Let's make our servers community-like!

Hi all!
Imagine you are a simple player who just googled free arena shooter or saw somewhere "Xonotic" and decided to install and run it. Usualy you are linux user and install games from linux repo/steam. What will you see in game? Just servers with people jumping around and shooting. Nothing about friendly community, discord servers, map making... Even nothing about duel and defrag tournaments!

Many online players are social persons who wants to not only play games but talk about it. I think we need to provide links to messangers and web pages for players to introduce them to activities around Xonotic and possibilities to talk about it. It can be helpful for keeping audience in game that requires high skill due to its genre. Just write additional info in MOTD and sv_hook_gamestart_all.

Yes it's requires more effort in server maintainance but let's make cool community-like servers with a lot of happy players!

For example,

Code:

alias sv_hook_gamestart_all "defer 7 \"say Next stage of xonotic championship will start soon! See https://rocketjump.zone for more info\""

I am against making Xonotic normie friendly, it will only lead to its mainstreamization and all the toxicity that comes with it such as censored chat and usernames, codes of behavior, removal of taunts, hard bans, tighter interconnection with proprietary services (steam, discord, twitch, ...), bloat etcetc. Eventuall someone will want to commercialize a game with large audience. I like it how it is, thanks.

Good idea Xord, but I I think we should change the message to link to the official Xonotic community first https://xonotic.org/chat/ and maybe after that mention the tournament.

Maybe something like this:

Code:

alias sv_hook_gamestart_all "defer 12 \"say ^2Matrix and Discord community: ^4https://xonotic.org/chat/\"; defer 14 \"say ^2Next stage of xonotic championship will start soon! See ^4https://rocketjump.zone ^2for more info\""

I couldn't disagree more with Drummyfish. We should advertize free software better and also make access easier. But of course we should not drag it through the mud by censoring user speech or by excluding people based on whatever ill bias we might employ over their personality, or just based on how they might make others feel for whatever reasons.

Platforms are everything in today's internet. If you can't find a product on Amazon, like a food or a phone, then people will simply not know about it and consequently not buy and use it. The exact same is true to other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Steam, Itch.io, etc. They are marketplaces and if you are not on the market then you will not be dealt with.

I don't think we should make Xonotic suitable for minors, but if we had noob mobile-only servers for Xonotic and at least a makeshift client on Android then we could also go one step further and disable chat all together plus remove the taunts from the pk3 (only for the mobile version) to pass the Google Play checks suitable for <14 years, so it will show up in the market if you are below that age. Having this would be very very very important for advertizing, because the target audience for games is and always was kids and kids stick with the stuff they have access to and are used to. Since 10 years kids grow up playing games only on their phones, mostly only free games even that really suck with tons of advertizement. Very few still have desktop PCs. Even at an age of 16 or older they might prefer to buy a Plastation instead of a PC since it still runs all the games they know and like. Or later they buy only a small notebook or tablet that fits easily in a bag and they can take to uni/school. Xonotic playerbase is dying exactly for this reason. It has been missing influx from new generations for over 10 years and it was removed from the market places that consumers have good access to, especially so concerning children and teenagers.

I think though it is already too late for this. In 3-4 years we will have a Fortnite-ish FPS in Godot taking lead in Free Software gaming. Another 3 years and we might already have strong AI creating all sorts of miraculous things.

I am against making Xonotic normie friendly, it will only lead to its mainstreamization and all the toxicity that comes with it such as censored chat and usernames, codes of behavior, removal of taunts, hard bans, tighter interconnection with proprietary services (steam, discord, twitch, ...), bloat etcetc. Eventuall someone will want to commercialize a game with large audience. I like it how it is, thanks.

It's not about mainstreamization, just create info area around the game and let players to be interested in this game. Yes, some toxicity may come with larger community but should we be afraid of this? Don't make fast conclusions and let people express themselves. Especially afps is not so popular overall but we can lure players from old shoters like Q3 or UT