'[R-DEV wrote:eggman']
If I look at the response to this poll and acknowledge that it's generally just the more hard core folks who respond to these polls (or even read the forums) then I would say there's a possibility that we'll lose as much as 50% of the player population if we enforced more hard core settings.
So be it.
So be it?
Have you ever done abseiling? Do you imagine if you walked a noob over to a 120 foot cliff and said ‘your going to run down the side of that face first’ that they would want to develop the skills and confidence to be able to do it, or do you imagine they would run away shrieking in terror?
I can do it, angel dive, but if I had been introduced to it like that I would have been at the head of the que fleeing for my life. PR in its pure form is exactly like that. You get people testing it only to be horrified and intimidated by the deep aspects of it, and slagged off that they are noobs because they cant climb the learning curve quickly enough, and so they dip out without staying to actually realise they would really enjoy playing it to a deep level and actually become the players you would value for their skills.
Complaining about ‘abortion’ servers…what can I say… Certainly some people would stick on an ‘aborted’ PR server forever, as running face first down cliffs Special Forces style is not a commonly enjoyed pastime. However I would think that you would get more and better people filtering into the ‘pure’ mod from ‘trainer’ servers then you would from BF2 itself.
You know what, you would probably have more trainer servers than pure servers, all told, but if you really don’t care if the mod is popular what would that matter as long as the core of pure servers grew? There seems to be a base assumption here that good players are pulled out of servers to play on servers they don’t want to. I find that flawed.
By all means say ‘we did not make the mod to be popular’. If it only takes 2 people on the whole planet play a game then it’s a game, at least for them. However where I live, Australia, there was once a PR server (run by Bigpond). Short story… it died for want of players because as good as a multiplayer game can be it requires one critical thing above all others, players. Once it reaches a level of people expecting there to be too few gamers playing it they do not even bother to check anymore. So died a PR server.
Thus, for a time, there were no PR servers in Australia.
With the upsuge of popularity of .5 now there are two, BigDY and Internode. To the best of my knowledge they are ‘pure’ servers.
They exist because the mod is popular and because they exist they are likely to make the mod even more popular. They came to exist because of bums on seats playing them, which IMO is chiefly to do with word of mouth (or rather word of internet), not with developers ‘pimping’ a mod. Certainly mods pimped more than PR have fallen on their face. The Aussie servers have a high population of people from other parts of the world using them also, because during their prime time the rest of the world is either deep in dreamland or at work.
If you take too hard a line with what can be done with PR and thereby shed 50% of your player base you probably stand a better than even chance of killing the pure servers I play on now in Australia, so please think long and carefully before you throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Norwegian| players to play in PR Leagues,
