Team Fortress MegaBirthday Extravaganza! - The Evolving Door
— The Hal
Turn it Up!
As Team Fortress for Quake one grew in popularity, the authors of the mod, Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley sought to more closely associate themselves with Id Software in order to better develop TF for Quake Two or TF II if you will. They were rebuffed for what ever reasons. Eventually, they managed to team up with Valve Software and now continue in the development of TF II though I believe Ian has left the team.
Team Fortress Classic based on the game Half-Life and now, the TF like clone Counterstrike mod are examples of what Team Fortress II might end up looking like. The explosion of players who appeared on the scene due to those two extensions of TF has inundated the community with a different persona. A different breed. No longer can everyone know everyone else. While there were always those who exploited cheats and others who sought to disrupt a good game with lame tactics and unacceptable behavior, that number increased disproportionately with the vast influx of players to the community.
The original TF community has all but disappeared, hanging on by the thinnest of threads. A new TF community has evolved. I checked the stats for Counter-Strike and TF Classic on a Sunday morning at 8:00 AM. CS was running on over 10,500 servers and almost 42,000 players were online. TFC had around 1,300 servers and 2,900 players.
TF II has been in development since shortly after the release of Half-Life several years ago. How many of the old TF players are hanging around for the release of TF II? It�s hard to say. TF became so popular that instead of simply creating a mod or add on for TF II, Valve decided to make TF II their next, full featured, stand alone game release.
The Big Picture
Online gaming has evolved from the little rural sized communities into huge planets. The number of players have grown from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands. Game news sites either struggle to gain popularity on their own or become assimilated by the corporate giants, hosted by bigger game news sites if they have something unique to offer.
The corporate attitude takes control and all game planets are terraformed to appear similar so that no planet can stand out alone as an individual. Kind of like a dress code. Is that a bad thing? To some it is. You have to get by the �cover� and have a look inside. All newsies are not created equal. Their own personalities should shine through and help create the community feeling. I wonder what percentage of the game players actually visit the game sites of the game they play.
Who are all the players on line now days anyway? If you take a look at the GameSpy site, the banners I saw there were for adults, not game playing kids. They had a banner for the US Army in the ad rotation. Let�s face it, gaming is big. And not just with kids obviously.
The reason many of the old time TF players hated to see the TF Newswire go corporate is because they resisted the money making connection involved. GSI was making money. Or if not making money at that point in time, that was the goal. But why shouldn�t they? It was costing them money to run the planets. Anyone who runs their own site knows that bandwidth is not free.
The average small time gaming site can�t even provide their own direct link on their own host to a medium size file if it has the chance of being downloaded to often. That would exceed their bandwidth allowance. The huge increase in gamers alone has contributed to the disappearance of the small community, small site success. They can�t possibly provide the service that a large site can.
So while the corporate behemoth GSI is perceived simply as a money making enterprise, they still happen to perform a needed service. They provide talented, hardworking newsies with the tools and infrastructure needed to get the word out on what ever game they are supporting. They give something to the various communities, and in return, the get something back. The communities, made up of the players are given quick and easy access to everything they need or want for the game they play.
I think that is one of the biggest changes in the past few years. It used to be that you might have to visit several sites to find all the files you needed. Now they are more readily available at huge gaming sites. It used to be you might have to wait to get on a server. Or your clan might not even have one. Now almost all clans have servers and you have a choice of ten thousand public servers to play on.
The revolving door continues to revolve. The evolving gaming community changes. It is bound to grow as more people get �connected�. Resistance to change will always be there. Each individual decides for their self if they want to go with the flow or not. In with the new, out with the old. That is evolution. It is as inevitable as the sun setting each day. And for the most part, it is good�
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