Teeworlds on Steam (Page 4 of 14)

So finally (as I'm making something what should look like trailer) there should be in video:
- skin customization
- map editor
- gameplay (ctf/dm)
- something about open-source?

I would be pleased with answer about basics which should be included into video.

I have no weight in this decision but this is something I believe is pretty agreed on among the devs. I remember having this discussion.

Teeworlds is already very friendly to mods: it is open source puts very little restriction to what they can do to both the client and the server, and still use the official masterserver to advertise themselves. It's even shown with little to no distinction in the server list (something I disagree upon).

Mods are not replacement for vanilla gamemodes, they have their own servers, etc. We don't want to do anything at the expense of vanilla.
As I stated before, the vanilla may even benefit from mods, because people who got attracted by some of them may then start playing vanilla from time to time (even if they wouldn't play Teeworlds at all without being intruigued by mods).

But the mods community does not ask for help, they only ask to not being ignored.

I understand your point, but if we completely avoid talking about mods, we'll make it biased to vanilla then.
Of course we could avoid bias by not naming mods in the showcase, but then people may be left wandering, if they happen to like a particular one.

The solution (the most fair I could possibly think of)
I think we should make a 5 seconds showcase of mods which are currently popular (DDRace, zCatch, City, OpenFNG, Infection, xPanic, iCTF, TeeBall) - maybe without the names shown, taking 40 seconds of the main video, followed by a black screen labeled "You can check out mods showcase in the second video". Then we should make another video of 10 seconds from every important mod (there are about 20 mods which are not slightly-modified clones of other ones, so even if I forgot something, we should make it to be max. 5 minutes long) - this time with mod names visible.

This way vanilla will still have majority of the videos (most of the first one and the third one), but the mods will be mentioned without really promoting them and the showcase video will prevent us from ignoring any of them.

In order to make Battle, OpenFNG and DDRace 10-second snapshots understandable, we should make Battle part of some tee capturing the checkpoint and shooting from a tank (fairly straightforward), OpenFNG one with a tee shooting another one, then throwing it into the spikes and DDRace one of tee finishing to drag other one through freeze, to be then dragged out by it, finished with both running through the finish line. We should focus on making similar presentations of vanilla gamemodes and other mods the same way. Small labels with description of mod purpose and key features (for example: cooperative gameplay for DDRace or Monster, dynamic gameplay for Instagib or zCatch, teamwork for OpenFNG or xPanic, tactic skirmish for Battle or Alien, etc.) below the mod name could also be useful.

I certainly don't wanna start a flame war here.
I play ctf games a lot during the week and sometimes convince my friends to play dm in LAN.

But your definition of great sucks. Get real.

To be honest DDRace was more popular than Vanilla for a long time already, but general player count went down recently, imo.

Loving TW since 2010

Whenever I've been active on Teeworlds recently, it's been the absolute worst time of day for me. It's literally always 5 DDrace servers with 100 ping and then everything else is 200 ping or greater. Maybe one openfng server, which I'll play on, but it's really annoying because I'm sort of addicted to Teeworlds but there's no chance to actually play...

Even when I am on at a normal time for North America, there's usually only Wetfish CTF5 and everything else is mods. European vanilla might be alive, but it's ~220 ping for me and that's ridiculous.

I don't think LAN parties should be counted upon as the indicator of whether vanilla is healthy. Vanilla is healthy only if a new player with no knowledge of LAN parties can come in and see several active servers that are with reasonable ping. If we exclude the completely invisible LAN parties, vanilla Teeworlds is in serious need of revitalization. It's clinging to life support.

There used to be a time when there were several CTF servers that I had <200 ping on that were regularly active. Now there's only one. I remember being in 6v6 to 8v8 CTF matches every single day for hours at a time. I'd like to see that return, but it won't work out if we keep pretending that vanilla is healthy. It is dramatically barren compared to what it used to be.

I'm not trying to be rude or get into a massive argument, I'm just stating what I see as a player who is limited to public, passwordless servers like the vast majority of new players from Steam will be.

TL;DR: Public vanilla is dying, and by default that's the only thing newcomers from Steam will see.

Even though it's not at the expense of vanilla, mods use the big Teeworlds playerbase to get people. Why do you think all the modifications that could not be shown in the official serverlist died off or had a very limited success?

In practice, it has worked the other way around - people going casual with mods and not bothering to play vanilla => lack of newbies in CTF servers => newbies get smashed.

That's the same to me.

What? It's only normal to show the official game in an official trailer.

That's still a biais if you show only a few mods.

See - here you defined the mods you want to see with arbitrary criteria. If there was to be one, I would have picked some very different ones. That's the tricky part and why I think including modifications gameplay in the official trailer is bad.
Maybe some teeish ones that were considered for official integration (there was race and another one) would suit, in my opinion.

"no offense but your tastes suck"

Well, where should I start?

In case you didn't know: Advertising Teeworlds has nothing to do with...umm...journalistic ethics?
Because your talk about tw officially being "unbiased to any mod" somehow sounds like you believed that...

I'll tell you the ONE important criteria which you seem to miss: advertising value.

There is only ONE thing that helps every gametype in teeworlds including vanilla: An INCREASE OF THE AMOUNT OF ACTIVE PLAYERS

Therefore the only goal you can have as reponsible and intelligent officials is to get as much people as possible to start playing Teeworlds.

I DON'T EVEN CARE IF YOU SHARE MY OPINION ABOUT INSTAGIB NEEDING TO BE INCLUDED IN A TRAILER.

ALL I WANT IS FOR YOU TO REALIZE THAT THE DECISION MAKERS HAVE TO CHOSE THE GAMETYPES SHOWN IN THE TRAILER BY GUESSING* WHAT WILL GET THE HIGHEST PERCENTAGE OF VIEWERS TO TRY OUT TEEWORLDS.

* Of course these "guesses" should be based on a rational discussion about advertising values.

I recommend reading my post #71 again. I don't just "want" instagib in the trailer, I tried to give reasons, explanations for my belief that instagib can appeal to a certain target group that may not be reached by vanilla.

As a last proof of me not being biased:

I don't like the gametype "infection". However, in my opinion it needs to be included with some short scenes into a possible trailer.

Why? --> Survival gameplay is extremely popular at the moment. Also, infection gives you certain elements of tower-defense which again appeals to target groups that probably wouldn't be reached by vanilla, instagib or something else.

Every new infection-player would make the instagib-fan inside of me happy.

Why? Because I know that a certain amount of infection-players will discover instagib and start playing it, therefore making it more popular.

Additionally infection-players mean free word-of-mouth-propaganda attracting new players which again will create word-of-mouth-propaganda and so on....

Edit:

That simply is a problem inherent to the vanilla gametype of teeworlds.

Think of other online-games:

1. You have shooters. Ok, in "normal" shooters you have somethign similar as in instagib with teeworlds: Newbies are able to occasionally kill experienced, high-level players. Already a headshot is enough.

2. Other games that are played online have ranking-systems that create matches of players who are on similar skill-levels.

There may be some exceptions - as I said, I'm no gamer at all. However, most games fit into one of the described categories.

YOU JUST HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT THE VANILLA-GAMETYPE IN TEEWORLDS ISN'T REALLY ATTRACTIVE FOR NEWBIES.

What can you do? Well, just try to increase the total amount of teeworlds-players as much as possible and you'll finde more newbies playing vanilla. It's your best and only solution.

A last argument:
If you don't include a description in your trailer that shows how to search for vanilla servers specifically, you can just as well make a trailer with the most spectacular scenes out of different mods (including vanilla) and simply don't give the names of the mods.
That way you have the same result: People who decided to try out teeworlds will randomely visit servers and coincidentally play different gametypes, may it be ddrace, instagib, vanilla or something else...

ADVERTISEMENT IS NOT ABOUT SHOWING EVERYTHING THE GAME HAS TO OFFER.

THE ONLY GOAL OF ADVERTISEMENT IS TO GET PEOPLE TO TRY OUT YOUR PRODUCT.

I DON'T RACE MYSELF BUT IT LOOKS SPECTACULAR IN A TRAILER ----> PUT IT IN!

ONCE TW HAS BEEN DOWNLOADED A PERSON WILL TRY IT OUT, GO ON DIFFERENT SERVERS AND HOPEFULLY BECOME FASCINATED BY THE GAME.

Why are we even talking about this? I have never seen a game having an entire section of their trailer dedicated to user content unless they were built around that, which teeworlds, while very open in that regard, is not. It would just look messy, whenever i go on some modded server there's all this weird stuff I don't even get, people turn to ninjas and can't move, you have guns but can't shoot other people, there's a health bar but it's useless, because you die instantly? I don't understand how that makes a good trailer, sorry.

So I did the opening animation (I'll be adding the fade from/to black/white transitions soon). Tell me if you want anything fixed.
http://www.mediafire.com/watch/c2s1tym1 … mation.avi

I'm going to end up making two trailers, one with only vanilla gameplay and the other with glimpses of the mods at the end. I'll submit them both, and you can decide which one you like best. So the main thing is that I need demos. This will help anybody whose trying to put together a trailer. The demos should preferably be vanilla, because I only need a couple short 2/3 second clips for the mods. Nonetheless, I be happy to take whatever demos you have, modded or not.