Are 'normally' numbered EN rooms going extinct? |
Lemodile « Censeur » 1367438460000
| 1 | ||
My main question is in the title. Are numbered rooms on EN disappearing? There seem to be fewer and fewer of them. At the point of writing I found myself in a room 8 with a mice count varying from 10 to 15 over a few minutes. And then to think I started playing this game as a room 18 "regular". I can think of a few reasons for this, which I'll list. I'll then continue and argue that something should be done to prevent these rooms from disappearing altogether. Hopefully some of you feel like reading and thinking along. Some of the factors involved: 1. The separation of EN and EN2. Although on paper it might not have been such a bad idea to create an entirely English community next to the already existing (international) EN community, it's always been my opinion that this was carried out in the wrong way. By calling both communities EN (instead of calling one of them INT or something) the EN community got split into people that don't want to hear anything other than English and people that don't mind a (small) variety of languages. As it turned out, many EN players didn't feel like they were the ones that should have been moved to some other community and they stayed behind. Result is that EN2 never even had a 1000 players online at the same time, while EN got some of their old filters back, reducing its international value and keeping more EN players there. The result is simple: less players per community makes for less normally numbered rooms. In my opinion there should just be a new community, that's actually called International (and not EN1), and merge EN1 and 2 back together. But that's more of a gut feeling; I don't know if it actually would solve anything. 2. New players automatically spawn in vanilla rooms. This was added 'silently' I believe. New accounts that don't set a spawn room get spawned in a numbered vanilla room. As far as I know this was done, because the quality of the average user-made map was poor enough for the admins to fear it might scare off new players. I think this is one of the largest factors when it comes to the low amount of numbered rooms. People always quit and new people sign up (they do, right?), slowly shifting more and more emphasis on vanilla. Not only does this mean that there are less players left in the normally numbered rooms. It also means that the majority of them are 'older' players, which you can assume are more experienced. The result of this is that the environment in these rooms also becomes less welcoming to new players, making these rooms become even more isolated. Question here is.. is the map rotation really that horrible? I don't think so. The majority of p0 maps, however, are. There is a difference between the p0's that are made and the ones you see in game, though. The server loads only the oldest 40000 p0 maps into a list from which it plays maps. This means that you rarely get to see a p0 map that has the newer map editor features. Even a background is rarely seen. With fewer people playing in normally numbered rooms, fewer people will vote these down. Which means the only audience for p0 maps would be the map crew. Was this really what the admins had in mind for user-made maps? 3. Larger variety of rooms This one's fairly simple to explain. We have official minigames (bootcamp, survivor, racing) and not so long ago we also got user-made minigames (rooms starting with #), which draw quite some attention as well. These also draw players from numbered rooms. 4. The large amount of often near empty communities. Although it's nice that the game gets translated into so many languages, I feel that it mostly has a scattering effect. Some of these communities (NL, DE, VK) consists of people that, talking averages, speak English just fine. I'm not saying they all want to, or that they all can, but these people all used to play on EN and now they don't. Right now those 3 communities combined is 500 players, whereas EN has 2000. If EN has a problem filling up their original (!) rooms, these communities definitely have the same issue. --- There are a few reasons why all of this frustrates me. First and foremost, I've always played in normal rooms and I like them the best out of all transformice has to offer. In that sense this is personal. I'm 7 weeks short of playing this game for 3 years (not sure if I should be happy or really sad) and I'm sad to see the amount of players in my favorite rooms at such a historical low. On a not so personal note, I think it's crucial for the way the game handles user maps that these rooms are kept alive. I've explained this somewhere above. I could -right now- come up with a bunch of suggestions that would improve the overall map quality of p0's and render the arguments for having players spawn in vanilla invalid. However, I can see how at the time, simply moving everyone to vanilla was less work. Still I hope to see this reversed some day. What I'm really wondering is whether the EN community is shrinking or that it's simply the scattering effect I described that makes me feel like EN is getting smaller and smaller. I don't have the numbers for this (though I know how to check cfm), but maybe someone else does and can enlighten me. I'd love to know how 'the game' is doing. Thanks for reading. Or skipping through. tl;dr Earlier today there were only 7 full numbered rooms on EN and that makes me sad. Is the EN playerbase becoming extinct or scattered across too many rooms and what, if anything, should be done about this? |
Rutabega « Censeur » 1367438940000
| 1 | ||
holy crap you made me realize this wow im in room 9 right now and there are only 18 people --- yes it sounds like a lot but when i started tfm rooms easily had 25-35 people... up to like room 25 :( |
Deletedaccount « Citoyen » 1367442660000
| 0 | ||
My home room of 21 hasn't existed for months now. I remember when EN went up to normal rooms numbered 30 and above, sometimes 40+. I think it really is down to the greater variety in games types you can play. It is kinda sad to see all the rooms disappearing. |
Ramenfrog « Citoyen » 1367443200000
| 1 | ||
I think the new minigames might also contribute to the list, but I could be wrong. A good deal of people seem to love the game Traitor (I've never even played it lol) |
Antfur « Citoyen » 1367443320000
| 0 | ||
On my older account I used to like to play in room 19. It ceased to exist after a few weeks. |
Lewbot « Citoyen » 1367444700000
| 0 | ||
A combination of Minigame addition, vanilla room autospawn and the fact that EN2 is now default server if you connect from a typical EN country IP/OS language for the first time (You have to manually change it to EN the first time this happens to go to EN now, rather than manually changing to go to EN2 as it used to be) does seem to be slowly killing the EN numbered rooms. It's a shame, rooms used to number past 20 with no issue, now you're lucky to get to 10. |
Mousechris « Censeur » 1367444700000
| 0 | ||
I thought it was strange I always spawned in room 1, so this is why |
Thisisnobody « Citoyen » 1367444940000
| 0 | ||
Lemodile has some interesting points there. Let's see... - Vanilla as default: I just logged onto various communities and checked how many normal and vanilla rooms they had - and most had as much, or more, vanilla than normal rooms. This is probably due to new players being sent to vanilla by default, as mentioned in the OP. I remember that before vanilla became the default game mode, there used to be much less activity there. - More communities: The ES community alone currently has 80+(!) rooms in normal mode, and the same amount in vanilla; other communities also have quite a few rooms full of people who are NOT playing in EN (and yes, some seem to have trouble getting their rooms full)... Considering how big some communities, like ES and TR, have become, one can assume that that EN has lost lots of players there. - Minigames: I didn't check those, but counting all official and unofficial minigames together (including racing and survivor), that's probably a fair amount of players - Map quality: I can only speak for myself here... I never play in normal rooms anymore, because I can't stand the majority of maps there. I cringe every time I see an "art" map or any other map that has those ugly colored grounds and/or a ton of decorations. And then the mechanism maps... I find them extremely annoying and, like art maps, they are usually terribly laggy for me. Unfortunately, most other map categories are also infested with these kinds of maps. And, as Lemodile said, most non-permed maps are very poor. So yes, there are players that have been driven away from normal rooms by the bad map quality. No idea how many, though. I would assume that the bigger number of communities (including EN2) and the vanilla default are the main reasons for the decrease of normal EN rooms. |
Shadowwinter « Citoyen » 1367447040000
| 0 | ||
I feel like this has been going on for a while now actually. As far as I can remember when I last played it was a tad hard to find a full enough room (I normally tend to like around 15 mice). Aside the reasons stated above I feel like most players spend most of their time in their tribehouses or just have quit the game completely. Of course this was already an on going problem before but I feel like with what's happening now it's contributed to more players leaving and to stop playing the game in general. For an example I used to play every now and then but now with the "exstinction" of EN players I can't be bothered. As for mini-games they've always been around and I don't think they really take too many mice from rooms. We've always had mini-games but I guess with the up-rise in quantity of mini-games they may have taken a decent chunk out of the players in normal rooms. I'm gonna stop here because now I'm just repeating what's already been said. Eh.. Hopefully things get better? |
Anythin « Consul » 1367448540000
| 0 | ||
I think the spawning in vanilla rooms is merely an attempt to recreate the situation of transformice BEFORE map editor was introduced. The initial idea of allowing users to make their own maps was a great idea, but nobody could have guessed the amount of maps that would be made. It had become too much to handle basically. Now you could question why you would even have P0/P1 maps in rotation. It might be fun to encourage new map makers to make a map which could be played in-game, but it has already been pointed out that the chance of one's map being played is extremely low. Added to that is that most permed maps are submitted via the specific forum threads. Those maps are reviewed by map crew, so it's not needed to let players vote these maps. What's left is a big pile of maps that are simply not original, not fun to play, not appealing, [fill in other reasons]. I would suggest to remove this big pile of maps from gameplay and let it be assessed by map crew first before adding them to the rotation. Letting the majority decide has obviously missed its goal because the majority wants fast and easy cheese, rather than playing a well thought, visually appealing map. Regarding the new minigames. I'm not sure when this vanilla-spawning feature arrived, but for me the decrease in "normal" room populations occured when the debuglua update was released. This update can be compared to the map editor update, as it has increased the level of player/developer interactions. It also gives a perfect example of why not to involve every player into making additions to the game-play. The whole situation is easily surveyed and only people that actually know what they are doing have the abilities to create minigames. Perhaps I'm going a little bit off-topic here. If minigames are indeed responsible for the reduced population in the "normal" rooms, I am willing to accept that sacrifice because the minigames offer a lot of (positive) variation in game-play. I disagree regarding the smaller communities. I will talk about the NL community here, because I don't visit VK or DE and don't have information about those. It is a matter of interpretation what one defines as empty. The NL community has about 300 players online at peak times on average. It is true that there are by far less rooms in NL compared to EN. But it doesn't make the NL community empty, in a way that the rooms that are used most always have players (at least 12) in them at regular times. It is however not possible to experience all possibilities of the game on the NL community, as for example most minigame rooms do not have sufficient players and the NL forum isn't exactly buzzing either. But if there's no demand for such features I don't think this is a huge problem. You can also question the impact a seperate community has on the total number of EN players (DE community average = 100-150 players l total EN players = 2000-3000 players). But I do agree that the trend of having less "normal" rooms gives some players mixed feelings because Transformice slowly is turning into something that's not familiar anymore. Changes are always difficult to accept when they arrive too fast, too often and in too big numbers. I won't deny the game will lose players because of it, but at the same time new players don't have a clue about Transformices history and will enjoy these new features nevertheless. |
Haruhitastic « Censeur » 1367452620000
| 0 | ||
Lewbot a dit : I think this has changed because today I loged into EN1 and didn't change at all? And my cookies had been cleared. The rest of it yeah; I agree with. Plus, let's face reality...most people have moved on. |
Chowsea « Citoyen » 1367471340000
| 0 | ||
I hate how dead it seems now. 33 used to be my go-to room but that's been gone for months. |
Johnlantern « Citoyen » 1367472840000
| 0 | ||
I feel like I should say something, but everything that's been said here pretty much sums up my thoughts. But personally, looking at my friend's list, all of the older players tend to stick to minigames and their tribe house while I'll see my 'younger' friends sticking to rooms (most often vanilla). Playing options have been spread so far, most people don't want to play in a room with messy user maps or a bad rotation (no offense to mapcrew, i mean to say maps made by users are overall less predictable than vanilla which can lead to more criticism or dislike of said maps/rotation). Spawning new players in vanilla rooms only assists in this natural inclination to avoid normal rooms and play in v or a minigame. |
Lewbot « Citoyen » 1367487360000
| 0 | ||
Haruhitastic a dit : I'm not sure what it depends on, but a friend who hadn't played in months tried logging in 2 days ago and was sent to EN2 automatically, so it's still default :S |
Lunoru « Citoyen » 1367491560000
| 0 | ||
Well As much I hate to admit it, I was gone for like 2 months. Room were full everything was fine, Minigames an everything appeared, and I did notice that the rooms are really becoming small, and kinda hard to find people with 10+ people. + When I try to log in to transformice. Everyday I must change my flag from France to En. Because for some reason I am always transfered to Fr community witch is awkward, because I am from Lithuainia, and bit far from france. |
Bengalstar « Citoyen » 1367495640000
| 0 | ||
it's sad to see the 15 to life room go :'( |
0 | ||
Bengalstar a dit : ^ I know ;_; I hope it will get more active later in summer. |
Impuredeath « Citoyen » 1367497440000
| 0 | ||
For some rooms I think the attitude players have towards new players and non regulars It would be really hard for new guys to stay. |
Championrs 1367500380000
| | ||
[Modéré par Lewbot, raison : Off topic] |
Lemodile « Censeur » 1367517420000
| 0 | ||
Anythin a dit : You make some good points here. I don't think talk about the map rotation -esp. the p0 part of it- is irrelevant to this discussion as users can only vote on p0 maps (and play them) in these normally numbered rooms. The problems with the system you've listed have pretty much always been there (a low chance of your map being played, players voting according to criteria that don't emphasize gameplay etc. The fact that there (in EN at least) are fewer and fewer players doing the actual voting means that where there used to be a flawed system, it's approaching a complete standstill, map crew excepted. As for removing the big pile of maps.. setting them to p22 all at once means you also p22 the few good maps out there. Checking them one by one means there's an immense job to be done. I'm not against it, but I also feel like some smaller things could be done to make all of these old maps a bit more appealing. For example, a random background could be assigned for every p0 that doesn't have a set background. This shouldn't be hard to do, while still making p0 more appealing (thus perhaps taking away some of the reasons for the admins to let new accounts spawn in vanilla). A possible way to get the huge job done could be to have the map crew close their p1 submission thread and instead review x amount of old p0's a week, setting them all either to p22 or p1, depending on their respective quality. That way we would soon be seeing more 'modern' p0's, possibly making these normal rooms more appealing to play in. I also can relate to what Impuredeath described regarding the attitude of experienced players. Not sure what could/should be done about that though. I have the feeling like this has always been the case, but it stands out more now that the normal rooms are mostly populated by older players. I'd also like to thank everyone else for replying. I've read everything, but don't feel like typing any more. |