Build and Shoot

We are nearing the 1 year anniversary of the founding of Build and Shoot, however I do not feel that Ace of Spades is moving in a good direction.

Lets go back 2 years, back when Territory Control had just been released, and the HUD began to resemble today's .75. If you asked me what the future of Ace of Spades was, I probably would have told you that it would remain pretty much as-is, fluctuating between 800-1500 players and keeping in a steady pattern, until Ben made a major move and beyond that it was up in the air. It was unlikely the game would be as massive as it was in the initial months until some kind of 1.0 was released.

Of course we know that that's not what happened and Jagex intervened. The steam version launched with it's fast paced, "Call of Duty" game play, and essentially was a commercial failure and has basically fizzled out today after going through several development teams and strategies.

And here we are today, similar to as we were 2 years ago, staying at around 600-800 players. Except I do not see a bright future.

If you asked me what gameplay would be like in two years, I would have enthusiastically and optimistically painted a landscape of a nondescript trench warfare game with some weapons, maybe a Mounted Machinegun, 64 players, essentially a polished version of .75

Where are we? Well, it's basically about 8 or so servers hosting various Arena and TDM gamemodes, with babel and CTF being the exceptions. Most of these servers are hosting Hallway, Pinpoint, Nuketown, etc. Aside from these few servers, everything else is empty.

And people wonder why the masses still seem very uninterested in .75? (hint: it's not the Steam Version)

We are the problem. When people weren't arguing about rifle/smg/shotgun balance on the old forums, there was a general consensus that Ace of Spades should not be Arena/TDM shooter #238424 where all the players are 12. And that's honestly what has happened.

A huge amount of the original community has left Ace of Spades, and that's because it doesn't feel like Ace of Spades anymore. It's TDM or CTF on some flat map where you can't tunnel or dig trenches, its arena where you can't even build at all, its babel on the same old island maps (seriously I'm fucking sick of these bright colored island maps covered in buildings already, they all play the same)

I've thought this through so much and I'm still not sure what can be done. Basically, I'm disappointed in how 90% of the populated servers are Jagex's AoS lite without the shitty gimmicks and classes.

Discuss
[Note: None of this is aimed at anyone in particular, I'm basically venting my absolute boredom with what is being offered by Ace of Spades right now]

|Update|

Seeing as this thread still gets bumped every few weeks, I feel like I should add some solutions to this problem which were discussed in the weeks following

-Create community events based on all types of game modes
-Using Openspades to modify the game
-Use the BnS launcher and modify server lists to better accommodate a multitude of game modes
-Accept that most of the community has moved on and continue as we are

removed

I hate Arena

Jesus, I just looked at the current server list. Excluding Shams(which is woefully underpopulated) and skynet(which is the only other server hosting an acceptable map/gamemode. not sure how good the server actually is) I wouldnt even touch them with a 50ft stick. Guess I have zero reason to reinstall spades now.

True.

Fluttershy wrote:

skynet(which is the only other server hosting an acceptable map/gamemode. not sure how good the server actually is).

The master server seems to over report it's player counts, and it has Anticbridge in it's lineup, which is enough to make me stay away.

What do you propose we do?

jdrew wrote:

What do you propose we do?

Well the easiest thing to do would be fucking ban arena mode and flat maps because imo they are retarded and have no place in the game. That won't happen though because they have been around for so long the community has become attached to them.
The next easiest step would to have at least one server hosting A good rotation of maps as well as having server hosts who aren't on a different planet and can't be communicated with.

Every few months one of these servers will pop up with good maps, good gamemodes, etc, but the owners are no where to be found and the server dies in a week because there's hackers everywhere

(keep in mind the only thing separating these servers from things like Aloha ToW is that Aloha just doesn't get shut down, it remains empty)

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Hopefully this whole "VoxelAuth" thing I keep hearing about every once in a while gets finished and helps weed out the players who are just playing AoS because it requires no effort to download.

Haven't played AoS in a long while. Came back after seeing this whole OpenSpades thing which looks pretty awesome (best of luck, yvt).

I'm still pretty shocked at how much AoS has changed. Going to sound like a whiny old bastard, but I do miss having nothing but rifles and teams being hills versus rivers. Tried playing 0.75 and found the rifle laughably inaccurate against anything near the fog line. At least 0.76 has improved rifle accuracy, but it still seems a bit off.

Never heard of Arena but I also haven't played anything outside of CTF, really. I have played on a few flat maps, and I don't really like them, as it just boils down to whoever can break past 1-2 block-thick defenses and spawn camp.

Also, sorry for the moronics, but I thought nothing could really be done with AoS in terms of updates thanks to Jagex owning it? I'm really behind on AoS and a quick run-down/clarification/tl;DR or what the fuck ever would be really appreciated.

DetectDefective wrote:

Also, sorry for the moronics, but I thought nothing could really be done with AoS in terms of updates thanks to Jagex owning it? I'm really behind on AoS and a quick run-down/clarification/tl;DR or what the fuck ever would be really appreciated.

Jagex probably would not like us publishing a .77, but we already have several "mods" and "updates". Greasemonkey basically re-made the early Ace of Spades as "Iceball", as well as creating an actual "mod" in the regular sense (not skins/models) which allows for 64 players as well as other optimizations and backwards compatibility.

I highly suggest checking out the "Noteworthy Picks" section

tbh Jagex seems to care so little about there own game that I doubt they would go through the effort of suing BnS for any of these mods.

;_; sad thread is sad.

Articsledder wrote:

Jagex probably would not like us publishing a .77

Articsledder wrote:

tbh Jagex seems to care so little about there own game that I doubt they would go through the effort of suing BnS for any of these mods.

In that case, let's release a 1.0.

Well what we can do is have a way to set priority on the serverlist on load. A way for us to highlight a gamemode or map and it would be listed above everything else.

Now this would be interesting, possibly a "server of the week" or something?

I'm almost convinced that the mods here are in some way associated with Jagex tbh.

The silence is deafening!

fatty wrote:

I'm almost convinced that the mods here are in some way associated with Jagex tbh.

The silence is deafening!

I can't imagine what trauma led you to that conclusion.