Online Doom Dying?

[beatdown]

I used to play ZDaemon, Skulltag, Zandronum, Doom Legacy and CSDoom online. The FFA, COOP, and other matches had tons of real players and were extremely active up untill 2009 when I stopped playing. I recently started dooming online again and it seems like the online community is dead. Is it just more active on weekends or are a lot of players leaving?

[_reallyTired]

idk man, i put up a server to play with my brother and like an hour in we had like 8 players and had seen like 4 others that had left, i feel like its still active enough

[beatdown]

Yeah man. My brother and I used to DOOM a lot back in the day. I'd been playing since 1996 or so but discovered online dooming back on Doom Connector back in 2003. Maybe I should buy a cheap VPS unit and put up a server for my friends and I to play.

[valkiriforce]

I don't think it's dying, but sometimes there are either special events like Thursday Night Survival or any other server sessions going on at certain times of the day that see a lot of activity. While I've never used Zandronum (which supposedly gets the most activity) I know there are always at least a few active servers on ZDaemon, but I would think it depends on the day and time if you'd like to see more activity.

[Doomkid]

Deathmatch and CTF have reduced dramatically in popularity (which hurts my soul) but the actual numbers are still pretty good. Excluding those stupid Mega Man servers, you can usually find over 100 people between ZD and Zan playing coop/survival, usually with heavy modifications.

 

If you just want to mow through demons with company, there’s no better time than now. If you’re looking for PVP you can still find it, you just have to look a little harder. Between the multiplayer Doom discord and #zdplayers I can always find at least one or two others to DM with me, which almost always leads to a big 8 man FFA.

[Doom64hunter]

I struggle to think of things more stagnant than the online Doom multiplayer scene. People are for the most part still playing the same mods today that they were playing 8 years ago. Stuff like Ghouls vs. Humans, Brutal Doom, Megaman Deathmatch, Master of Puppets, Samsara, Zombie Horde, Duel40, Alien Vendetta, Zdoom wars, Neodoom, Dwango, All Out War... the most recent of these is probably Complex Doom, but even that is essentially just the successor to the ancient "Hard Doom" mod. Remember that?

 

You'd think that over the course of 10 years, the multiplayer scene would have changed completely, with dozens of new popular mods cropping up to replace old favourites. Yet, I come back to check Doomseeker every year, and every year I see the same shit.

[Bauul]

11 minutes ago, Doom64hunter said:

You'd think that over the course of 10 years, the multiplayer scene would have changed completely, with dozens of new popular mods cropping up to replace old favourites. Yet, I come back to check Doomseeker every year, and every year I see the same shit.

 

For mods, I reckon it's source-port related.  The modern modable source port that gets the bulk of the innovative mods (GZDoom) has terrible netcode.  The modern modable source port that has good net code (Zandronum) has seen much fewer developments than GZDoom, so is much less attractive a place to make mods.

 

If GZDoom ever gets proper client/server support, I can see a lot more new multiplayer mods being made for it.

Edited September 14, 2018 by Bauul

[Doomkid]

I suppose a lot of it is old, but everything you just mentioned (other than AV, Dwango and Duel40) is all far too newfangled to me.

 

Even though I rarely use them, I do miss a new popular mod coming out every 2 years or so but now it’s more like the same things (brutal, complex, etc) receiving updates, often pretty substantial ones, so that’s still something. This may just be me but I’m constantly seeing these mods placed alongside new/unfamiliar map sets, so there’s definitely no shortage of new turf.

 

I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to pre-2010 in terms of what gets played if I’m honest.. multiple servers full of deathmatchers and CTFers.. that’d be a treat!

[Marcaek]

Quote

I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to pre-2010 in terms of what gets played if I’m honest.. multiple servers full of deathmatchers and CTFers.. that’d be a treat!

 

I'm convinced the staleness and repetition of what has been played from then till now contributed to why "classic" Doom pvp is on the decline. Regular CTF and DM are honestly pretty overdone in the year of our meme 2018

Edited September 14, 2018 by Marcaek

[Doom64hunter]

21 hours ago, Doomkid said:

I suppose a lot of it is old, but everything you just mentioned (other than AV, Dwango and Duel40) is all far too newfangled to me.

 

Even though I rarely use them, I do miss a new popular mod coming out every 2 years or so but now it’s more like the same things (brutal, complex, etc) receiving updates, often pretty substantial ones, so that’s still something. This may just be me but I’m constantly seeing these mods placed alongside new/unfamiliar map sets, so there’s definitely no shortage of new turf.

 

I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to pre-2010 in terms of what gets played if I’m honest.. multiple servers full of deathmatchers and CTFers.. that’d be a treat!

 

You know, I totally agree with you. I miss seeing competitive gamemodes like TDM and CTF on Skulltag/Zandronum. I also miss gamemodes like Last Man Standing, Possession, Skulltag and Terminator. I especially miss regular Coop, Survival and Invasion servers without gameplay mods like Complex Doom, Brutal Doom or whatever being thrown in like some disgusting artificial flavoring.

 

Maybe I should check out Zdaemon again at some point. Zandronum is clearly on the decline in terms of variety.

 

Edit: Also, in regards to old mods receiving substantial updates: Even if they do get updates, at its core it's still the same mod. There's very little variety in that. And in most cases I feel that less is more; personally I'd love to play the original GvH before all the addons with these myriads of playable classes were added to it. You can't get that anymore nowadays either.

Edited September 15, 2018 by Doom64hunter

[Decay]

6 hours ago, Doom64hunter said:

Maybe I should check out Zdaemon again at some point. Zandronum is clearly on the decline in terms of variety.

Possibly one of the most backwards statements I've read on these forums.

[LexiMax]

Yeah, traffic isn't what it once was.  But it's far from dead.

 

As for why the stagnation, I think that there are simply not enough new players playing the game, and the old blood has gotten tired of the game.  The latter happens naturally to any game, but I have a theory about the former.

 

I suspect it was a lot easier to discover and play Doom in the 2000's because it was easy and cheap (or dare I say it, free) to get hold of, and ran on literally any toaster of a PC you had, even if you didn't have 3D acceleration.  There wasn't a whole lot of competition in that space, so it was easier to get new players.

 

However, these days, even cheap laptops have some form of hardware acceleration.  Plus, there is now an absolute glut of free to play or cheap games out there such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, and so on.  And that's even assuming somebody has a PC - I bet that in terms of percentages less people have access and the desire to use a "home" PC today than a decade ago, since smartphones and tablets exist.

 

So yeah, in a market like that, Multiplayer Doom has some pretty tough competition for people's attention these days.