ah2190 said:
Blue Warrior, I was pointing out that luck can play a part with the users you get - at the moment, more noobs seem to be joining. That could be because of bad luck.
Well, it's bad luck that they're still here and growing, that's for sure. The problem is, when someone grows interested in a fad, they share it with a couple of their e-friends, and those guys do the same thing. Many of the same people are told until they're pretty much an internet community camping at the fad. For life. Or something.
Now, let's say that first person is a friggin' noob. Most of his friends are probably noobs as well (with the exception of two or three), and so on. So let that noob tell others, and let them pass it on to other noobs, and repeat the process for two more SRB2 versions; the effects are equivalent to giant e-coli cybering under your master server.
I don't know how big of a role it plays, but it can vary depending on who the noob tells. Let's say he has a mySpace, with about two hundred logged on friends. He puts it in his sig, or whatever the hell mySpace has, and a fourth of those two hundred friends become interested in it. Half of them will repeat the same process. It's unfortunately the smart people that are a little more anonymous about it. Many of them (including me) don't have anything like a mySpace, and even if we did, we wouldn't put in a billion friends. More than half of them would probably be lifeless emos from some other far-off planet where the sky is red anyway. By the looks of things, smarter places, it seems, either don't care, or are just sparse or nearly unpopulated. The effects of advertisement from that angle would have a lesser extent, I would think.
By this point, there would be one thing keeping a person from playing an online game: the community. Let's say times are great, and netgames are almost always of decent or above caliber. There is a wad categorizing system going on that filters all maps that aren't fit for SRB2 on the forums and site, and most hosts use console wisely and effectively. One day, a noob joins a netgame and says "add sms". Everyone else says, "What the hell? Get out." The noob makes a server and puts gravity to 0. Everyone who joins has seen it a hundred times and is not interested, so they leave. The noob is unhappy with the results, so he does not tell his friends what a great game it is. E-coli destroyed.
Let's go to flopside now. Coop servers severely outnumber everything else, sometimes on Skill Easy, with SMS added, or with 999 startrings or gravity 0; sometimes it's just a dumbass who loaded in over nine thousand wads so that nobody could join the "teh awsumest server evar", as the guy named it. At this point, there are already several noob hosts, and many noob joiners, so these acts are only encouraged most of the time by their moronic friends which populate the server. The T-cell of the master server (Alam), is trying to get rid of them, but different ones keep popping up, or the people he bans have a dynamic IP. Meanwhile, the white blood cells of the forums (admins) are shooting freakin' antibodies all over the places, and now they've created a machine gun antibody (easy ban button) to get rid of them ev--
...What the HELL am I doing? I'm having an analogy comparing an online community to the HUMAN BODY. Christ, I've got to end this post before I become more of a nutcase than I already am.
Anyway, even though the smarter part of the community is trying to disencourage the noobs from coming back, they keep on multiplying like friggin' bunnies. The noobs are still coming because there's already several hundred tents of them. It doesn't have much to do with just luck more so than it does with the standard effects of population. Noob immigration, forced noob emigration, but STILL a lot of noob immigration, because they like hanging out with the noobs still living there.
Simply put, there's more noobs coming because we already have noobs. If we could figure out a way to make the noobs shut up, then a large percentage of noob immigration should stop. There. My back hurts for some stupid reason, so I'm going to sleep. Feel free to build on / object to my insane post of an equal length to a life story.