Just wondering how and when people first played online.
Lots of people only got the idea when they were looking over someone else’s shoulder.
What could the FPS community/industry be doing to turn innnocent civilians into newbs, newbs into gamers and gamers into l337 hardcore fragheads?
:moo:
Started with RTCW and got into MP via the SP version. Wouldn’t have bought it for MP only, didn’t even really know what MP was. A mate at work plays MMORPG’s but used to play Quake and he told me once “Quake online is everyone runs around shooting each other and the guy with the fastest net connection wins”. Didn’t appeal to me in the slightest, so I avoided online gaming for years.
Then NTL installed Cable in my area, with 64k and then 128k offerings (at a price I could afford). I had this SP game called RTCW which had a CLASS structure (i.e. not being able to shoot any better than Stevie Wonder wasn’t necessarily a handicap), so I gave it a go, and haven’t looked back since. Now playing ET with a 600k connection.
To get more people into games I think you need a SP portion (to give it value beyond MP, which is dependent on servers being available, and other people to play with), and also to make games that don’t require monster PC’s, don’t require massive net connections, and aren’t based on shooting skills alone.
Not sure, I was stuck with a P133 until about a year ago, and really got into Quake II so much I completed it using only the blaster, great fun! but boring, lol. The mutants were the hardest to deal with. Mmmm, memories, I loved the CTF patch and the railgun, and the auto-doc was the best :rocker2: And the supershotgun… hehe run up to someone on a ledge, duck down and fire both barrels upwards into their chest, they’d fly off the ledge like a woman in a wedding dress store. I played Quake before that, but for some reason felt like it didn’t have much of a storyline and was slightly less believeable :huh: Oooh, more memories, …castles, oh yeah!
I don’t really remember how I got into FPS, probably over someone’s shoulder as you said (Not literally). Oh, and having the cable installed for nearly a year now has been probably the main thing distracting me from my studies, but there ya go.
More recently it’s been Tacops until I found ET, much more substance to it. Recently played Deus-Ex, my god that’s a good game.
I think I prefer them when they’re set more into the real world. I had no idea where I was with Quake or Doom. Oh god, just remembered Blakestone, thanks!
Anyway, [/EndOfRamblings]
As doom came out I tried it in our school with null cable. Only 1vs1 fights but I was hooked. Actually started mapping then. Then years passed by and I was with the 56k modem and did not played at all. Then i got my first adsl line and alien vs predator 2. Rest is history.
I got my first home computer via my work, and I bought some games, including Wolfenstein (RtCW). That game had just been released at that time. Later, I got an ADSL-connection and logged on some servers. Woa! I just could not believe my eyes (first multiplayer map I tried, was Beach). Are all these players real people who are logged into the same game? And we fight in teams, to complete obejctives?! This was definitely something for me.
I really enjoy playing WWII-fps-shooters.
The next thing I’ll try, will be that multiplayer game called WWII Online, because I have a friend that plays it and I want to try it too. I will also buy Doom3 and HL2when they are out.
I’ve been console gaming since Atari / Coleco Vision and all the generations since. Never had a PC until I hit Uni and never used it much for gaming. That was until the Beach Demo hit the UK and myself and a few mates went Bonkers over it. Being able to play it from our own houses, playing on the same team in great intense battle that seemed really realistic got me hooked. I played and enjoyed RTCW but dropped off the Multiplayer arena due to having a cracked copy and not many places to play I watched the release of ET very closely as by then I was getting fed up with simple console games and the lack of online options ( PS2 stinks ) and was deadly pleased that it would be free. Since the release of ET I’ve went out and bought RTCW and have enjoyed the thrills of it again and have been playing ET daily since the day it came out.
As for turning non gamers / casual gamers into players, I think word of moth is important. It was how I came to RTCW, the buzz from a mate and its the same buzz I have spread to at least 10 people since, I have unleashed a monster in some of my work colleagues and they are now a few ET freaks, (YO eRRoL get back to making music & Girlf and stop sitting up all night playing ET) just as dedicated to the fight as me. Online buzz is all good and well but if the right experience is created in the game (like ET) then I think it will spread naturally.
Good support from the Developer is important, we have seen how much the SD guys care but support will eventually drop off, as we have seen complaints about makers of other games not ‘caring’ once the game is out and released.
FPS games are traditionally fast and furious and usually put casual gamers off, some of my mates feel alienated and lost when they play. I know that D3 Multiplayer is going to slow it down further than ET so perhaps that will help…Also Rambling…
Only really got into online gaming a couple of years ago when i was introduced to Counter Strike. On a 56k connection and Celeron 500 pc the gaming experience wasn’t hot to say the least but I was certainly inspired. After a while the interest died, and the old faithful mega drive and offline pc games filled the void. Then ET cam along and then everything changed. I was just a casual gamer at the start and then i got Broadband into the house and it snowballed from there.
i have played other games, COD , Battlefield, Max Payne back to Counter Strike and even loads on XBOX live. But the interest fizzles out quickly and back i come to ET. 
May it run for a very long time
Then the odd console game here and there, never really got into PC games - was more into PC for makin’ music. I played Deus Ex too, real nice game, but I get bored with Sp games as they’re always the same (although Deus Ex tried to fight that) and you go this way, kill these 2 guys etc…
Then I start to work with fattakin and the rest, as they say, is history!
Re converting people, I am one of those converts - ET hit the nail on the head for great gameplay. Being not a great fragger (although getting better :D) you can still have an enjoyable game playing other roles in the team. The teamwork is definitely the main thing that makes ET so good, and having to work together to complete objectives. Any game that does that right I think will be successful & will get people playin’ it.
BTW I don’t care about any other games, I only want to play ET, and I have some musical surprises coming sOOn, wOOt! 
ET was my first FPS game, my friend recommended me to download it because it was free, i did and havnt stopped playing it since
My 1st multiplayer fps game was the original Quake in college, we all installed the demo on the college PC’s (while we were supposed to be doing COBOL) and had a quick frag session on there, but the teacher wondered what all the shouting was about and promptly unistalled all copies. We had to install the games in nested folders within the windows folder so as not to be found out then, and at the same time try to stay quiet when fragging or being fragged.
My mate had an N64 and we would play 4 player goldeneye non-stop (until they got fed up of me winning all the time).
Once I got my broadband connection I was playing alot of Q3-CTF and RTCW, tried others but nothing has kept my attention quite like Q3, RTCW or ET
Started playing SP FPS when I was 8 (9 maybe?) with quake 2. I had played computer games since I was 4, but anyway, back on topic, I figured I would try out MP when my dad finally got DSL when I was 14 (Always had wanted to play MP, but was on a 56k, so I had never bothered). First game was HL, then Unreal (Yes, the original), then UT, then RTCW, then RTCW:ET.
Random fact: At school here, we can LAN it up, have gotten up to 3 ten-person servers running full during studyhalls (That was UT, now we play vanilla wolf)
We had a quake-class in college, but after that I had to wait for cable to play RTCW 
i only got broadband so i could play xbox live. first game i played on live was unreal championship then the xbox version of RTCW. But then i heard of this free game called ET so i thought i may as well have a go at that as its free and ive been playing it ever since.
Making stuff free is the way forward. Lots of people got into RTCW via the free Beach demo and even more via the free ET game. Of course you can’t make games for free and expect to get paid. So if your next game has say 10 MP maps release a pack of 3 as a free demo to get people hooked then assuming the game is good enough people will buy the rest. I would certainly be willing to pay for another 6 maps from SD for ET and i expect a few hundred thousand other people would too. personally im happy to pay money for games but i know a lot of people object to paying £30-£40.
the day i got my high speed internet connection i went looking for warez, i thought i had found rtcw, but it was only the demo :<:<. anyway i installed it and it hooked me. man those were the times camping the warroom for 30 minutes on MP_BEACH. scrolling my weapons and then when i finally had it passing it and look for it again :D. i play the demo for about half a year, in the mean while trying to find some key that worked for the full version which i had got of a friend. that didnt work :<. so i eventually bought it. within the first week i was asked to join a clan and i havent been clanless for more than maybe 2 weeks since then.
I got a PC and a m8 at school gave me the Doom shareware, whereupon I happily bit onto the hook of PC FPS gaming. Other mate liked it so much he eventually got a (more powerful) PC, and Quake came out not too long after, which we took turns to play through. Some mag CD turned up with the infamous reaperbots on it, which we took turns to play all the time. Got my own PC and found BT’s Wireplay, where it was definately playable on my trustly USRobotics 28.8k modem Perhaps surprisingly I didnt get owned too badly (due to the sheer amount of time spent with the reaperbots) and would occasionally finish top, more usually on my speciality DM2. I still remember getting my ass handed back to me on DM4 1v1 though, never been beaten like that in any game either before or since.
Forgot about online gaming for awhile, sometime traded my Playstation for a N64 (was bored with the games and a m8 had one I could play on whenever anyway) where I got goldeneye… bunch of us would sit around and play it a bit too much, “davegod” gaming nickname comes from there - they’d go 3v1 and i’d still win, losing a frag or two at most Goldeneye basically got me back interested in multiplayer FPS.
Ages later I built a decent PC, 1600+ with a GF3ti200, and heard about a Wolfenstein game coming that had “id software” label on it somewhere, flatmates got me it a couple of days after it came out (day after I’d done with essays), played it SP, decided to try it MP… whoa! Teamplay! Objectives! I LIEK!!!111 rtcw.co.uk community added extensively to my interest - especially because you could find these people in servers everywhere and “knowing” people your playing with, the banter and teaming up etc made it so much more fun. Then we’d got so big, a few familiar names on a server would lean to a mass forumite invastion whereupon eventually the whole server would be taken over by us, with a few innocents left wondering WTF had just happened but hey this game is damn more fun than usual. This led onto semi-organised forum games… best “public” play evar. From there tried clanning, though dropped out of that because 64k isdn doesnt give the bandwidth for voice comms 
Bought quake 2, got internet and played it online a bit… A friend at school said Quake2 sucked. and gave me QWTF 
doom 1 + 2 via null modem cable
then goldeneye on the n64 in split screen (this is where i got the name melonfarmer from ^^ )
then a big gap where i didn’t own a console or pc. Then about 8 months ago i decided to get broadband + a decent PC. once i had everything up and running i decided i needed a new game to try out my new system … found ET online and as it was free decided to give it a go. havn’t played any other games for more than a couple of days since (all other games just seem boring)
thanks splash damage / activision for such a great game :drink:
I usually only played the single player part of a FPS, than there was the RtCW beach demo which I really wanted to play but it was multiplayer only… so, I had to play a multiplayer game and that was it, I was hooked and played RtCW almost daily and as soon as the Fuel Dump demo came out I switched over to ET.
RtCW and ET are still the only FPS I play online, might try a MMORPG soon but for FPS there is no competition for ET
I started playing MP when the rtcw demo came out. That got me pretty well started and from there I went on to the full version and then et when it came out, about a year ago now.
quake 3 was my first online baby. then i branched out into Unreal Tournament and RTCW and then BF42 and UTK3 and nowe ET. =D