let the new blood learn on their own natural curve and feel what it's like to win now and then, it helps them grow. If someone's skill level is that high to begin with, obviously they've been here a while and have a network of contacts to get another game going with. Getting stomped isn't fun for most, it's not a "learning experience" through which you should expect them to endure for weeks/months when it's so easy for them to simply pass over Z& for another game if they're not having fun with it. It's just harmful for a few matches of cheap satisfaction.

I don't personally mind too much when this happens, it can be plenty fun to train against someone much better than you. Can still understand that the majority of any playerbase just isn't interested in high-end competitive or playing enough to jump the wide and widening skill gap present between average pubber and comp. It's all unfortunate, but almost inevitable in an community as old as this.

This. I'm not saying we should let newbies win, but it's all too easy for someone who gets rekt on their first time playing LMS/DM/CTF to either a) move on to the next game in their Steam library because they're not having fun here, or b) only play stuff like ZH/AOW/WDI from that point on.

I'm not "competitive", but it's safe to assume that stomping new blood for your own ego and mocking newbie clans drives them away. Put it this way: Most of us have been playing online Doom for a long time. Hell, back in the 96f era you could jump into a TDM server that had at least 10 players at any time, all with varying skill. But these kids that are buying Doom on Steam now (or torrenting it just to play Brutal Doom) have no idea what that's like, so when they finally do try it and get rekt every time, they're just gonna go back to ZH and BD. And then the competitive crowd bitches that competition is dying.

I think if the competitive scene was less about the politics and the drama and less about "dominating" this tiny port, and more about just playing some Doom, it would be more alive. It's true that most players nowadays come here for the mods but there's no reason why they can't be turned on to DM/CTF/LMS too.


But what do I know.

[ibm5155]

BUT, where's zandronum opengl (or maybe glide) compatible with my voodoo 3 3000? .--.

[Slim]

Eh. All it takes is to get a group of two or three people onto a server and people will start joining. You'll get a good hour or two of gameplay from this until some inevitable aliaser decides he wants to stomp a server, beats everyone by triple the score and takes most of the excitement out of it.

This discourages potential new blood from stepping back into deathmatch if they come to only ever expect brutal stompings. If you have triple the frags of the next guy in a DM, just go organize a game with others of your skill level and let the new blood learn on their own natural curve and feel what it's like to win now and then, it helps them grow. If someone's skill level is that high to begin with, obviously they've been here a while and have a network of contacts to get another game going with. Getting stomped isn't fun for most, it's not a "learning experience" through which you should expect them to endure for weeks/months when it's so easy for them to simply pass over Z& for another game if they're not having fun with it. It's just harmful for a few matches of cheap satisfaction.

I don't personally mind too much when this happens, it can be plenty fun to train against someone much better than you. Can still understand that the majority of any playerbase just isn't interested in high-end competitive or playing enough to jump the wide and widening skill gap present between average pubber and comp. It's all unfortunate, but almost inevitable in an community as old as this.

This. I'm not saying we should let newbies win, but it's all too easy for someone who gets rekt on their first time playing LMS/DM/CTF to either a) move on to the next game in their Steam library because they're not having fun here, or b) only play stuff like ZH/AOW/WDI from that point on.

I'm not "competitive", but it's safe to assume that stomping new blood for your own ego and mocking newbie clans drives them away. Put it this way: Most of us have been playing online Doom for a long time. Hell, back in the 96f era you could jump into a TDM server that had at least 10 players at any time, all with varying skill. But these kids that are buying Doom on Steam now (or torrenting it just to play Brutal Doom) have no idea what that's like, so when they finally do try it and get rekt every time, they're just gonna go back to ZH and BD. And then the competitive crowd bitches that competition is dying.

I think if the competitive scene was less about the politics and the drama and less about "dominating" this tiny port, and more about just playing some Doom, it would be more alive. It's true that most players nowadays come here for the mods but there's no reason why they can't be turned on to DM/CTF/LMS too.


But what do I know.

^^^ All of this.

I agree that pros wanting some cheap highs beating someone who hardly knows how to DM/CTF/LMS/etc isn't worth it, and it causes splits in the playerbase. I mean as Medicris stated, these high skill level players are so connected from their time they can just play with each other, and not discourage learning players from the game modes.

But then again, I have hardly any skill in PVP modes so I guess my input's not too credible, I'm just rambling right?

[ibm5155]

Zandronum is not only about competitive vanilla DM just saying :).
It's also a good "engine" for making games (yes, I said games) for multiplatform and easier to use with 2D related stuff (as most people here doesnt even know how to make a 3D cube, so it's a good engine for 2D artists)

[Slim]

Zandronum is not only about competitive vanilla DM just saying :).

I'm pretty sure we mean all DM in general, not just vanilla.

[Lollipop]

It appears to me that there are also quite the sore losers among these newbies.

I have just now fought two players, here are my experiences:
The first guy had been avoiding me from two other duel servers he was idling in. I had no idea why.
When I played him after he had played out a 40-14 against a guy newer than himself, my mouse was borked and he got ahead because of that.
I got my mouse to do as I wanted and got past the frags I were behind, and then he RQ when he realized he was losing :\

The other guy I got to a 4-0 score on and he left too before the match had barely started.

I think some of these newbies just need some time to grow up and understand that fighting a battle and losing is okay, although I am aware that this of course is only one of many reasons for this.
Maybe the veteran players can guide the newbies somehow, though all I can think of right now is leaving the idea here.

EDIT:
I have just noticed that they all three went for some brutal doom DM.
I suppose that this explains a tad, also now I think of how one of the guys used the BFG.

[Medicris]

When you're more familiar with how Brutal Doom works than Doom itself, it's a sad day.

Yeah, there's always been some sore losers in ST and Z&. There's no helping the ones that just quit as soon as they're 5 frags behind.

[nax]

just to chime in - the newbies who quit deathmatch because of a few high skilled players are not going to be long term players to begin with. It's just never worked that way since FPS deathmatch is by nature a high skill ceiling environment.

a good example of what ends up happening with more casual versions of a game - smash brothers melee vs the new smash's. they don't get near the amount of play time or long term play that melee does. for long term play and healthy scenes to be a thing (for games' competitive scenes *not* fully funded by a publisher that is) there has to be a decent skill ceiling. this inevitably means newbie stomps. to get better, you need to get stomped and want to close the skill gap between you and a high level player.

the only reason DM doesn't get players is because its easier to seed an empty server when its on coop and you can be doing things by yourself. people don't like seeding DM stuff since nothing happens until people start joining. I host WhoDunIt, and my server is always empty until I seed it.

EDIT: as far as brutal doom, even I play that. many people enjoy it because weapon power gaps are not as wide giving a more quake like feel to the dm. for competitive FPS play I'm a quake player first.

[Marcaek]

I hardly ever see Brutal DM, when does that happen? I'm not sure I believe there are many people playing it to begin with. I played it a few times over the years and it gets old quick IMO.