Expectations.
Armor.
Hit-registration.
Learning curves.
Momentum.
Seconds ago, a click to the Unread Posts page showed me someone asking where all the players have gone.
My first thought, they were never here to begin with. GES failed to attract them.
FIE! sayeth the Goldeneye Source die-hard. (You can spot him because he wears one of maybe three clan tags and spams the microphone while abusing a motion glitch in the engine code as he warps through a corner.) We had people! My clan has XX members and we play all day every day! [snip]
Orders of magnitude separate GES's population from other online games, but not from many other mods. Zombie Panic Source and Age of Chivalry are are Steamy freebies, and they suck shit for players-online. Insurgency never really went off, either. Looking at them, ZPS has glaring design flaws (even "zombies should always be a threat" was overlooked), AoC wanted to be medieval battles but didn't consider that those weren't fun (it should've gone more the Thief route than the LOL TIN CAN MACE SMASH route), and Insmod, despite its stellar production values, is just another Realismistic Army Game, bringing very little to the genre and suffering a lot of THIS SUCKS moments related to poor level design, such as "Defend the point means spawncamp for 10 minutes" or choke points that a team of pubbies can not possibly penetrate because pubbies are pubbies.
The numbers show we're doing it wrong, but not as wrong as other groups, whose exaltation above GES is more a matter of advertising and positioning than it is a matter of quality. So, what are we missing?
Well, what's the most obvious feature of Goldeneye 007 that made it popular. It wasn't exploding paperweights, damaged armor, running sideways, or the Klobb.
It was played by a group of people in the same room.
GES has failed to foster the fraternal camaraderie that made Goldeneye 007 work.
I know I've seen (and deliberately overlooked) threads talking about voting, so I may be redundant on this point, but we need voting on everything as a stock feature. Vote for map, vote for scenario, vote for a sudden-death way to end the round now/soon, vote for toggle options like Jumping Enabled, No Armor, Infinite Ammo, Akimbo, DK Mode, etc. We need to make the public server as (read: more) flexible and hospitable as the console was.
We also need to implement Handicap in an intelligent way. I already have in a few ways, it pops up in Live and Let Die after Baron gets a full arsenal, and in OHMSS when a player starts earning damage bonuses. Allow Handicap should be vote-able, controlled by the game itself to support players who don't "get it" yet, and indicate it clearly on the scorecard when a player is having his hand held, so it can be accommodated and adjusted-for in stat tracking.
As much as I agree that handicapping in an online game is undesirable, as long as it is vote-able it cannot ruin anything, and I would rather have one bad player getting +2 damage in each of many populated servers than to have almost no populated servers because no new players hang around. Additionally, a "noisy" handicap system will encourage players to get better so they will have those training wheels taken off. (I have some implementation details in-mind for this strategy, should it take root.)
We also, quite simply, need to attack the LAN market. We need to completely polish MP (yes, that means get rid of all the fucking Valve-related cheese and motion exploits, KM), properly support our scenarios (no more shoe-horned CTF bullshit, it needs its own versions of the maps), and ensure that, even if hit-reg and throwing knives are ass due to lag online, that in LAN mode, nothing fucks up. Rock fucking solid. Then, we need ambassadors who will infect every LAN party they find with a virulent strain of GES. We need guys in a room playing Goldeneye. Those are the ones who will be willing to get those same people playing over the internet to play, and start building the user-base that GES needs to become more than just another junk freebie mod.
Because, it ought to be. Right?