Imagine your maps not getting used, so you want to enforce communism on MB2 to force the player base to play the game the way you want them to play it.
Communism would be closer to the situation where we are now, since the community provides the servers and the players. What you are referring to is dictatorship.
The community wants to play on a server where they can say and for the most part, do what they want
Bingo.
Ill never understand why any of the devs cant just say “yep, tR did it right and thats why they hold all of our pop for NA”.
tR is seemingly the strongest community in the NA's side of things. This can be judged from their high pop counts. Their ability to play to the basic human need of comfort combined with the ability to use their active players to bolster server popularity is a sign of good business sense.
With that said, server owners are not here to make money. Hence I wouldn't go as far as to say that the choice to use that influence over the NA community to soft-enforce a 24/7 1-map server is good for the game at large. A lack of variety tends to make players bored and boredom in turn forces players to try and create their own fun. Sometimes with good results (fun class spam and other emergent moments) and sometimes with negative results such as griefing. I remember doing this a lot back in 2006-2008 when we had nothing but DOTF 24/7. Many people didn't like me or my friends because of this. Worth noting a bored player is also a player who is less likely to return.
The fact that some of the devs are making sly suggestions to some how kill the ds map in direct response to the community having a good time on certain maps is pathetic
Consciously killing a popular map would indeed be questionable.
Why is it when the community speaks up Against something like this, its almost like we went from majority to minority? The proof is in the numbers. If the numbers fall, THEN we can have non-current-problem conversation. Till then, focus on things that matter. Please?
Fluffy said:
Keep in mind that all of us here, on both sides of the argument, are only the vocal minority of the 'community'
There's a fun GDC talk about this.
Faux said:
as Ben and I already pointed out, NA has more players than EU at the current time, why do they want the NA community to model themselves after the EU community? if there is no statistical evidence to back up that 24/7 maps are hurting the playerbase, and the only detractors are part of a "small vocal minority", who are not a true representation of the community as a whole, then what is the "problem?"
Raw player count is by no means a direct indicator of success either. The European population demographic as a whole might be larger than the North American one, but I would assume that NA has a far larger target audience to reach. Star Wars is an American franchise and by that merit alone, it is safe to expect more affinity.
Any negative impact on the player experience is up for debate. It is worth noting that nobody on EU side prominently complains about RTV, while on the NA side you have complaints of lack of map variety.
that's a good point, but transistor and botw are both completely different from mb2. players choose what server they want to join, class they want to play, and what map they want to play on.
Games at heart are all the same. It is up to the designer to set the framework for what is up to player choice and by how much.
it is true that players like to pick favorites, but in a game like mb2 there's nothing wrong with that. people do the same thing with tf2, there's 9 classes to choose from and plenty of official and community made maps, but a lot of players just like to chill on one or two maps and only play one class. it's just what they want to do.
not to mention a lot of players have jobs, they don't have time to learn every class and every inch of a map, they just want to stick with a class and map they like and turn their brain off.
Highlighting my point for a player's need for comfort. There is nothing wrong with our desire for comfort. The beauty of comfort is that it is a very flexible. You will be comfortable with almost anything after sufficient exposure.
coercing players to play on different maps with an empty game mechanic is just dumb, let them join whatever server they want.
This is where I would disagree. Providing a fun mechanic that players can opt into through server choice is no more coercion than 10 guys from the same clan populating their own server to be on top of the server list. From a design perspective I would place it on the same level as the notifications many modern games provide when selecting the difficulty setting that indicate the developer's intended level of difficulty.
Mark Brown has a few good little clips on much of what we're talking about.
It is entirely up for debate whether these are what we want to happen with MB2, but I think inherently rewarding players for doing intended behaviour while not restricting player freedom is at the core of how a fun game is made in my books.
