[quote author=shadowman link=topic=246.msg2190#msg2190 date=1281285015]<br />Just a nobody here, and I don&#039;t take either side...just a couple of observations...<br />[/quote]<br /><br />Hey shadowman.&nbsp; Thanks for dropping by.&nbsp; While I might use strong language as I refute your points, I hope you don&#039;t take it personally, and become a member of the IDL community!&nbsp; I&#039;ll also warn you that I have a reputation for wording people to death, which you&#039;ll understand shortly.<br /><br />[quote author=shadowman link=topic=246.msg2190#msg2190 date=1281285015]<br />ZDaemon is [i]undeniably[/i] the goose that lays your golden egg. Without them, you&#039;ll just die the same slow death that they are.<br />[/quote]<br /><br />I agree that there would be no IDL without ZDaemon, or that it would at least be very different.&nbsp; I think on some level, every (reasonable) player of ZDaemon is grateful to the development team for the game because it [b]is[/b] currently the best multiplayer Doom experience.&nbsp; I would, however, strongly disagree that what the provide is &quot;golden&quot; in any way, and I have a number of points to my argument.<br /><br />ZDaemon hasn&#039;t added a major feature in over 5 years - the last major features were Capture the Flag and the Unlagged netcode.&nbsp; While this is debatable (SECTINFO, voting), I think that we can all agree ZDaemon development has slowed to a crawl - and not for a lack of experienced, willing developers wanting to contribute.&nbsp; There are a number of technical, infrastructure-related things about ZDaemon that discourage qualified programmers:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]The source is closed, meaning any code I contribute will disappear forever[/li]<br />[li]There is no source control or patch repository, meaning I&#039;m unable to use the work of other contributors[/li]<br />[li]The things I personally want to work on are hilariously outdated in the 1.06 source code (netcode, prediction, etc.)[/li]<br />[li]My contributions are subject to the will and whims of the ZDaemon development team, so if I want to add or change a feature, I have to convince them that the feature is worth adding and maintaining; because I will have no way to maintain it because it won&#039;t be added to the 1.06 source code (no source control, remember?)[/li]<br />[li]There is no testing framework that I&#039;m aware of, which at least led to 1.08.06 and 1.08.07 being completely unplayable in a competitive setting (100% reproducible crashes in CTF games)[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />I&#039;m aware that the development team is using Git now, but when I was talking with phenex2 about it, my understanding was that contributors outside of the development team had no access to it because Stealth had left the community (last year...).<br /><br />My main point is that ZDaemon has a rather bad development system, which is reflected by the fact that development has been so slow.&nbsp; Some people would point to the ZD changelog and say, &quot;Hey Ladna, look at all this stuff&quot;, but the huge majority of it is ripped right out of ZDoom, and even then it took over a year (actually it&#039;s a lot longer than that, because they gave up on 1.09 and started backporting changes to 1.08.09); a lot of the changes listed are trivial besides.<br /><br />ZDaemon is also very resistant to our feature requests.&nbsp; The IDL has asked for lots of features that we think are very reasonable, but every request is met with non-reasons why they can&#039;t be implemented.&nbsp; Most of the time we&#039;re able to berate them out of their stupidness, but other times Kilgore says he&#039;ll implement things in 1.10 or 1.11 (if we&#039;re all still alive), or he won&#039;t engage in any kind of debate with us about why he won&#039;t add them.&nbsp; We&#039;re met with a rage-post and a thread lock.&nbsp; This is not exactly encouraging, in fact, it alienates IDL altogether.<br /><br />The administration also thinks it knows better than we do whom we should play with.&nbsp; Over IDL&#039;s 8 seasons, we&#039;ve had a number of players who were banned from ZDaemon participate in IDL, sometimes for cheating, but more often than not it&#039;s for stupid ZDaemon political reasons we couldn&#039;t give two shits about, and in fact we frequently agree with the banned player.&nbsp; For instance, I&#039;m now banned from the ZDaemon forums.&nbsp; If IDL used ZDaemon&#039;s forums I&#039;d be unable to contribute to IDL-related discussions because Kilgore&#039;s mad at me.&nbsp; That&#039;s stupid, and not something we can ever deal with.&nbsp; This is why IDL has its own separate website, forums, and IRC channel, because we can&#039;t be subject to the madness that is ZDaemon&#039;s administration.<br /><br />So yes, while ZDaemon is currently the best multiplayer Doom port, that&#039;s really only because the alternatives aren&#039;t really that great.&nbsp; ZDaemon the software and ZDaemon the community are both things IDL fights with every season, with limited success.<br /><br />[quote author=shadowman link=topic=246.msg2190#msg2190 date=1281285015]<br />Also, by pulling all the &#039;best&#039; players out of public CTF, you [i]undeniably[/i] put another nail in the already fading public CTF coffin, whether you all realize it or not.<br />[/quote]<br /><br />I&#039;ll deny it all day, actually.&nbsp; Playing in IDL isn&#039;t really that big of a commitment; my captain has my cell phone #, and when we&#039;re going to practice he TXTs me.&nbsp; Games are scheduled well in advance and according to player availability.&nbsp; All told, I probably spend maybe 2-3 hours a week doing IDL-related things.&nbsp; My point is that I have plenty of time to play Public CTF if I wanted to, I just don&#039;t want to because it sucks.&nbsp; The reason the best players play in IDL is that traditional ZDaemon Public CTF and traditional ZDaemon clan wars are shitty, and they&#039;re shitty in a big way.&nbsp; Private CTF was actually created before IDL was, specifically because the normal ways of playing ZDaemon (Public CTF and clan wars) are frustrating as hell, and IDL was - in some ways - an extension of that.<br /><br />Don&#039;t blame IDL for the decline in players interested in ZDaemon and Public CTF.&nbsp; ZDaemon does no advertising, and has no interest in supporting the efforts of other community members who want to contribute to ZDaemon (ZDaemon Sessions, ZDaemon Tournaments, ZDDL, IDL, etc.).&nbsp; It&#039;s barely improved since 1.08.02 (released in Apr 04, 2006), and my threshold for a significant &quot;improvement&quot; is fixing sv_deathlimit... which honestly is pathetic.<br /><br />Furthermore, if our goal with IDL was to kill Public CTF, then it was really stupid of me to run so many Public CTF servers on TotalTrash.<br /><br />[quote author=shadowman link=topic=246.msg2190#msg2190 date=1281285015]<br />You should have implemented a league for all skill levels while ZD was booming and had the players to be interested.<br />[/quote]<br /><br />There was no time that ZDaemon was booming.&nbsp; Even at the mythical &quot;peak&quot; in 2006/2007, more people play Quake Live in a day than played ZDaemon those years.&nbsp; There&#039;s a number of reasons for this, and I&#039;ll admit that most of them are pretty out of reach.&nbsp; Doom is an old game, id Software isn&#039;t interested in promoting source ports (so players have to purchase Doom from id, and then download/install ZDaemon... which makes things like Steam hosting difficult), adding modern features (voxels, 3D models, OpenGL rendering) is difficult and provides little reward, and so on.&nbsp; But to be fair, the ZDaemon administration has no advertising whatsoever.&nbsp; There&#039;s no news page, the forums are overmoderated and full of great examples of the admins being jerks, they offer no support to players who try to evangelize ZDaemon to the wider gaming community, etc.&nbsp; I ran TotalTrash for over 2 years and was pushed around, ignored, and threatened just like any other shit-ass ZDaemon player.&nbsp; There was no thanks, no reward and no privilege for what I contributed to ZDaemon.&nbsp; This is a bad way to retain community members that want to help you.<br /><br />The only thing IDL ever wanted to do was to create a system in which highly-competitive, fair CTF games could be played.&nbsp; There&#039;s no way that providing high-level CTF did anything to harm Public CTF, especially considering all the other things that are wrong with ZDaemon.&nbsp; The idea that we would do something like tell our players not to play Public CTF so we can &quot;stick it to zdaemon&quot; is so fucking silly I feel like a faggot even typing it out.<br /><br />[quote author=shadowman link=topic=246.msg2190#msg2190 date=1281285015]<br />Now the newbies have dried up...<br /><br />And we all know what happens to game communities where the newbies dry up, don&#039;t we? How many serious competitive newbies do you see now interested in w/e game mode nowadays?&nbsp;  ;D<br />[/quote]<br /><br />Most of the above points apply here, but I just want to say that IDL has tried a number of things to get &quot;rookies&quot; interested in the league.&nbsp; We ran IDDL in Season 5 and we tried to run a similar league this season (IDDL was a &quot;developmental league&quot; for newer/less-skilled players).&nbsp; Both attempts were complete disasters because the players simply weren&#039;t interested enough to finish out the season (or in the case of this last attempt, interested enough even to respond to an &quot;are you interested&quot; e-mail).&nbsp; Let me be perfectly clear: the ZDaemon player base is barely big enough to sustain a 32-player league that only plays 75% of its players on any given week.&nbsp; ZDAEMON CAN BARELY EVEN PRODUCE 24 GODDAMN PLAYERS A WEEK.&nbsp; The IDL&#039;s advertising is way more widespread than ZDaemon&#039;s, but it&#039;s not because we&#039;re awesome - it&#039;s because ZDaemon&#039;s sucks.&nbsp; We worked with TastySpleen (http://tastyspleen.tv) to broadcast live video of IDL matches that quite a few people watched.&nbsp; The TastySpleen community is now aware that ZDaemon and IDL exist, and it increased visibility of the game tremendously.&nbsp; Actually, ZDDL had this idea first, and it was VERY SIMPLE TO DO.&nbsp; If ZDaemon gave two shits about getting the word out, it could do things like this.&nbsp; It could also recognize that there are people in the community that will do these things for them, and they could LINK US ON THE FUCKING HOMEPAGE.&nbsp; But that would take more effort than none, and in some cases it would involve swallowing pride, so it hasn&#039;t happened.<br /><br />[quote author=shadowman link=topic=246.msg2190#msg2190 date=1281285015]<br />ZD peaked several years ago. A new version of ZD, Doom4...w/e, will see a surge in interest again, but the golden years of this particular nostalgia niche are over. Enjoy your league while it lasts, imo, the writing is on the wall for both communities.<br />[/quote]<br /><br />I really think that there&#039;s a lot to be said for Doom&#039;s gameplay; I personally hate the way Quake Live and Source games play - they&#039;re way too slow for me and the weapons suck.&nbsp; But I can understand people recoiling when they see sprites - Doom is over 15 years old after all.&nbsp; In some ways it frustrates me to see my favorite game reduced to a &quot;nostalgia niche&quot;, but again, I can understand people seeing sprites and remembering the days when Nirvana was still releasing singles.&nbsp; I still think there are plenty of things that could be done to increase ZDaemon&#039;s player base, in fact, I&#039;ll list them:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]Create a web-launchable viewer-client.&nbsp; Use Adobe Alchemy (this is very, very easy, but you need the source).[/li]<br />[li]Create a web-based server list, and add icons for joining and spectating (using the web-launchable viewer-client) for each server.[/li]<br />[li]Remove the limit on the number of clients that are allowed to spectate games.[/li]<br />[li]Add server-side demos.[/li]<br />[li]Remodel the ZDaemon website so that there is actually stuff on it; things I would recommend off the top of my head are: the link to buy Doom from id Software, news page (development and otherwise), clans, leagues, wad review, tournaments, ZD sessions, etc.[/li]<br />[li]Talk to sites like ESReality and TastySpleen to market ZDaemon to the wider FPS gaming community.[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />None of these things are even controversial.&nbsp; No one&#039;s talking about unbanning anyone or opening the source or whatever stupid thing that sends Kilgore into a blind rage.&nbsp; We&#039;re just talking about making it easier for people to watch some fucking ZDaemon games, to know what&#039;s going on in the community, hell, to even know that ZDaemon fucking exists.&nbsp; There are still plenty of people who are willing (God only knows why) to contribute to this in a dozen different ways, but the administration thinks that adding:<br /><br />[quote]<br />138. Implemented a new version of unlagged that&#039;s tick rather than ping<br />&nbsp; &nbsp;  based. It&#039;s far more accurate and efficient than the previous version.<br />[/quote]<br /><br />will fix everything.&nbsp; Not only was it mind-blowingly stupid to implement unlagged this way (wow ping, really?&nbsp; Durrrrr.), it&#039;s not something anyone gives a shit about, and I&#039;m picking a huge 1.08.09 feature here.<br /><br />In closing, please don&#039;t blame IDL for anything that&#039;s wrong with ZDaemon.&nbsp; We&#039;ve done nothing but try and encourage the growth of ZDaemon and the adding of features that would make it more popular and our lives easier, and we&#039;ve received nothing but closed doors, threats, and bans.&nbsp; The fact that we put up with this stupid shit for so long is a testament to our desire to improve the ZDaemon experience and grow the community, and while I&#039;m certainly not interested anymore I know that there are others that are.<br /><br />I hope you appreciate the full response I&#039;ve given to you, which is roughly 10x the length of your initial post (sorry, like I said, I&#039;m a carpet-bomber), and I&#039;ll be happy to continue this discussion.&nbsp; Unlike Kilgore I won&#039;t just realize my position is irrational and stupid, and try and threaten and thread lock my way out of it.&nbsp; That would make me a Class A asshole, and while I have my moments, I&#039;m the first one to apologize when I&#039;m wrong.&nbsp; Ah, rationality!