I don't think the playerbase is dwindling, but I've definitely been noticing that some of the more dedicated players are leaving or not playing as much (RedEagle, some of the purples moved to or are trying BAR...) Maybe game needs new units, gamemodes etc.? Stuff I would like - turret defence gamemode - Ships rework, ships should be modular with attachable turrets. Maybe make shipyard like air where it's more of a 'support factory' than one you're initially supposed to place down, with ships being only big with maybe little-ship drones. Basically having ships acting like mobile mini-cerberus or reef where you attach the turrets yourself depending on the situation. Not sure where submarines would fit into this though... - Reworked air vs air combat, for example I would like it if raptor had flares that could disrupt AA fire for a few seconds. Although this would be challenging to implement as you might have to watch certain weapon projectiles Not a chatGPT post btw :)
+5 / -3
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protip - merge the player-base... we all ride the same bus
+4 / -0
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I have made 4 posts on new unit ideas-imagine if every major update we got like 2 more units how much more fun this game would be. People finding new metas and arguing about balances is always fun to watch. Besides, I'd love to see some of my ideas put to use. https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/34236https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/34245https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/34247https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/34560(Shameless self-promotion)
+0 / -0
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I PLAYED BAR LAST WEEK, DAMN ITS PRETTY BUT IT HAS NO SOUL, ZERO MICRO ALL ABOUT THE MACRO... TBH JUST NERF LANCE DAMAGE MAYBE EVEN ITS AOE, IT WILL OPEN UP A LOT MORE STRATS AND LANCE WILL STILL BE USEFUL.
+11 / -0
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as a player of basically everything on spring - BAR is good, its smooth, its painless to play as long as you remember that reclaim is OP and eco is exponential. that said it lacks some Zk widgetry that could make it peak. that being said "battling" it is a pointless battle, as i said merge the player bases, make ZK lobby spring compatible and join the fun... spring was best before every fork started trying to make their own lobby server and then dieing because the player base fragmented
+3 / -0
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quote:
(RedEagle moved to BAR, Firepluk moved to BAR, PRO_Dregs moved to BAR...) |
None of this is true
+4 / -0
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quote:
imagine if every major update we got like 2 more units how much more fun this game would be. |
Um, no, this sounds like a terrible idea. You'd need a team of like 20 people to work just on balance, and people would have to relearn stuff all the time. And compared to a lot of other open source games I have seen, Zero-K actually gets updated quite frequently. quote:
- turret defence gamemode |
We already have chickens, it's not exactly tower-defense but it's really close. quote:
protip - merge the player-base... we all ride the same bus |
This sounds like an interesting idea actually
+2 / -0
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I know RedEagle moved to BAR because I played with them. tbf RedEagle might've just been trying it out EDIT: wait nvm redeagle's back
+1 / -1
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turret defence mode #ROBOT CHICKEN!!! !game abc best mode in zk history :)
+0 / -0
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Players moving between TA-like games is probably not a bad thing. If ZK is good, they will probably mention ZK positively to others over there, and it will get players moving back in the other direction too, given they are likely fans on TA-like games. Like free targeted marketing, or maybe like a TA ecosystem that players can move around in to prevent boredom. The BAR website mentions ZK fairly positively too. Of course if someone was to mention a few words about what ZK does well in places like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/TotalAnnihilation/comments/kx4mhd/bar_vs_zerok/it wouldn't be a bad thing. A comparison video between ZK, BAR, OTA etc. would be even better promotion if someone had the patience and skill to make it: ***RTS Showdown*** - Which is the best RTS - ZK vs BAR vs TA
+3 / -0
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IMO what is needed is a more story based Campaign the current campaign is ok... but exists purely to act as a tutorial for the Multiplayer. Additionally co-op campaigns/scenarios would also go down really well. The thing is all of this the community can do.
+1 / -0
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This post has been downvoted below -5 and collapsed, click here to expand
Nah. its not the game, its management. stuff i was speaking of couple of years back with admins here, that either fork is coming of zk or the whole project goes down to drain since it kills creatives by topdown management.. people vote with feet/keyboards... people leave bs places like california/ny/australia/uk/china and plant their asses where no micromanagers are over them... Even cops at that places go f. it. China has for example high desertion rate in their force... All tech startups, and countries leave EU, regardless of that covid bs thing fiasco where they heavyhanded people to jab or fuck their life up, that only put another nail to a coffin. Tiny cuts like satanism in unit names, communism in zk eco, police state chat rules, heavy-handed map enforcement. all that stifles freedom makes a cut to this once cool game when we had 1000 fast start metal, and backpacks and surfboards. Sucks that it happens.  ZK is australian based mangement, and it kinda shows, spoke with admins aboutit that all other places are not as tight up as this... they want to have it their way, they have it. Some stuff can be made to make it better, like incorporating stuff from FW and Level Ups into ZK main.. some stuff i mentioned on some improvement in gameplay like home turf advantage or damage model changes, but it is what it is... Stuff like replace topdown communism wiith voluntary communiism where people can decide how much % they want to involve in system vs how much their own eco. so like at 50% involvement 50% of your personal mexes and e goes to communism, but you also get 50% of communism slice of pie... Edit: Oh cry me a river     GoogleFrog with your downvote, we both see people play zk vs mods like 50-50 recently.
+5 / -17
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  rookstoo if enough people downvote you then your delusional nonsense gets hidden by default. This is an ability available to any user of the forum. If moderation was anywhere near as heavy handed as you think, then you would have been booted from the forums long ago. It would make the threads more sane and generally improve the vibe of the community. But ZK inherited a very linuxy early-2000s laissez-faire approach from Spring (although, we know how that turned out). We seem pretty far from modern "good community management standards" (ie ban anyone who might be a problem) for something like a game. On the tail end of your post, if you have any substantial suggestions or improvement to make, then make them. But I don't expect much as your rambling and tangents don't ever seem to have any substance.
+6 / -2
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im sorry GF, nothing against you personally but im with rook here. the main reason i keep leaving ZK to play other things is because it gets annoying fast. Not boring, Annoying. The team games are pure pain because of the eco structure, air is broken late game, and there are a whole host of structural issues that ruin ZK as a team game. ZK has loads of excellent ideas, the game UI and the lobby are top tier. but the game itself has problems.
+3 / -0
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quote:
police state chat rules. |
The fact you're allowed to post this crap without it being deleted and you banned is proof enough against this claim. I've seen forums where the developers ban you instantly for criticizing the game or moderation. I'd sooner call those "police state chat rules" than Zero-K. What we have here is extremely lax by comparison. quote:
Tiny cuts like satanism in unit names |
In what unit names? Lucifer is still lucifer; it used to be called Annihilator, which has had one name change from six years ago. Citation needed of the commit that "removed satanism from unit names". Here's my citation against your claim here. Source says last change was 6 years ago and that was Annihalator -> Lucifer. quote:
heavy-handed map enforcement |
Failure to post examples of "heavy handed map enforcement". You mean disallowing people to spam votes for unsupported maps on autohosts? That crap was obnoxious back in the day and vote spam where you had like 6 map votes just to get to a start vote was honestly frustrating. Do I think the current implementation is perfect? No, I'd rather not have to password and unpassword a game on my own host. Do I think there's a better way of implementing map vote? Yes, but not with our current lack of resources. However, I wouldn't call it "heavy handed"; having some standards is fine. Like not having a certain nazi symbol map plastered on every host (it doesn't look good on our community to allow that to happen) or having legit porn maps. Or how about maps that look like this? At what point do you need to draw the line? Reminder: new people see the first map that's played as an indication of quality and having maps like my first shit map show up as someone's first experience into Zero-K is probably going to drive them off. Edit: to make matters worse, the map linked here is broken -- it doesn't even load properly! 
+7 / -0
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quote:
The team games are pure pain because of the eco structure, air is broken late game, and there are a whole host of structural issues that ruin ZK as a team game. |
A lot more people play team games over 1v1. What is annoying about the eco structure? I don't remember you saying anything before this about these things either. The nice thing about a game like Zero-K is that if you don't like the way something is, then you can make a suggestion or even fix it yourself. If the people fixing the problems don't know that there is a problem, then they can't fix it. I'm not even sure how air is broken late game.
+1 / -0
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quote:
In what unit names? Lucifer is still lucifer; it used to be called Annihilator, which has had one name change from six years ago. |
Rooks has suggested renaming Lucifer in the past, so I think in this very specific case the problem is that the admins/developers are not exercising their authority to do something that Rooks wants them to do, as opposed to the usual "you did something I didn't like and all authority is evil" schtick.
+3 / -0
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quote:
What is annoying about the eco structure? |
the eco being logarithmic and communism splitting it out further, it limits the size and scale of games. I've mentioned it plenty, hell i was one of the few players hat argued against increasing the amount of communism way back when just for this very reason
+2 / -0
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I personally am mostly moving over to BAR, because the player base is too small in zero-k. I don't think the level at which zero-k gameplay / balance is at is affecting BAR vs Zero-k growth, because Zero-k is just a much better designed game. Any changes to game design itself is more likely to make zero-k worse, not better. What BAR has going for it is momentum. There is a feeling it is getting a lot of work done on it. People are excited about matchmaker coming, for example, which zero-k already has! There are also frequent, major, graphics improvements. Zero-k is sadly getting close to no work put into it. I think part of the reason is Googlefrog and co are (rightly) happy with the game state, but the result is there are no new people excited to come in and take over the project. So in a way ZK is being punished for already being excellent, and thus driving away the kind of motivated people who could plow a lot of time into it. If ZK was having big graphics and animation updates regularly, I think that would attract more people, and create a positive feedback loop. More people -> more development -> more people. But how do we get new motivated devs if they aren't free to make other, likely bad, decisions. So yea, the core issue is giving ownership to new devs without damaging the existing work. I don't have a solution to this, but I fear without attracting a next gen of excited devs, zk will slowly wilt.
+14 / -0
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