Insurgency Sandstorm - any future for community servers?

[[RC]Hunter]

We all were excited reading about this new title to come, reviewing its first screenshots or other kind of published media and finally started playing its first editions from early "Alpha Releases" until today.

Reviewing NWI´s patch progresses, communication levels and directions until today (early April 2019), I feel seriously uncertain about this title, with all hopes we put in adding another great years of Insurgency gaming into it. Same like we did in previous years with Insurgency 2014 and earlier releases.

Plenty of discussions are going on at different places in between private community server Hosters. Not all are sharing the same ideas how the game related to community servers and its configurable variables should look like, but all are currently blocked not being able to much with the current state of technology.

I do not want to miss copy and pasting a post I made into a steam forum discussion, for our records in case steam forums may no longer show it in the future.

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In early days of digital warfare games, we were all excited about the multiplayer possibilities, enjoyed the newly provided technical options to modify content (modding and server settings for basic values) and played a desired title for ages.

Most games at these days perhaps featured ranks, but mainly to illustrate how many hours you spent with it. You never required XPs in order to obtain certain ingame items. This is what made certain game communities strong and longlife so to speak, we were focused on the content, enjoyed the game features and nobody took care for anything else perhaps just for the round win score and your K/D.

The first early birds of shooters with ranking and ingame related items based on your earned rank, enabled the same rank earning options on community hosted servers.

We all should not forget, back these days most game developer studios were happy about the communities popping up and putting lots of servers online, since we paid the bills for the server infrastructure and not the dev studios.


But times are changing, since nothing last forever in life...

The computer gaming industry grew so rapidly over the last 2 decades, that the main focus for a game studio today are no longer its communities, but the amount of copies sold on release. This is of course where the money lays, an absolut valid approach and understandable.

Casual gamers of today are eager to play for ranks and ahievements, than teamplay and objectives. They basically "force" developer studios to integrate ranks and options because of it.

The tiny difference in between developer studios creating today´s multiplayer games is, do they want to keep their historical reputation of being a game for communities or not? Its a pretty narrow path in between the initial cash earnings - this is only based on game content and functionalities and absolutely not related to communities - and the potential income if you are able to provide your game title for a couple years in a row with fresh content and sporadic growth of newly sold copies because of it and HERE you need existing game communities for this to function.

If you want to build a steady base of players around a game title providing XPs in order to achieve certain ingame items, you need XPs on the so called community servers.

Because a today´s casual gamer starting to play on a community server with enabled rankings, will be surprised about administrated actions (he did not even know about their existence before, since he only pushed the "play now button" in the past and was guided through a match making system to official servers only) and due to enjoying this absolutely different gaming experience he perhaps will become a member of a community and digital friend with many others and therefore a steady gamer of this title for many years.


NWI should recognize that most success of their initial sales start of Sandstorm was not only related to the game functionalities, superb appearance and marketing actions. It was because they could announce their alpha, beta and final releases to an existing community of gamers. And this large group did exist due to their support for community servers and community based content in the past.

If you do not enable XPs on community servers, if you do not help communities to promote their servers (fav entries in server browsers, ingame server name on the score board, MOTD et cetara), communities will drop their Sandstorm servers, the game will continue of course but in the near future be far away from any popularity.

I feel I keep repeating myself in many posts for different titles in the same style, hope I am not getting too old for this or is it the beginning of a dementia ...?