A lobby that could integrate both ZK and BAR could have the potential to attract many people to ZK

I don't think the BAR team would be terribly enthusiastic about such a thing.

I don't think they will see a net benefit to them. I don't think that I see one for them either. I don't think that this is going to conjure up enough Spring-RTS-playing hours to offset the number which they might expect us to leech from them.

People who want to play both BAR and ZK are quite capable of downloading both.

It also raises questions about who is responsible for moderation where.

quote: (especially BAR doesn't have as much variety in mods as ZK)

As far as I know, this is true because the BAR developers and admins specifically want it to be that way. If they're not willing to compromise on their vision for the community to the extent of allowing mods why would they be okay with "hosting" a completely different game?

Ahhh, I see part of the misunderstanding - its unclear I mean a lobby CLIENT as opposed to changing the server side. I just mean a lobby client, to be clear. Nobody would "host" anything different from now.

quote: If you move 1% of BAR players to ZK, and 1% of ZK players to BAR, there are going to be more players moving from BAR to ZK. On the other hand, the nature of room seeding means that being able to join one or the other easily is actually pretty likely to completely kill ZK, since it is probably always going to be easier to get into and start a BAR game.

I don't think "move players" is right, it just lets players switch easily. The two above paragraphs for are sort of in contradiction, on the one hand its too good for ZK at BARs expense, on the other its very bad for ZK in BARs favour. The language doesn't match the massive uncertainty of the statements - maybe the predictions are just too extreme there?

Are we coming back full circle? 20 years ago all engine mods were on the same lobby client on the same server - until they became clients (with an -s) and then at some point servers (with an -s).

I would have two comments on the idea:
a) The lobby of ZK is not perfect in terms of features (queues never work, some issues with voting maps, etc.). Nothing serious, but I would rather see lobby improvements than BA games.
b) I think the playing styles of ZK and BA are different enough that I would rather prefer players to find and stick to their preferred style, rather than playing "more or less the same" in both BA and ZK. I guess there is a subset of people that could play both reasonably, but not the largest set.

There should be though more cross-advertisement of the games existence, especially for unhappy/bored players. Because if someone stops playing one of the games, he might as well try the other one.

The exact consequences are difficult to predict, but unless this conjures up a bunch of Spring-RTS-playing hours, which I personally do not think it is likely to achieve, it is a close to zero-sum game in terms of which game ends up with more players, meaning that it is not in at least one party's interests. Furthermore it would carry substantial dev-time, bureaucratic, and user confusion costs.