P2P isn't a horrible idea and actually still works to turn profits.
People don't seem to understand that League of Legends is not huge because it's free/unlockables. The secret to League success is in the marketing scheme: there were LoL cards at Best Buy before I even knew what the game was. They immediately jumped out to create and nurture a competitive scene (and by virtue of arriving before DotA 2 got to keep the scene) and have ever since basically designed their game and their marketing around every single major tournament. Not a single major tourney goes by that there's not an IN-GAME LINK to watch a stream of the tourney, often RIOT's own particular stream of the tourney.
I know how to market an Allegiance-like game and I know the vast majority of MOBA players would love to have something like this, even as a palate cleanser for when the ranked queues are full of morons. Unfortunately I can tell you right now this community can't make it happen. It's probably because the community's aging, but here's a few points:
1) Skillcap isn't an issue. My friend practices Marvel vs Capcom 3 for probably 3-4 hours a day just because he hopes to be competitive. In a small town like Davis, CA (approx population, 56,000 during the school year) the fighting game club will have 20-30 people who practice as much or more than my buddy WEEKLY. People are perfectly willing to put time and effort into a game if they see a payoff at the end of the day beyond "just doing another video game."
2) Complexity isn't an issue. Back on the GitP boards (where I found Adept's ads) I used to participate in what was called the "Test of Spite." These people literally spent dozens of hours preparing D&D characters for one-off combats against other meticulously prepared characters. You don't know the meaning of "complicated" until you've seen three people argue the semantics of two rules in two rulebooks published a decade apart and how they interact. Ditto with Magic: The Gathering. People like complex games. $#@!, people LOVE complex games. Most people who play video games are NERDS and giving them the chance to use their brain is like nerdvana.
3) E-sports and competitive play are massively taking off. Generally speaking you get one per genre: people watch Starcraft 2 (and have watched Starcraft for the longest time), League of Legends, Street Fighter (various flavors), and Marvel vs Capcom 3. What do these four games have in common? Pretty much only intense tournament support from the game's designer. Capcom hires top-level players to help balance their games specifically to push the competitive scene. The end result are games that have massive and rabid followings. Pretending, like Broodwich does, that an Allegiance-like game is "too slow" or "not interesting enough" is crazy.
3.A) Have you even HEARD of "Let's Play"?!
http://www.youtube.com/user/retsupurae <----- 60,000 subscribers just because they MST3K other people's Let's Plays. People will watch Allegiance and they'll love it.
This isn't a question of "can this game work?" I know it can. I know it can because virtually every single person I've ever shown it to or talked about it with has fallen in love and wanted to play it only to be turned off by toxic aspects of this community or the various problems the game has. $#@! me I can't even log in right now to maybe start AFKing in the lobby because I keep getting a vague error that might or might not be on my end... and while I appreciate the efforts of our dev zone and recognize the game is a lot more playable than in the past, we're still looking at some Bethesda quality bull@#(! right now.
I know this game can work because not a day goes by when I don't catch my self chuckling to myself after someone $#@!s up and saying "ro baby, ro" or playing a game of LoL and someone saying "TF is porting in" and immediately reading it as "technoflux." I know this game can work because within the first six months of my playing I sat down through cadet 1 and 2 as well as ACS and thoroughly enjoyed the experience of learning new things. But what I think a lot of the vets in this thread are simultaneously saying and ignoring is this:
ALLEGIANCE cannot work.
ALLEGIANCE is dead.
I am not looking to resurrect it. As $#@!ing sweet as it would be to usher in a brand-new game where hundreds of thousands (even millions, if we're lucky) of people are flying the IC "Weedman" int {sue me I forget which one is his}, I recognize that for a variety of reasons that just can't happen. That can't happen because MS has the rights all locked up and I don't want to fight to get them. That can't happen because there are definite flaws in the way the game is played and designed that have been systematically exploited for 13 years. That can't happen because, frankly, this community won't let Allegiance be resurrected or resuscitated or redone or reworked or even rewritten. It won't for the exact reason someone said: this community can hardly agree on what Allegiance IS.
You can argue that point all you want and I frankly don't care. Mostly I just want to take the parts of this game that sucked me in like a $2 hooker and gave me the best times of my life like... well... said hooker and arrange them into something similar and similarly glorious. Into a game that has 10-15 player professional teams earning money by dueling against each other once a week and spending the rest of their time practicing in PUGs. Into a game where someone can show up for a 30 minute game twice a day and *#$@ around before they start on their homework. Into a game that people just might be talking about 10 years after its doors are closed. Frankly an Allegiance-like can be *that* game.
(P.S. HSharp? FPSes don't really have all that big of a competitive following. Generally speaking FPSes do best in the frat boy/under 15 categories with a few outliers like Left4Dead or TF2.)
(P.P.S. then I realized I actually don't give a rat's ass what you guys think of the idea because I'm not here to ask you for anything. All I wanted to get was a ballpark estimate of "how much." I got that, so thank you. Hopefully I can get my copy working again and we can relive the glory days by gunning people down in our mini3 heavies. If/when I manage to make this happen you'll all be welcome aboard of course.)
