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Allegiance failed in the mainstream for a reason. Keep that in mind. The game used to have many 1000's of players, and I do remember a pretty visible marketing campaign for it. It's not like it's this undiscovered gem that never had a chance. A lot of people played it and didn't like it/didn't stay with it even if they did like it. Space sims themselves are pretty niche in appeal, and they're just now starting to make a comeback with Kickstarted Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous. Big publishing houses still don't want to make Space Sims because there isn't a mainstream desire for them, even less-so than back during Alleg's prime.

I'd be excited for you if you tried to remake Alleg, but without MS's backing or some nostalgic brand-name to back you up, you aren't going to generate any real interest IMO. All successful Kickstarters have either had a) a big-name game developer behind them, b) a brand name or c) a really unique idea that caught the imagination of the internet public. An Alleg2 campaign doesn't have A or B, and C is sort of this nebulous thing that I don't think you can just "create." It just sort of happens. Are any of the community members who'd contribute to this sort of a project even professional game devs? What credentials does anybody here have that would make strangers give you money?

An entire Internet to Cashto.

I love Alleg, really do, but for every amazing game of Alleg I played, I remember played 10 that sort of sucked. Commanding was often a practice in cat herding, nobody listened to anybody, teams were hopelessly stacked, etc. etc. These are all massive flaws in the game design. For the game to work, you need a teams of people who know each other and work well together. This lends itself well to a small group of people, not a pool of faceless people you've never met before. But even if you solve this problem and have many small communities within the game, people then know who is good and who isn't, and stacking ensues. So you have lopsided teams all the time because everybody wants to win. Then of course there's the epic learning curve that only got worse as people became better and better at the game.

These problems aren't just minor flaws that just need a quick fix... they're major flaws in the game design. It's why Alleg worked well for as long as it did in our small community, but making it into something that works for a playerbase of 500,000 people... I have no idea how you'd do that and retain what made Alleg so unique.

Allegiance. Too weird to live, too rare to die.

QUOTE (Bacon)The game used to have many 1000's of players, and I do remember a pretty visible marketing campaign for it. It's not like it's this undiscovered gem that never had a chance. A lot of people played it and didn't like it/didn't stay with it even if they did like it.[/quote]

Wow... in your bizarro world maybe.

1- There wasn't a visible marketing campaign for it by any stretch of imagination. I was watching the scene very closely back then, heavily into the space-game genre, and I had only heard about it because a friend of mine received a review copy.

2- A lot of people didn't leave because of "design problems with the game". They made the game pay-for-play ($10/month) and then totally mired the game in lag and disconnections. Remember June/July 2000?? It was impossible to get a game going without getting horrid lag in 15 minutes or the whole server dropping in 30. That's when the mass exodus happened. How long has the game been live before then? Two months.

3-There were serious exploits in the core all along. They capped it with the horrid 1.25 patch, and shutdown AZ.

4-Despite having virtually no developer support the game continued to attract players all the way to 2007.

5-Stacking is not a design problem. It's a coding problem. It's easily, easily solvable given enough development effort.

Anyway, more on topic, it would be interesting to round up a list of developers who would be into this kind of thing and just email them see if anyone bites.

Would be even worthwhile if we could say "hey, we have at least a thousand guys willing to promote the crap out of this game if you decide to go for it."

esports don't work with teams of 15-20 people that need to be present to play a game

esports also need to be watchable

allegiance is not really watchable unless you intimately know the game, and even then it's not that interesting to watch

Won't work. Move along.

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Feb 4 2013, 05:53 PM) Wow... in your bizarro world maybe.

1- There wasn't a visible marketing campaign for it by any stretch of imagination. I was watching the scene very closely back then, heavily into the space-game genre, and I had only heard about it because a friend of mine received a review copy.

2- A lot of people didn't leave because of "design problems with the game". They made the game pay-for-play ($10/month) and then totally mired the game in lag and disconnections. Remember June/July 2000?? It was impossible to get a game going without getting horrid lag in 15 minutes or the whole server dropping in 30. That's when the mass exodus happened. How long has the game been live before then? Two months.

3-There were serious exploits in the core all along. They capped it with the horrid 1.25 patch, and shutdown AZ.

4-Despite having virtually no developer support the game continued to attract players all the way to 2007.

5-Stacking is not a design problem. It's a coding problem. It's easily, easily solvable given enough development effort.

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I disagree, if there was a player base of 500000 you would so rarely play with the same people stacking would be much more difficult
Back in the early days there was at minimum of 5 seperate games going at most times of the day and because of game size limits you always had 1 bigger game and some 10vs10 meaning if you couldn't get into one game there way always another to go to. However this would always lead to some players not being able to play if they got booted or droped.

While some of those issue have been taken care of I don't see alleg 2 in any form comming close to the numbers of the original release.

June/July 2000 was the deathnail for Alleg and is why it never took off. However with almost everyone having hi speed internet now a lot of th issues would be resolved

As I have stated before I would love for Alleg to have been launched 10 years later than it was because of the improvements in tech, connectivity and grahipcs this game could have a 5 million playerbase instead of 100


Can we note contact some of the devs and see if they could talk MS in an update and re-release of an updated Alleg.
Oh how I wish they would

I don't think any of the main people (Solap et al) work for MSR any more.