Savage - Why I wont promote it....

[RogueAgent]

Savage : Battle for Newearth - Why I wont promote it....and why I encourage you NOT to play it.....yet

This game has some serious potential. It looks like it could be a really awesome game, but at the moment it is beta and is as buggy as hell. We tried it at TD for some length and it was really unplayable due to lag on LAN. I've since been to their website to find out more and discover that it is very much a work in progress.

So, obviously I wont promote it at the moment because if you picked it up and played it you'd probably think it was crap and wouldnt give it a second look later when its better. But why am I encouraging people NOT to play it now ?

Well....I've seen plenty of games come and go. A lot of games that I would call 'one month wonders' where they hit the scene, everyone gets excited about it and then a month later its dead. Basically, I dont want to see this happen to Savage.

We've all seen games like UT2K3, C&C Generals and War3 hit the LAN scene but struggle to take hold as people revert back to the much older Quake3 and CS - because they have an established following down here. While Sydney LANs are moving onto better, more recent games, we struggle to get a following for such games in Wollongong.....why ?

The most successful new games I've seen have been ones where everyone discovers it at around the same time and all players therefore start at around the same level. People have some fun, develop some skills and the game gets a decent following....a critical mass is reached that is large enough to survive the one month wonder syndrome and develop a solid player base.
This is what (almost) happenned with Tribes 1 some years ago. About 20 of us ALL got in at the ground floor at the same time and after a bit of development it became one of the few games where a local rep team was formed to go up to Sydney and take on teams up there.

However, some games just dont cut the mustard and this isnt possible for them. I dont believe that Savage will be one of these lesser games, but there is another danger that could prevent this game from getting a following.....

Now despite claims to the contrary, Savage does have a learning curve. It has a strong RTS element which puts it above the average LANners 'complexity sweet spot' [(c) Azog]
If a few people go ballistic on this game now, then by the time the game is ready for mass consumption (maybe in a few months) there will be raw noobs and then there will be top class players. This IS the sort of game where a rank noob will get raped severely by someone who is a whore at the game. I know guys like Gretchen (who did this with Battlezone 2 and then wondered why no-one wanted to play anymore) will play this game to death and when everyone else gets on board he'll smash them, get a bit of an ego trip, but then will shoot himself in the foot because the game wont take hold as people get raped and dont have fun. Possibly also, people who play it a lot now will possibly be sick of it by the time it is ready for mass consumption and just as everyone else is picking up the game, they'll be putting it down and once again we will fail to achieve that critical mass of players required to develop a decent following for this game.

It'd be much better for all of us if we left Savage alone for the next couple of months and then ALL TOGETHER give it a good push when the game is fixed.
Dont get me wrong, I like CS and Q3, but it'd be really nice if some other games had a decent following down here so we could get some diversity in our diets.....

/end rant

[Lord Shaper]

Dont get me wrong, I like CS and Q3, but it'd be really nice if some other games had a decent following down here so we could get some diversity in our diets.....


I have always pushed for a UT following down there but only have a small core group who play it... also other games we have tried which are simalar to savage (ie: Giants and Rune) which never seemed to have the following take off (even tho I would have loved it if they did) but Savage does seem to take the fun bits from both games and make them better...

I'm waiting to see the final result and hopefully an ongoing game for years to come

[cpd]

Hear hear! Hell yes.

I like that because, as you said, get everyone off on the same foot. As could be demonstrated with Call Of Duty at TD; myself, Mouse, and Irwin played it a fair bit the night before and so would almost rape anyone at it the next day. But yeah. Sentiments.

[Mouse]

and as much as cpd played it...

he still got owen'd

:D

take it

[cpd]

Fine, next time, no ADSL or gamez for you and Slinger.

Owen'd indeed. Bitch.

[Mouse]

:shock: awwww...no fair!

although i still stand by comment :lol:

[FenR|R]

well...savage is available for purchase...ive been playing it a bit here and there with the full version and fuck me, i havent been impressed with a game other than CS in a very long time. the most charming thing about it is greg...even if one guy does play the shit out of it...and knows everything...hes not gonna do much in the end..because the game is like 900000 percent focused on the team...ive played it on lan 2v2...and like...thats proof that 2 ppl can do fuck all..it was an eternal stalemate

and as for the buggyness....while it runs like a complete S H I T on my system...lan pings were still fine..no real game bug issues ive noticed yet...but yeah..if your running an old system..look out..
on my 1.2 with gf3ti200 256 sd

it gets denied

but alas...this game which everyone should ave right now..and should be playing right now, gets my thumbs up and even if i become all godly aty it..or even slightly mroe knowledgable..ITS YOUR FAULT FOR NOT PLAYING IT NOW )(&#^$*&#^$&

thats my 20 cents

[Mouse]

lol nicely said nigz

i didnt play this at TD...mainly coz im just not a fan of those types of games...but it did look fun

might give it a go.....i got the demo on CD here...

/plays

[VenoM]

no most the new games dont get a following cause in the end we go THEY FRIGGEN SUCK!

Like ngz, he played the shit outa SC/D2 and now hates the games... i dont mind them but heh.

ut2k3 or what ever looked promising but then just bit the dust when it needed a vgood pc to run properly, and looked too fairy tale pansy like.

war3, was awesome what can i say? was well played, and overplayed by some (nex), and then TFT came out, not usually does an expansion kill a game so quickly, however it happened.

MOHAA, im not sure why it didnt take off, i quite liked it...

New game of the future, Call of Duty@!!!@$!$!$

Quake 3, has pretty much died aswell now.

CS/Half life games will die if valve introduce this pricing thin to LAN cafes to play there games or to host servers etc.

WOW will be foookin good so everyone play that bye@

[RogueAgent]

Interesting.....
I'm pretty sure that at last TD everyone lagged severely in Savage, maybe we had an older version ? Maybe everyones computers just sucked ?
Dont know, but if you can show me how to make it playable then I'll be onto this like stink on a monkey.

In the meantime Nigz, please dont play it to death so much that you hate it later when everyone is starting to pick it up :o

Interesting comments from Ven too.
I'm sure if people keep an open mind on new games and get involved when we try organising different games at TD we will be able to find something that will stick.
I was really pleasantly surprised last TD when we got 14+ people playing Wolf:ET at the end of the day. Should we try that again ?

[FenR|R]

the lag problems haoopened in every game not jsut savage....


and i cant play it to death

56k hurts :( even though it runs fair good on it

[Yoda]

Yeah. As I understand it the quake 3 games were horrible at times (though got better)... bit hard to make a judgement in that situation.

Guess you'll find out next time.

[RogueAgent]

Well I played a lot of games on the day and while there was some lag in most games it was nothing compared to Savage, which I found unplayable. But maybe thats just because I have a 1.4 Athlon and a GeForce2.
The PCYC should be picking up some GigaBit gear in the next week or two so I think the network lag experienced last TD is unlikely to return.

[Yoda]

:o

I thought you'd done that already... orsm

[RogueAgent]

I had hoped we would have had access to GB gear already, but there are certain PCYC procedures that have to be followed and now that the NYA is dead we are fully dependant on the PCYC for everything.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, there were delays and complications, but we're pretty confident things will happen soon - atleast in time for next TD.

[Yoda]

Yeah I wont get into that ;)

cool.

[Mouse]

hmmm kewl

might have to pick myself up a gigbit NIC :D

[Corporal]

New game of the future, Call of Duty@!!!@$!$!$

here here... i dunno if yas talked about this or not yet, but fk me this game is king. getting through the game on the hardest difficulty is good fun... stalingrad...

any else spot some of the voices? i think i heard giovanni ribisi and jason stathon (think that's his name... turkish from snatch :P)

[Beecha]

I also noticed the names of your squad mates seem to be taken from actual soldiers.... (wether this is 100% accurate or intentional is something else) but while I was fighting with Baker company in D-Day I spotted a Lt. Spears.. Anyone who's watched Band of Brothers would recognise that name as the Lt. from baker company who played a notable role in Easy in the later half of the series....

[Corporal]

Baker company... can't really call it that... i mean it was a mix ;P

fkn utah, dog, fox + baker or something

[cpd]

There's a nice blend of realism and I love it. I think I almost cried in the first Russian mission, seeing that many models on screen at one time. And getting mown down continually like every other hopeless Russian soldier out on the field that day. Goddamn.

[VenoM]

i was interested to see how TD sets up there network, because i dont understand the lag problems...
are use running 4 games from 1 server machine? with it not being configured properly?

how are they set up what type of network?
i dont think it was just games affected, i got 8mb/sec from someone down the other end, but when it came to someone close i got 50k/sec.

is someone adding cables where they're not ment to be??
only time ive experienced lag like this was testing cross over cables from switch to switch to reduce lag but instead it just made loop back feed and fucked the entire thing..

personally i do not think Gigabit switches will solve that lag problem we had, it is something else. 100MBIT switches should be sufficent for under a 100 person lan, maybe they are poor quality or something :o

[RogueAgent]

Yes, the switches are old and are beginning to fail. They have a low buffer throughput and the central switch in the 'star' effectively cops most of the traffic through the entire network (unless traffic is going from port to port in the one switch). Resulting collissions cause a major grinding down of the network with packet loss etc.
TD before last Scorpion had borrowed an 8 port Gigabit switch with high buffer and we ran with no real dramas.

Put simply, the switches we have are around 3 years old and have been doing the rounds with all the other LANs too, they have been knocked around a bit and need replacing as some perform erratically or straight out poorly.
A new network should fix everything and while the PCYC is close to purchasing 'some' gear, it will be a while before ALL the old equipment is replaced.
The main thing we need at the moment is a new centerpiece and we will soon have it.

Logic fails you all

[Lord Shaper]

How can you use logic in an illogical world?

[cpd]

Logic fails you all
Your postcount fails you.

[Lord Shaper]

but not me

[Warc]

TD is always welcome to use WLF's equiptment, if you need it again in the future all you have to do is ask.

Peace

[cpd]

Actually, I played this game the other night thinking I'd hate it.

I love it.

Even commander mode. Although I just want to yell at the workers to move faster.

[eza]

personally,

on saturday night i played it on ngz ' s COmputer and it was cool, its fun to make yourself a soldier and shoot the ostriches :twisted:

[Bowen]

I dont know if any of you guys heard me, but there is a problem with it. I dont know if its a bug or a setting but if you hit the "tiller key" (or what ever its called above Tab) you will notice it is spamming 1 line over and over in the cmd interface. this seems to be the only cause of the lag because online it doesnt happen at all.

I would put it down to the game trying to contact some online central server. running silverback.exe doesnt seem to rectify this problem either even though its supposed to bypass online checking of the server. If anyone else can find a resolution to this problem then we can enjoy a relatively lag free game.

:idea: p.s. I would have to blame alot of the lag issues with the network configuration in regards to the switchs/hubs. If alot of people are copying files then that will cause an issue even with a switched network if the switches are connected via uplinks to a central switch through a 100meg connection. I didnt get around to looking at the configuration at the last TD lan but I'm guessing they configured the network in this fashion.

[Bowen]

QA|renegadeavenger
Administrator posted December 13, 2003 03:55 PM
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Hmmm, there will be a new Savage patch coming out soon with new netcode. Hopefully it will help with your performance of the game.

This was cut/pasted from official Savage Forum.
http://support.s2games.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=959609965&f=7066089804&m=8416008134&inc=1