As Killa said earlier, this post annoys me, but just for one reason as i am concerned.
You guys always whine and dime about the same damn situation and either oppose
changes or rather do nothing about it
THE WHININGMore maps should be played if we want to attract more players.
Continue playing the 3 maps and sit back, watch the game die.
From time to time there's a miraculous server that plays some original maps
MY ANALYSISThe ability for everyone to put a server online (own or leased) killed the duck.
"Too much choice killed the choice" as they say in the business world.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONSRedundancy over the total number of servers is not the problem.
The only way to make people play other maps would either be that assist
only displays online servers with the same map for a day, or a limited number of
servers with rotating maps, so everyone would be forced to play 7 different maps every week.
In the ideal AA there should be 10 servers, all official ones
having only official servers might work.
CONTRADICTIONSForcing people to do something is considered a dictatorship and in no uncertain terms will kill AA 2 faster than any thing else
I would love to see players forced
THE FACTSHere's it's like, the more servers you have, the more power you have over the game.
THE MYTHSAs for server admin abuse, we definitely realize it, there's just not much we can do about it.
They bought the server, they can control who goes on it. It's always been that way for any game.
There's no other way around that. If we start punishing server owners, nobody will buy servers and players might leave.
What if it's a clan server and we have an entire clan leave the game?
We don't need to lose any more players.
having only official servers might work, if we had the resources for that.
THE RESIGNATIONI should have said 'utopic' AA in order for you to understand I know it's not gonna happen
CONCLUSIONAlthough so many technical changes have been made by devs, the numbers don't lie.
The amount of active players is ridiculous compared to the number of total assist downloads.
When this game started, everyone was forced to play on official army servers.
Soon, better players got tired to get mixed up with noobs and early cheaters and started
clan / private servers, claiming the security playing there would be greater as they administered
their servers directly. As time passed, Army official servers emptied gradually.
More and more clan servers appeared, admins got technically better and gained popularity
inside the community because of the way they handled things. But soon many lost control
as we know and some soon appeared as dictators because of their banning policies.
After 14 years, things are different. Assist has the best AC ever and a very competent dev team,
so we can have today what we never had before : Official cheatproof Army servers with the best
admins around.
Brand new organization - Measures :
- Start over from scratch.
- Create a specified small number of Official Assist Servers (OAS)
matching the current number of active players.
- Only those OAS would be listed in Assist.
- Define a new set of policy rules for private server owners.
- All existing private server admins / owners should give them up and donate to assist instead.
In return, selected ones would become "Assist admins" and play with a brand new logo next to
their names. Means they would finance the new framework and get a leading position inside of
the Assist organistaion.
- Concerning purely private servers, the right for them to be listed in assist should be gradually granted
just as players need to do training before they are able to play, but based on other criterias :
If the number of players should eventually rise exponantially again one day, they would
play an adjusting
role and get listed in Assist for a limited amount of time for example.
Much more neccessary measures involved would need further discussions.
Therefore :
Time has come for Assist to retake control of the whole fucking project
as if the army had just launched version 1.0 of the game.
Doing nothing in fear of losing what is not there would be a great mistake and
all could be lost in the end. Think about it, but do it fast.
Just my 2 pennies.