Author Topic: GTM is reclining  (Read 9677 times)

Offline yugitom

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #20 on: August 12, 2016, 05:12:46 PM »
@R01 The idea is to get participation to spike in the competitive area and hope all others follow. I do see where you are coming from, though.

Thank you to everyone that has given their input on the tournament! I'll be sure to definitely flesh  out what I already have concerning the details of the tournament when it's a bit more convenient.

Offline 090901

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #21 on: August 12, 2016, 05:32:49 PM »


rest in piss gtm, never forget.

Offline 09090901

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #22 on: August 12, 2016, 06:28:45 PM »
One thing people should take note of is that the average age of the fourm is probably a lot older than it used to be in 2008-11. A lot of regulars here are in their late teens or somewhere in there 20s and have more important irl stuff to deal with like work/school.

Usually there's enough of a younger "generation" that joins to take their place, but right now we've been kinda hurting for new members.

I'd say the lack of top-tier builders probably isn't helping the showcase section either. Doesn't help that most of the good builders are in the same category as the former.
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Offline frezal

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #23 on: August 12, 2016, 08:06:36 PM »
One thing people should take note of is that the average age of the fourm is probably a lot older than it used to be in 2008-11. A lot of regulars here are in their late teens or somewhere in there 20s and have more important irl stuff to deal with like work/school.
Yeah, when I joined the community, I was around 12 or 13. Now I am in my late twenties. Yick! Just as I am moving ever further away from my youth, RA2, too, is forever aging. It isn't a hot new game. Kids don't see it on the shelf at Target and think, "Cool, that's like Battlebots!" Hell, kids don't even buy PC games from Target anymore. They go on Steam. If they stumble upon Robot Arena on there, they will instead find the disappointment that is RA3.


RA3, in many ways, both built and cursed this community. It was always a hypothetical; a representation of our hope. When the game launched, hope was tarnished. Even with the resurgence of Battlebots and Robot Wars, we will never get the RA3 we wished for. We are no longer anticipating or wishing for anything.


Without a change of focus, we'll simply be a forum dedicated to a thirteen-year-old budget title, and numbers will continue to decrease.
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Offline Kossokei

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #24 on: August 12, 2016, 10:06:26 PM »
One thing people should take note of is that the average age of the fourm is probably a lot older than it used to be in 2008-11. A lot of regulars here are in their late teens or somewhere in there 20s and have more important irl stuff to deal with like work/school.
Yeah, when I joined the community, I was around 12 or 13. Now I am in my late twenties. Yick! Just as I am moving ever further away from my youth, RA2, too, is forever aging. It isn't a hot new game. Kids don't see it on the shelf at Target and think, "Cool, that's like Battlebots!" Hell, kids don't even buy PC games from Target anymore. They go on Steam. If they stumble upon Robot Arena on there, they will instead find the disappointment that is RA3.


RA3, in many ways, both built and cursed this community. It was always a hypothetical; a representation of our hope. When the game launched, hope was tarnished. Even with the resurgence of Battlebots and Robot Wars, we will never get the RA3 we wished for. We are no longer anticipating or wishing for anything.


Without a change of focus, we'll simply be a forum dedicated to a thirteen-year-old budget title, and numbers will continue to decrease.
In a perfect world, RA3: DSL would come in after RA3's hype. But we don't have that hope anymore, it's not even hypothetical at this point.

Who has the gumption to mod it? I know I've said this before. For one reason or another (and I don't mean to sound dismissive in that sense) we no longer have the DSL dream team that wrought the original DSL from iron. Sure, we still got Click, but Click put his hail mary's into DSL2.2. It's time for Click to rest- I don't mean it like "alright you're dead click get the hell out already", but I know before releasing 2.2 he definitely made a post like "I'm putting all I have left into DSL".

Who else, then? 123 dropped the mic, dabbed and backflipped off stage with Ironforge. I don't think the RA2RW team is interested in doing a TC in the same manner. Joeblo is too backed up to lash out at the aftershock of RA3, and I don't know what Naryar or AS plans to do.

That's all of the people who've done large-scale mods/retools in the last like 4 years as far as I know. Unless someone with hunger in their eyes and a fire in their heart steps up, the last of the hype trains have left, and it left like a bad orgasm with a 4/10 hooker who doesn't know a wang from a toilet brush.

Offline TommyProductionsInc

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #25 on: August 13, 2016, 01:26:32 AM »
We should stop talking about how this forum is dying and start working on keeping it alive. I've already contacted/bothered various people regarding this situation.

If you guys really care about this forum, then you should start talking to people about saving this website. It could be the starting ground for a whole new generation of new robot builders to come about, helping robot combat stay relevant in general.

(INB4 someone calls me out for being too optomistic and stupid.)

Offline madman3

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #26 on: August 13, 2016, 05:45:25 AM »
i'm too old now to feud with nary in all caps so yeah this forum is boring

now i can vaguely play dsl2.2 i'm up for enterring tournaments (probably only HW ones cus sub HWs are boring for me personally)

Offline Mystic2000

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #27 on: August 13, 2016, 06:41:53 AM »
the fact that this game is aging and that every option and attempt at making it interesting (well unless Retooled succeds in making this game fun and interesting to tinker with) has already been tried isn't really gonna help with the forum s'present state, a wide-scale tournament could help to kick the forum activity back up, but it will only last so long cause it will still end up being the same boring game in the long run, and making mods and sh** won't change that, i recall 123 saying after he released IF that even with this mod, it was the same boring thing again, really at this point, it's a new game that is required, but now that RA3 is proven to be a massive pile of sh**, i don't think there really is much hope left
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Offline RpJk

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #28 on: August 13, 2016, 07:15:07 AM »
GTM will stilll keep going for another few years at least. It's a good forum, it's just in a quiet period which I'm guessing is common. I'm only here like once a week now compared to when I used to check it practically every hour of everyday when I had interest in RA2. Now it's only because of forum news and able to talk about games.

This and the fact that my position here has been sealed here for a few years now.
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Offline 09090901

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #29 on: August 13, 2016, 08:08:25 AM »
Only thing I could see that would give more interest long term is working multiplater. RA3 kind of has that even though I've never seen it actually work.

We could try organizing some RA2 online tournaments. Have everything divided into regions to reduce lag as much as possible and maybe have third-party hosts to make things fair. Not really sure how well it'll go but I'd be willing to try.
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Offline playzooki

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #30 on: August 13, 2016, 09:51:05 AM »
We could try organizing some RA2 online tournaments. Have everything divided into regions to reduce lag as much as possible and maybe have third-party hosts to make things fair. Not really sure how well it'll go but I'd be willing to try.
I'd also like to do this. I remember a few of us did an organized online ra2 thing once, i quite enjoyed it.

Offline cephalopod

Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #31 on: August 13, 2016, 09:59:03 AM »
This and the fact that my position here has been sealed here for a few years now.

Attitudes like this don't help the appearance of the forum man
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Offline R01

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #32 on: August 13, 2016, 11:29:04 AM »
One thing people should take note of is that the average age of the fourm is probably a lot older than it used to be in 2008-11. A lot of regulars here are in their late teens or somewhere in there 20s and have more important irl stuff to deal with like work/school.
Yeah, when I joined the community, I was around 12 or 13. Now I am in my late twenties. Yick! Just as I am moving ever further away from my youth, RA2, too, is forever aging. It isn't a hot new game. Kids don't see it on the shelf at Target and think, "Cool, that's like Battlebots!" Hell, kids don't even buy PC games from Target anymore. They go on Steam. If they stumble upon Robot Arena on there, they will instead find the disappointment that is RA3.


RA3, in many ways, both built and cursed this community. It was always a hypothetical; a representation of our hope. When the game launched, hope was tarnished. Even with the resurgence of Battlebots and Robot Wars, we will never get the RA3 we wished for. We are no longer anticipating or wishing for anything.


Without a change of focus, we'll simply be a forum dedicated to a thirteen-year-old budget title, and numbers will continue to decrease.
In a perfect world, RA3: DSL would come in after RA3's hype. But we don't have that hope anymore, it's not even hypothetical at this point.

Who has the gumption to mod it? I know I've said this before. For one reason or another (and I don't mean to sound dismissive in that sense) we no longer have the DSL dream team that wrought the original DSL from iron. Sure, we still got Click, but Click put his hail mary's into DSL2.2. It's time for Click to rest- I don't mean it like "alright you're dead click get the hell out already", but I know before releasing 2.2 he definitely made a post like "I'm putting all I have left into DSL".

Who else, then? 123 dropped the mic, dabbed and backflipped off stage with Ironforge. I don't think the RA2RW team is interested in doing a TC in the same manner. Joeblo is too backed up to lash out at the aftershock of RA3, and I don't know what Naryar or AS plans to do.

That's all of the people who've done large-scale mods/retools in the last like 4 years as far as I know. Unless someone with hunger in their eyes and a fire in their heart steps up, the last of the hype trains have left, and it left like a bad orgasm with a 4/10 hooker who doesn't know a wang from a toilet brush.
I've thought about that, while that's true it doesn't have to be a bad thing.
A lot of people who originally watched Robot Wars are adults now, so are a lot that played this game.
As an adult you sadly don't have that much time anymore, but more and more have started to still play videogames. We're (hopefully) no longer in a age where people say "you're playing videogames? That's for kids" and having a adult fanbase can be a good thing as stuff can be discussed without situations like "mods, that guy made a better bot than mine, ban him", you know, we can actually act like adults and I wouldn't mind having this forum be like that.

Of course, new games allow for new things and refresh the fanbase that way, RA2 however still allows for a lot and I think all this meta stuff is part of the reason why it got killed off. Since we're adults now we know if a bot is fair or not, and I'd love seeing a tournament where people try to focus to make all kinds of different designs of bots, with them being in the same effectiveness category.

I've seen this "update=new hype and activity" before, let me take Terraria as example. Originally in that game you would end up having many weapon choices for the endgame, as time went on however it turned more and more into a game that lived on getting new updates, it turned into this "new update out, new better weapons, all your old stuff is useless now", 1.2 somewhat fixed that by adding weapon variety, but the halloween and later xmas update did the same thing again and even in it's current state the game is like that, only getting a small few updates that flesh out the game which disappoint a big part of the community.

Said part is one that requires the updates to keep on playing the game(it doesn't help that the game doesn't have much variety either), so don't be surprised that the forum gets inactive over time because no such updates happen anymore. RA2 does have a lot of variety, but with only a few designs being the meta I feel like that's what caused some people to no longer be interested in building stuff.

I don't know if RA2 was really known that well back then(personally I don't think so, which makes me wonder how it got it's original popularity) but one thing I noticed is that if you do a youtube search for RA2 you will find some small LP's(which never really got to good bots, even for stock ai levels) Nerd3cubed's videos and a few videos of people playing with the DSL AI, all of which are rather old, you won't find any of the tournaments because they don't have that in the name and I doubt they appear near any Robot Wars or Battlebots video.

Adding Robot Arena 2 to the tags could maybe change his, of course adding Robot Wars or Battlebots shouldn't be done as it would end up showing only those videos instead of the content that the user wants(but YT seems to have a different system for this anyways), but I feel like seeing some new stuff or different creations could interest some people in this game.

We might not attract many young people with this anymore, but that doesn't mean that we can't get adults to join this forum and still have fun with the game.

As for RA3, Serge has actually done some stuff for it, but I doubt that we will ever see a full mod for it.
I'm personally interested in modding RA2 but think it would require a lot of time of effort for a game that's really old and not exactly stable/not allowing some things to work properly due to it's mechanics.

I did think about online multiplayer before and how well non hamachi multiplayer would work but I haven't had time to test that yet.
Tournament History:
Showcases:
https://gametechmods.com/forums/index.php?topic=18882.0
https://gametechmods.com/forums/index.php?topic=19197.0

Offline Thyrus

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #33 on: August 13, 2016, 11:48:11 AM »
For my part I must say that I lost motivation for the game. Motivation not interest. I caught myself enjoying gmod alot more recently.
I haven't started the game for a few months and I visit this site very rarely. So much so that my mod title should be in question.

Also I agree with frezal on pretty much everything

Offline 090901

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #34 on: August 13, 2016, 12:18:40 PM »
doesn't help that we basically hit an efficiency wall basically a couple years ago so the more competitive area of ra2 is boring as hell

Offline RedAce

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #35 on: August 13, 2016, 12:45:46 PM »
The DSL Reborn AI for me was one of the last things I just had fun doing.  The competitive scene for RA2 is just not interesting to me anymore.  I might be able to crank out new bot for a tournament (or just to make something I know will be trash just for the sake of making a bot for funsies), but because you need to have wedges to make anything good anymore.  When the wedge is trash, then all that effort in making an interesting robot is pretty much gone and it drains me.  The last time I actually had fun building something for a tournament was my Tricycle Takedown entry since I didn't really take it seriously but it was still fun to watch it fight.

I hate to say it myself, but I think I might be retiring from RA2 if there is nothing left that I am really looking forward to most likely by the end of the year (assuming GTM lasts that long).

Offline Sage

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #36 on: August 13, 2016, 12:47:33 PM »
if retooled get's finished let's do the tourney in that mod like a week after release. There would be no meta and it would be exciting. Have multiple hosts to speed up production, dedicated AI team to get through that phase quickly, and perhaps even commentary.

Putting a tournament on one person's shoulders has been the norm but really it doesn't make sense
You got my vote for RA2 Wizard. Always and forever.

Offline R01

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #37 on: August 13, 2016, 01:11:38 PM »
The DSL Reborn AI for me was one of the last things I just had fun doing.  The competitive scene for RA2 is just not interesting to me anymore.  I might be able to crank out new bot for a tournament (or just to make something I know will be trash just for the sake of making a bot for funsies), but because you need to have wedges to make anything good anymore.  When the wedge is trash, then all that effort in making an interesting robot is pretty much gone and it drains me.  The last time I actually had fun building something for a tournament was my Tricycle Takedown entry since I didn't really take it seriously but it was still fun to watch it fight.

I hate to say it myself, but I think I might be retiring from RA2 if there is nothing left that I am really looking forward to most likely by the end of the year (assuming GTM lasts that long).
Sad to hear that, for me you were always one of the great almost veteran members who is still playing. My post is apparently too big to be read, so let me quote some important parts:
Quote
A lot of people who originally watched Robot Wars are adults now, so are a lot that played this game.
As an adult you sadly don't have that much time anymore, but more and more have started to still play videogames. We're (hopefully) no longer in a age where people say "you're playing videogames? That's for kids" and having a adult fanbase can be a good thing as stuff can be discussed without situations like "mods, that guy made a better bot than mine, ban him", you know, we can actually act like adults and I wouldn't mind having this forum be like that.
Quote
Of course, new games allow for new things and refresh the fanbase that way, RA2 however still allows for a lot and I think all this meta stuff is part of the reason why it got killed off. Since we're adults now we know if a bot is fair or not, and I'd love seeing a tournament where people try to focus to make all kinds of different designs of bots, with them being in the same effectiveness category.
When I wrote that part about fair bots I was thinking about your AI bots, how we would have all kinds of different designs that don't all have a wedge/half sheet glued on to them. Those bots would be like FIVES.

If we got advanced AI coding(everyone seems to mostly copy existing ai nowadays) or working online multiplayer(which might be possible) we could have more intelligent fights where strategy would play a important role instead of clash of wedges, whoever gets under the other bot first wins.

if retooled get's finished let's do the tourney in that mod like a week after release. There would be no meta and it would be exciting. Have multiple hosts to speed up production, dedicated AI team to get through that phase quickly, and perhaps even commentary.

Putting a tournament on one person's shoulders has been the norm but really it doesn't make sense
Then it's basically who gets the best working bot first, and I feel like spinners and wedges will still be the best working thing anyways.
Tournament History:
Showcases:
https://gametechmods.com/forums/index.php?topic=18882.0
https://gametechmods.com/forums/index.php?topic=19197.0

Offline Sage

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #38 on: August 13, 2016, 02:26:34 PM »

Then it's basically who gets the best working bot first, and I feel like spinners and wedges will still be the best working thing anyways.

maybe maybe not. in the last two stock tourneys I entered I won with a stiltz hammer and got runner up with a giant VS. sometimes the meta can be broken- especially when there is no meta
You got my vote for RA2 Wizard. Always and forever.

Offline yugitom

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Re: GTM is reclining
« Reply #39 on: August 13, 2016, 02:59:10 PM »
if retooled get's finished let's do the tourney in that mod like a week after release. There would be no meta and it would be exciting. Have multiple hosts to speed up production, dedicated AI team to get through that phase quickly, and perhaps even commentary.

Putting a tournament on one person's shoulders has been the norm but really it doesn't make sense
That's actually a really good idea. I've started to work with AS already, so I'll see what I could arrange.

In terms of having a hosting team, I'm not too sure if it's necessary. Even though one would be receiving a lot more entries than your average tournament, you're not receiving them in bulk and shouldn't be that big of a job for one man. I'm not entirely against the idea but I may need a bit of convincing to have one.