A Primary Mod Flip?
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
Something very strange has been happening in the spring community. Well, a lot of strange things have been happening but this si different, something is gradually occurring that could change how things work forever in such a way that nothing appears to have changed!
The primary mod Balanced Annihilation appears to be moving towards equilibrium with Complete Annihilation at a slow pace. This process has taken months to occur and will continue to take a long time to result in a complete take over, but in the next 4 months a tipping point could emerge and so could the slippery slope on the other side. It’s very possible that a dominant CA could swamp BA completely.
Balanced Annihilation is already losing its appeal to the general player base due to its lack of game play innovation. The reason for this is the official stance that Balanced Annihilation is feature complete, and that updates only perfect that state with balance and graphical fixes.
But naturally the player base is tired of the same old game play, especially when most game play in the lobby just happens to be BA game play. This minor backlash against TA purity has been coming from a long way away and is now creeping into forum posts as noted by the recent “spring boredom” thread:
Is it because of the amount of hours spent in spring or something else?
I think fine tuning BA is a bad idea. It seemed as though when units were a little more off balance, people had more fun playing it. Now that it’s ‘perfectly’ (actually pretty evenly) balanced, people are getting bored with it.
Of course we could move onto CA. But CA isn’t the mainstream mod and you are limiting yourself in the amount of players available at any given time.
So is it just me or has the mod gotten boring? Maybe it’s time to retire, like it seems everyone else is doing.
Perhaps it is time we moved on to another primary mod? What nobody seems to notice, is that CA’s goal is to eventually break free of the TA heritage it has been saddled with. Could the primary mod in a year’s time be a non-TA mod?
In order to speed up this process I would suggest CA made it clearer how the new user is to download and install CA, and provide easier alternatives such as installers and a core main release alongside the various stable releases that are pushed out on a near daily basis. A greater emphasis for the main website on helping attract users rather than serving as a developers aide should also improve user take up. A screenshot on the front page for example would only do good.
While working on the download site wiki recently I went to the recaptcha website to find only the only wiki listed with a recaptcha plugin was mediawiki. Since I make use of dokuwiki this simply would not do.