Wow. Well, I've been climbing in the Rockies the past 4 days, so I've missed all this Drama Redux that's been going on. But I'd still like to weigh in with my 2 cents, dripping with sage-like wisdom gleaned from my brief time in the mountains. The wisdom will probably be tempered by the four scotches I've had since I arrived home.
Project Reality is an attempt to modify a very popular, very "arcadey" game into a more cautious, tactical, and in the end, "realistic" depiction of war. Many players, upon first finding PR, will be in for a bit of a shock.
I was this way. I found PR about a year ago. I was thoroughly confused much of the time, and found that I was dying an awful lot. But I was intrigued by the fact that there was actually "lines of control" to some extent (something you never saw in vBF2) and that people were using VOIP extensively (again, something rarely seen in vBF2).
Because I enjoyed the maturity of the players, as well as the nature of the game play, I stuck with the mod. Now I am very skilled at PR (and I'm modest too!
), and enjoy a degree of involvement in the community.
This is exactly what I believe the devs want to occur. They want people to come across PR, and either hate it and leave, or find it overwhelming, but with a gleaming kernel of great gameplay just visible under the surface. The former group is quickly discarded, and the latter group sticks around and learns to play in a more tactical, cautious way.
Since the devs have contributed so much to this mod, and it is, after all, their mod, I think it's only right that we respect their wishes. They created not just a string of code, but an idea of how a game and it's community would be formed, and they are merely protecting that idea from being derailed.
SSM's such as the one that CDU ran create a problem for the dev's vision. Instead of new, "fresh from vanilla" players being "pushed out of the nest" and directly into PR to either fly or fall, they are given a potential distraction.
And so we are confronted with three major problems.
1) Players with no interest in tactical play stick around. They will also bounce around into PROS servers, upsetting the tactical play taking place there.
2) Players looking for tactical play (such as Colfax) will find a SSM server and be put off by the gameplay there. I for one never really read the server message, nor do I pay attention to the text at the top of the screen. I think many others are the same way.
3) Players who would like tactical play, but don't know it yet (such as myself 1 year ago) will never be thrown into that sink or swim situation that results in them finding the joys of tactical play.
I understand that you feel that since it's your server, you have the right to do what you wish with it. But it is the dev's mod. And they can distribute it under any conditions they like. And if the three problems illustrated above are sufficiently undesirable to them, they can take what steps they like to eliminate their occurrence.
