I just watched the Jeff Morris Stage Demo interview. In it, he mentions the top three concerns with UT3. The third one he mentions is mods, and how wonderful the modding community is and how the modding community has kept UT2k4 alive as long as it has.
Yet at the same time, admins and mod authors are hamstrung by the same organization which praises and encourages them by the implementation of the Standard Server Checkbox.
I'm sure 99.5% of you here, as part of this active community, knows about it. For those of you who don't know, this is a little checkbox in the lower left hand corner of the server browser which will filter OUT any servers with "mods" that in Epic's opinion changes out of the box gameplay. It is on by default. Far too many people to this day do not know about it, and leave it on without realizing it. This causes many servers which may have seen playership otherwise, languish in silence. It has undoubtedly cost Epic in terms of playership, as they see far fewer servers. Many players I'm sure got bored of the game after a year or two, and never even knew about the wonderful mods which are out there. Maybe 10, 20, or even 50% of them would still be playing if they had. And all players with this checkbox on see right now are half the servers which are running, and the servers they see are running with the same vanilla game they were running four years earlier.
So for UT3:
Leave it in until the first patch? OK.
Give the player a splash screen telling them about its availability? OK. But leave it off by default.
Or the best yet: Put your money where your mouth is. Mods are important? Show us you really mean that by allowing mods to get a wider audience, and allowing admins to get more creative by getting rid of the standard server checkbox altogether.
Rich (TW)
Yet at the same time, admins and mod authors are hamstrung by the same organization which praises and encourages them by the implementation of the Standard Server Checkbox.
I'm sure 99.5% of you here, as part of this active community, knows about it. For those of you who don't know, this is a little checkbox in the lower left hand corner of the server browser which will filter OUT any servers with "mods" that in Epic's opinion changes out of the box gameplay. It is on by default. Far too many people to this day do not know about it, and leave it on without realizing it. This causes many servers which may have seen playership otherwise, languish in silence. It has undoubtedly cost Epic in terms of playership, as they see far fewer servers. Many players I'm sure got bored of the game after a year or two, and never even knew about the wonderful mods which are out there. Maybe 10, 20, or even 50% of them would still be playing if they had. And all players with this checkbox on see right now are half the servers which are running, and the servers they see are running with the same vanilla game they were running four years earlier.
So for UT3:
Leave it in until the first patch? OK.
Give the player a splash screen telling them about its availability? OK. But leave it off by default.
Or the best yet: Put your money where your mouth is. Mods are important? Show us you really mean that by allowing mods to get a wider audience, and allowing admins to get more creative by getting rid of the standard server checkbox altogether.
Rich (TW)
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