Why do people only seem to play minsta+hook or CTS?

I agree with kojn^'s comments above and the general consensus that this game is spammy. Higher weapon damage would be nice.

Guys i think we should have a test mod - call it balancemod or bmod, so we can determine how these new features will work. For example we could increase the weapons switch times and direct hit damage and see how it goes.

I think one reason why people mostly play the more casual gamemodes is because Xonotic does not have a reputation for being a competitive game. I mean as dead as QL is, it still has a much bigger community and years of player experience behind it as well as a considerable tounrament scene left.
Now let's face it, most serious-minded duel shooter players are pretty old at this point. They are unlikely to pick up a game where they have to completely re-learn everything.
Another thing is that the market is just oversaturated. You have QL, Warsow, Xonotic, alot of older games that are still actively played, and now Shootmania, all being a somwhat similar style of game.
Minsta on the other hand is kind of unique with its speed (or atleast it was when I started playing it in 07) and much easier to pick up.

So I've done some testing in the last few days of logging into a server and waiting for players (my Ft server). Well with Xon you'll get one transient player here and there. In Nex especially on the FT servers you'll park in the game and with in 5 min someone comes, 10 min later you got a whole crowd showing up, pretty interesting.

In Xon also noticed people coming into the server and bitching about the rifle lol and no hook or trying to change the map to a CTF space map lol.

some thoughts ...

electro could be better for defensive the the bobbles stayed around longer

what if mg was really weak ... unless you hit many hits in a row ... like first hit does one dmg ... second does 2 ... third does 4 ... ect ... with limits of course ..

nex is the weapon that really needs a cool down time ... the others ... not so much

make crylink bounce more?

bring back the big push that weapons had in nexuiz ... so that a rocket hit you now your moving and the enemy cant aim thier nex as well (although corners may be an issue)

Small balance changes will not make more regular DM etc. players choose Xonotic over what they are currently playing.
I guess Xonotic could either embrace the minsta niche and drop all of the other things to fully focus on being the best minsta experience there is (which I would personally hate, but I guess it would make sense), or it needs to attract totally new players.
The latter means however being newbie friendly (which Xonotic is to some extend) and being in the news often, e.g. more regular stable releases with a visible progress to get new players interested.

0.6 is now how old? Sure all the "old-timers" use the autobuilds, but you can't really expect a newcomer to do that, and seeing only an really old version for download will probably turn away many too.

P.S.: An official Overkill release would probably help too... all that download this game, then join this specific server and wait for the game to download from there is about as newbie unfriendly as it gets.

@poVoq
Minsta and OK communities have one problem: there is no really active group of people, who would make forked minsta or OK oriented game. [irony]Most of work is done already, just fork Xonotic by tweaking it, make up some name for it, put it on the website, make servers running... and you have this successful game everybody's talking about. [/irony]

DOTA is a great example of a free product, which did not need any forking (even if there is a sequel). DOTA was/is a free mod for a commercial game for years, and there were a lot of people, who bought W3 just to play this mod. If Xonotics mods were so phenomenal, there would be a hundreds or thousands active players playing right now.

But anwering the question Why do people only seem to play minsta+hook or CTS?:
1) In small playersbase skill differences are colossal, most people don't enjoy being pwned.
2) Minsta and OK are not really easier to learn than vanilla modes, but the sheer number of skills to learn in minsta/OK is MUCH lower. It's easier to catch up to better players (and yes, people don't give a damn if game is easy or hard to learn; they care about being able to compete with others without being raped).
3) Lack of team-based vanilla servers and low quality of present servers in terms of public gameplay:
a) no CA(!!!) or TDM public servers. Transmutable ones does not count, they are for people who know the game.
b) too big/stupid maps available on CTF servers. It's not a bad thing to severely limit mapchoice to 8-12 most friendly and good maps.
c) public players for some reason play MoN Vecicles CTF server. I don't intend to elaborate on this one because I don't really understand it.

Disclaimer: I do not intend to offend any server admin. I appreciate allowing other people to play. I just think, that too many maps is confusing for many players and lack of TDM and CA(!!!) in public gameplay is a waste of potential of these gamemodes. I may be wrong, but I think, that starting such servers is worth at least a try.

color = tl'dr and sorry, it's ugly.