Disappointed at player turn out

[~kev~]

Last night, a couple of players were talking about how few people are playing FF.

To say I am disappointed is an under statement. This is an awesome mod, just about everything I had hoped for. After the first patch or two, and a little fine tuning, FF is going to be even greater.

Why are so few people playing? There are several reason for this.

1. Bad timing.

A. Halo 3 was just released. A lot of the console gamers are playing this instead of PC games.

B. tf2, that piece of C***P was released.

So FF is having to compete for people in the gaming community.

Now the disturbing thought. The mod has not been well received by the TFC community. Most of the TFC servers that were full before the release of FF, are still full. This is a big change from previous game releases.

When Quake 2 (Q2) was released, Quakeworld (QW) servers were almost empty within a week. Not because everyone thought Quake 2 was better, but because it was new. Some of the people that tried Q2 went back to QW a few weeks / months later.

The same goes for Quake 2 and half-life 1. Q2 was the "in" game until half-life 1 was released. Within a few weeks after the release of H1, the Q2 servers were almost empty.

Quake 3 however barely put a dent in the Half-life community. This may have been in part because counter-strike and TFC had been released.

The old school TFC players might not be ready for a change just yet. A lot of them are older in age and just want to stay with what they know. A lot of them will have to upgrade their computers to play FF. As an example, one guy playing FF last night had 384 megs of memory and a 900 MHZ P3 processor. His frame rates were about 30 - 33 fps.

One community has held true - the Fortress community. A lot of the quake world team fortress players moved to TFC and have been there ever since. The hard core fortress fan has stayed true to the community through the release of dozens of games and now sadly through the release of FF.

Now for the humor:
To get more TFC players into FF I suggest a microsoft battle plan.

A. Tell everyone TFC is full of theoretical (it could happen) security holes when in fact there are none at the present time. The only way to get around these security holes that will be exploited in the future is to upgrade to FF.

B. Get these fake security holes and their theoretical effects published on several highly visible websites. Every website then should direct the TFC fan to update to FF.

C. Get into the steam forums and criticize everyone for playing a 10 year old game (TFC). Then tell them they should "upgrade to FF."

Hey, microsofts plan works on mac and linux, why not TFC?