Would you play online more if other people played?

I played a bit on some Odamex coop servers around 2012. They were running Freedoom, and another one had the free version of Hell to Pay.
Last year I tried again with Odamex but I couldn't build the server browser on my Linux ARM system (the Doom engine works fine though). And now they have a more recent version of Odamex, but it needs all new SDL libraries and other crap I don't want to bother with.

I haven't given much time to the recent versions of Odamex, but in my experience I like it a lot. It has some 'coop rotation' servers that essentially run every classic megawad, so by going to one server you can play any wad you like by doing a callvote. It's also had the long awaited survival coop mode for a while, and the 2022 cacowards made a big splash about how many maps the hellforge made for horde mode, but who cares if no one is playing it?

odamex.net/servers

xeepeep That one person was me lol, i just played a little bit of sunlust out of curiosity but map06 broke on some kinda boom voodoo doll thing. Gotta look for vanilla maps I think.

I was responding to Xeep-Eep originally, who clearly has some type of brain damage from his reply and post history.

40oz, you obviously are an old player and understand how server browsers work, most people in 2023 DO NOT. We have noticed a trend over the past 2-3 years where new players come to our Discord and have no idea how server browsers work. They don't understand that joining "open" servers is the norm for Doom because commercial games haven't operated like that in decades. Many of these new users think that the servers in a list are "other people's servers" for the "other people" to play on. Once they're finally in speaking with other people, it's easy to convey how it works but in general they don't get the concept that you just join pre-configured servers. This is something we started realizing about a couple years ago and it honestly becomes more apparent as time goes on.

Modern games don't use the Quake server browser model. Instead, players are usually dropped into some sort of matchmaking or have the ability to spin up their own custom game with friends straight from a menu. "Running a server" is a foreign concept to them. Further, the way that people play games has changed. Players used to idle in servers waiting for opponents. This doesn't happen anymore. People want action instantly, they don't want to wait. It's why I give credit to ZDaemon's forced closed community as a way to continuously engage their existing player base. They also have a handful of really dedicated people willing to put time into events. However, as we get even further from Doom's release and gaming trends change, I stand by my opinion that absent something significant happening, you will never see 100+ active players on actual Doom (read: not megaman or non-doom like mods) servers again. We can see that there are hundreds to thousands of new people trying to play Doom online over the course of maybe a month, but they don't understand it and then leave.

Your approach to running a weekly event is the way to go. Last year we ran a weekly Horde event and were pulling dozens of unique users for every event, every week. Consistency and longevity is really the bread and butter.

Also, you gotta read my damn post, because I never said "we give up" or things aren't going to get better. I'm simply surveying the landscape as someone who has been passionately involved in multiplayer for 20+ years. I said the engines need to do something different if they want to draw more people in. I can only speak for the Odamex team but we're looking at solutions to these issues. Of course, most of our developers are not in their teens anymore so we're all limited by time.

ralphis has a point. But the pushback you're going to get from places like this is from the idea of consolidation: let's say Odamex+ Suparsteam Matchmaker runs from (or is affiliated with) the doomworld servers: well, that's the non-soy userbase fucked, cuz we're all banned.

No moar doom for the homeless. In this scenario, you can see why people might be against the idea of putting yet further community eggs into linguica's famous bukkake basket.

Odamex is a great solid port. It's incredible how vanilla it is down to being demo compatible and is a ZDoom at the same time with all the Hexen scripting, polyobjs, colored lighting, and now even more expanded dehacked with decorate-ish expansion features. Also it has the best online performance. 200 players of course isn't that smooth, but it is an impressively hilarious experiment. Decino has some great stress test videos, of both deathmatch and coop and one of the funniest things was seeing a ton of marines with pistols just maul a spider mastermind in a second or less like army ants.


Also, Dew might be swimming in that basket.