[How To] Make this game more popular.

Just rename 'Last man Standing' to 'Battle Royale' and we're good to go along with some fresh 'Xonotic:Battle Royale' - trailers.

Last Man Standing, as the name implies.  Technically Clan Arena is similar too.

If you mean riding on PUBG's fad & coattails, Xonotic doesn't have the Asian/Chinese playerbase, microtransaction/lootbox speculation (if you thought Bitcoin and other experimental infungible currencies were crazy, this is even further out there), and the mechanism & level designs of shrinking territory to make a similar impact.

I've long wanted some concept of a movable territory in Xonotic. That would be amazing, and could serve as the foundation for implementing stuff like King of the Hill and shrinking zones. 

But really, PUBG/Fortnite-sized maps would be atrocious in Xon.

ons reborn, ahria, capturecity might be good maps.

Bring in loot boxes and grinding for hours to xain XP and we'll have 1000's from Korea playing. Introduce an in game currency that can be Ebay exploited and we'll have 1000's of players I mean bots just farming away.

Maybe add some minimal legend.  Just additional stuff aka video or comic. To be more correlated with this world.

With the supremacy of design and technical aspecects of the Xonotic that part anyhow missed. IMHO

We could completely screw with everyone and announce a battle royal mode for Xonotic and then make it more inline with what you'd find in professional wrestling.... aka make it more like Super Smash Bros. where the objective is to simply knock your opponents out of the arena (it's impossible to kill them any other way). Copying Smash would involve replacing the health meter with one that determines how light your character is (the more damage you take, the lighter you get and therefore the easier it is to knock you out of the playing field).

@Lyberta: It exists as last man standing already.

@Antibody: You could also shrink the player(+forces), weapon and pickup models by a factor each map could specify for itself, edit balance to fit the battle royale mode and more.

@Lee_Stricklin: Reminds me of laser sumo.

If somebody tells me how to modify(where I need to begin reverse engineering the code to implement) and compile xon for win10 I could actually do that. (Got the source(/source/darkplaces/darkplaces.dsw?) in visual studio but doesn't compile due to 8.1 sdk missing but can't find it. does win10 sdk work?)
But I wanted to start with smaller things first like making the weapon selection order (hud) match the priority you give the weapons and show the key-bindings instead of just numbering them.

I think shrinking zones are none of a big deal to implement as mutator as it only requires you to check if a players distance to a point is larger than specified and apply damage till death and occasionally network the zones center, radius, shrink-start and -finish times. (+ show the zone on minimap)

Lootboxes are just items that spawn other items when you run over them. But other than that you could just place the weapons like normal and make them spawn by chance.

Copying Smash would involve replacing the health meter with one that determines how light your character is (the more damage you take, the lighter you get and therefore the easier it is to knock you out of the playing field).

Might be easier with a simple knockback multiplier, starting from value 1 and going up decimals.

Can we just step back and think for a bit, why would copying a popular thing with advertising from big companies (Nintendo, Tencent) help a small open source developed game that doesn't advertise? And much less, without engaging the respective game communities that you're trying to attract players from?

Random idea if we want to get more players to try it. My old university has an annual  Lan Party, and I'm sure other schools do.
We could potentially try sponsoring tournaments at universities to get people to try it.
Advantages:

• Students are poor and it costs nothing so people can download it no problem
  
• Some of them are programming students so might snag a coder out of it
  

Any thoughts?

There's nothing stopping you from doing that if you want. "Sponsorship" for us doesn't mean much, as we have no assets. We're just a loose organization of people on the internet!

There's nothing stopping you from doing that if you want. "Sponsorship" for us doesn't mean much, as we have no assets. We're just a loose organization of people on the internet!

Yeah I was thinking I might shoot an email to them about it.

I guess my overall point is the issue is more marketing than game modes I think. The way I found Xonotic was through a package manager, which is a niche way for most video game players to look for things.

The way I found Xonotic was through a package manager

Which one?

It's one of the games listed in the 'Application Installer' on CentOS.

Has anyone looked into getting it as a free to play game in steam? I have no idea how hard it is to do that, but that would be great exposure.
Post about Xonotic + Steam
Based on that post I'd say the focus needs to be on defining the scope of what is needed before a steam release. I haven't had time to look over the issues too much but if that hasn't been done yet I'd say that would be a great next step.

I don't think steam is a good idea. One of the great things about xon is the community. You get to regularly play with the same people and most of them are nice (when they're not ranting about balance or bad code like me). A release on steam would either attract too many people and drown this sense of community (and then they'd probably leave anyway) or almost none and then it's a waste of effort.

Yes, we need more players to keep all the mods alive (overkill and CRA are effectively dead for now) but not really *that* many. We have ~300 a day now, i think around 1000 or 2000 would be ideal. If anything, i think we should focus on getting into debian repos, that's also likely to bring more devs.

Martin, I think you're missing the point. One main merit people are looking for in popularizing Xonotic is so that you could have more activity in otherwise dead regions. Real ideal would not necessarily be 1-2k players, but rather that you'd have activity like us EU folk are enjoying all around the globe.

Getting Xonotic packaged for other distros is definitely good but given the game is also on Windows and Mac, Steam is imo the next logical step. 

I wouldn't worry too much about incredible popularity because you'd still be competing with all other FPS games on steam for players.