Free Allegiance Forums

The marketing team is working on stats and ways to attract more players.

The main push is waiting for some of the R5 kinks to be worked out.

The Nvidia graphics bug has been putting new players off for ages now. R5 fixed that but the AV bugs came along and still need fixing.

All these things drive people away.

Help the dev team any way you can, even if it's only 10 mins on a Beta Wednesday to check that everything seems to be fine.

I suggest getting the carebears drunk and shoving them in a closet together. Their proliferation and their warm (if not somewhat sticky) embrace will help retain newbs.

of course those individuals who constantly tell everyone they are a bunch of idiots do alleg no good whatsoever.

I don't know if anti-virus issues should really be a priority. Seems like these days there are a lot games that either just don't work if you have an AV installed or don't work very well. I mean, IIRC Valve's advice regarding anti-virus software on their support KB amounts to "don't even try." If a big name like that has given up we're probably better off pursuing other objectives.

The one exception I might make is the bug that's causing a particular AV (Avast? I don't remember) to decide Alleg has a virus in it. That could scare away newbies who happen to have that AV installed... but even so, it's a question of how much trouble it is to fix.

The fall from 700 to 500 has been fairly gradual IIRC - if somehow we can get some stats it might be interesting to see if they correlate with anything. However, I suspect what happened is mainly that people who could no longer play R4, or for whatever reason decided the Alpha wasn't worth the trouble, haven't heard anything that would make them want to come back. I hate to advocate spam, but some kind of mass e-mail to addresses associated with forum accounts might not be the worst plan ever.

All that said... there's nothing like eye-candy to generate interest in a game. I know there's really no chance of the engine being upgraded to even 2005 standards (with the possible exception of buying hookers for the FS2 SCP team), but even one noticeable graphics upgrade - like shine mapping, or better weapon effects - would produce screenshots that might draw in new players. Graphics shouldn't take priority over gameplay in general, but if there's any one thing that can be done, it's probably worth the trouble for R6.

i remember primetime on weekdays used to be at least 60 people. that was only a year ago or so. it could have something to do with every game being sup v sup and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

But a year ago every game was exp vs exp

gee maybe thats why attendance was so good.
and actually there were quite a lot of tac games thrown in as well, not that i like tac but i havent seen one of those in a while. int bombing has totally gone out of style

Brood if that were the case then I don't care about low attendance .

i miss the days of tac and exp.

For a newbie, those are the easiest to fly. Figs require you to balance dodging, missiles, AND guns all at once. With ints you only have 2 of those and SFs are like... super easy.