I was in the beta, and played the retail for a bit. I very fondly remember doing just that sort of stealth bomber attack. I also did a bit with the free version, prior to R3.
This game honestly deserves all the praise its gotten, and then some, no game before or since has matched it.
However, it really does depend on the community. Sadly, it takes a lot of good players to make a good game, on both sides (or all sides, since you can have 2,3 or 4 teams). And as you might expect if you have any public server team gaming experience, just one player can screw it up badly, and even easier if he's the commander. If you've played Savage, or Natural Selection with a bad marine commander, you know what I mean.
When I first heard of the free version, several years after the retail died, I was excited to get back into it. Read all the docs they had, set my ingame callsign with the 'newbie' tag on it, just like they requested, then waited to get into a game. And waited. And waited. Most of the l33t commanders didn't like 'n00bs' in most of the games, it seemed, and limited the number they allowed on 'their' team (we are bad for their rating, you see). Finally got on a team. After waiting the better part of the hour for the game to start, thanks to the 'vets' stacking the teams then arguing about how to balance out the vets and the 'n00bs', I spent just 5 minutes in the fight before being booted and banned.
Why? 3 way game, the commander set up a deal in private with one of the other teams, and I was attacking an 'ally' resource harvester when he did this. In the heat of the fight, I didn't see him yell at me to stop, so, boot, banned, and that was it for me. Wasn't going to hang around for another few hours, in the hopes of getting into another game, only to risk another commander boot.
Great game, so-so community. Very steep learning curve (or relearning curve in my case) and elitist attitudes in abundance. Well, hopefully they have realized they can sustain the game without new blood, and done something to curb those attitudes.
"Atti tudes", how very odd, this software won't let you use that word, or at least won't display it. Flag this | Edit this post |
