I'm sorry, empires isn't dead, but it's slowly dying. A couple of years ago, I remember seeing Napalm's and Nachos and juice box server mostly filled at anytime in the weekends. Now, I can't remember ever seeing EPIC or Viper full in the last week. And there are far more than two commercial FPS/rts hybrids.
There's been loads of people playing lately, compared to the same bunch of 20-30 people playing about between VIPER and EPIC.
We had over 70 players in the two servers for much of the past two days. I think it is a positive slippery slope in the sense that when more vets (in this case, JPL and BSID members) play the game, other old vets will join that would otherwise avoid the servers full of newbs. Empires' life depends on competition. If not the scrims, then those "BSID vs JPL" PUGs in the public servers. If both clans can continue to recruit the group of decent, active clanless players, maybe we could stop the bleeding (i.e. people leaving the community) and slowly grow the game (i.e. bored newbies that wanted to try a new free game from Steam).
we use to have 3 or 4 full servers all day, not sure what its like now but imma hop on rite now and see one server with 17 people
You picked 110 Sunday night PST, which is 70 Monday morning GMT. Maybe if it was one or two days ago, or eight to twelve hours earlier, you'd have better results. The undeniable fact is that the game is reviving. Vets who I haven't seen in months and even over a year are starting to play again. I see new names every day; a few of them refuse to learn and listen, but most of them are at least willing to try. A good number of them have quickly become known members of the community and good or decent players. Over the past few days, the EPIC server has had times when it was a full 64 players and people were going to VIPER because they couldn't join EPIC. Numbers don't lie —the trend is reversing. Whether or not this is simply a temporary disruption in a general decline or the start of a new time in Empires has yet to be seen, but I have high hopes for the near future of the game.
I've noticed more people coming back who haven't played much since Empires went to steam as well as people who did play since steam but took extended breaks to play the recent slew of blockbuster games. Since people have been away there are also now a bunch of pretty good clanless players who have been carrying the torch, seeding the servers and are just waiting to be picked up by clans and play organised rounds. In some of the recent pugs they could often be found in the top half of the leaderboard. People are probably interested by the signs of life in development/testing where there has been decent turn out and the scripts on EPIC which although are only in testing now serve as something new to people who have logged 1000+ hours since 2.31, plus some old broken maps have been fixed and there are some new ones. But mostly its because of the snowball effect steam friends has; the nature of the game is that it is quite social, we preffer to play with a decent amount of people we recognise as thats usually when there are the best games happening. So everyone get to adding people and we'll see more people on more often. Then all we need is the clans to get active and Empires could very possibly have a decent resurgence.
You know a game isn't dying when there's 12 year olds playing it. (Glowstick, Chrissy, Waterbuggeh, etc.)
This game will never die on its own. it would take a catastrophic event to kill it, like say... the world ending.
I just checked again and now its 22 ppl.. We are all dying including the mod, it was dying when it was peaking in popularity. Time will not be kind to this mod, specially since the devs come and go like its a whore. The community is clearly dying as well, these forums use to be overflowing with posts. This mod survives on the community obviously.
To be fair, these forums are about 5 times more active than they were 6 months ago. I'd come home from work, click new posts, and get 5-7 new threads to read. Now it's overflowing to the second page. And whilst I wouldn't say the mod is reviving, it's doing a lot better. I'm not going to sit here and say it's the server or anything, but most of the old vets I've seen coming back (bar 1 or 2) have actually been Euros who are playing because a European server is now getting populated nearly as often as the US one. Top that with BSID getting people ingame again, as well as EPIC, with vets attracting more vets, it's just picking up for a bit. Whether it's temporary or not, I couldn't judge, but it's certainly worth having a few games at the moment, because we're having some really high quality games that I haven't seen since before we even released on steam.
The whole thing seemed like an e-peen contest between HSM and Trickster. With majority of the veterans stacking NF to make HSM lose/rage. Sure, there were some fun games, The first game on Canyon and the one on Bushed, the Mvalley game was only fun because HSM laughed maniacally for two minutes straight after we won. The rest? not so much. Urbanchaos was a huge shitfest, the isle game was doomed before we even began and I don't even remember the rest of it. So the only good thing I could say about it is that there were a lot of vets participating.
