I have come to the conclusion that the biggest barrier to growing the mod community is the lack of modded games being hosted. As such I have come to the conclusion that the solution is having autohost bots continually hosting games 24/7 with a randomized map, number of players, etc. Is this something that one of our scriptors would be able/willing to do?
It's because no one wants to play your bad mods. I'm sorry that door was to open to not walk through and I think this is bad idea as having a bunch of empty games with bots filling them seems useless. If you want to see more modded games host them yourself. If the mod is fun then you will see it hosted by other because it is fun. IE Boom bot wars, 5v5 comboxes on community made maps, Legion mod (I haven't played but plan to insult @KillerKiwiJuice when I get to because it looks so bad Kappa)
G0hst stop trolling. Prediction: Legion will be played as much as GA is. In other words, you see someone hosting it once a week or so. People don't play GA not because they don't enjoy it (Otherwise I'd actually see complaints when I host it instead of literally everyone saying that it's awesome. If you don't believe me on this point go ahead and host a game of it yourself and see the reaction). The reason is 1. People don't have PAMM and aren't getting it. We have done all we can as a community at this point, we can do no more. 2. People aren't able to join more games of it because there aren't games up. I don't play PA 24/7, I'm lucky to be able to play it 3 hours a week at this point. Without games up people don't play mods. 3. As a secondary effect of 2., a lack of games means that people are unable to get experience with mods and thus don't host games with them. Until 2. is addressed this problem persists. We already have games cluttering the lobby G0hst, such as Mikey's PAMM advert. What an autohost does: Be in spec. Randomize map, gamemode, playerslots using set parameters. Autostart once game is ready. Leave and host a new lobby. Rinse and repeat. This is not clutter, and it is key if we are to grow the mod community as there is no other practical way to solve point 2.
I disagree with this approach and I also don't believe in aggressively promoting complete overhaul mods to newish players. Most people play single player and the majority of the 5%-10% who graduate to multiplayer just want to play well with the standard units in Titans and classic PA. They will explore unit server mods over time as they see fun games hosted by experienced players and see feedback from other players. We grow the community first by making them aware of PAMM, PA Chat and PA Stats.
This isn't aggressive promotion. It's simply hosting a single, clearly labeled game for someone to join. They can choose to join it or not. Nor is it directed to new players any more than the FFAs that I host myself are. They're directed at people wishing for more. This would be no different than what I already do, only this way if they like it there will always be a game of it up for them to join. If what you said was true then it would be the approach I took. It's not though. Most people never discover PAMM, never dabble with mods, and if they do join a game with them they rarely have the opportunity to join a second immediately afterwards. I really wish that we could get people playing solely through your PAMM advert in the lobby browser, but that doesn't seem to be enough. Hotbuild2 has only gotten 5k downloads in the last year. In the year before it got 20k. PAMM is getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-300 downloads a day if one github repo view is one download, and GA has gotten 100 downloads in the past week, but that isn't translated into more games hosted and the majority of modded games hosted have only 3 or so non-gameplay mods. People don't host games with mods they don't know and without an easy way to always have a modded game up for them to mess around this isn't going to change. Autohosted mod lobbies are needed to grow the mod playerbase, and they are not going to cause any damage.
Just to point out, I did see a Galactic Annihilation lobby hosted earlier by a name I've never seen before. I'm not sure this problem is really all that big. Remember that even for vanilla, the vast majority of players never touch multiplayer. That might even be higher for modded games.
Again I disagree with auto hosting complete overhaul modded games without real hosts. I also disagree with you posting links to your GA mod in response to simple questions on steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/386070/discussions/0/451850468370024709/ That's what I mean by aggressively promoting.
I'd be surprised if modded games are joined less. The problem is that there aren't enough being hosted, not being joined. On the other hand, the last couple of GA games that I saw hosted never made it to being played. We're looking solely at anecdotal evidence though. It would be nice to get hard @mikeyh, would it be possible to create a script to see what mods are used in games as a percentage over time and what percentage of games get to in-game?
I'll tell you guys a big problem when it comes to modded games. Load times. The way this would be fixed is for Uber to implement a system where the server checks if you have the same mods enabled as are present on the server, then does not autodownload the mod if you already have it enabled. As it stands each time I join a modded game even If I have the mod enabled on my end PA redownloads that entire mod and in some instances that can take ages. Atleast I think that this is the case since it takes so damn long to get into modded lobbies. Oh yeah and upload times when hosting for people with average internet are ridiculous in some cases. I don't really agree with the whole aggressive advertising thing, other than making people aware of PAMM, since that is the gateway to all the community made creations here. If anything I feel that in some cases aggressive advertising can make people reluctant to try your work. EDIT: In any case I've been wanting this to happen for ages, where Uber implements their own mod manager ingame. For some reason which I cannot fathom they seem to freak out at the mere mention of the idea. Last excuse I remember was pertaining to legal problems.
I'd say 1/4 people joining GA games leave due to problems downloading the mod from Uber. Significant, but not the cause. Upload times to Uber when hosting games on the other hand can exceed 10 minutes for me on GA and twice that for Legion, so yeah, that may be part of the problem.
