CEONSS

Hello all

It feels like to me that UT2k4 is finally in its twilight hours. The servers of all gametypes are getting more and more thinned out of players. Servers that used to be full of half full on a regular night are empty. Even Ceonss is now lucky to have a full server of players nowadays. Omnipotents is also pretty much half full with rare full servers these days.

There are so many new good games coming out that lots of players just vanish off and go do different things. Sometimes it's also just life and work that takeover and people leave. It's almost 15 years since the game came out so I guess we can say it had a bloody good run.

I will make a post about UT and what it has meant to be me when it finally does pass away. I'll do it on here because this has been my favourite server. I just want it to be etched into the online history as my record of it and my existence playing it.

Anyone else feel like it's coming to an end?


-lichReen

The server is actually more full than it was a few months ago. I wanted to join but couldn't because it was full.

Well I do agree with Lichreen, looking at my fav list most of the servers have died out.
But when it comes to ceons, well it's pretty active for the last few months.

But yes the game is really old by now and new games keep releasing and ppl like to play other games too, so do I, I also stop ut from time to time to play some other games.
And ppl get older and life gets in the way too, so many factors are in play that it's hard to pinpoint what the main reason is.

I am just happy I can still play this game on a daily basis and have a server full of nice ppl to play with, sadly the day's of clanwars and clanbase cups have long been gone and I miss them dearly.

It's a 14 years old game. Many games don't even live this long and start declining after 2-3 years, if not earlier. This game started declining quite late, only after ClanBase was shut down, which kind of decapitated the professional play. The thing is, this game has been past its prime for really long now, it likely won't get any better, only worse, but small communities are still alive. On Discord you can find a few of them. They usually do organised matches, which you can join if you want. For example every Sunday some guys actually play Bombing Run, but public servers have been abandoned for a while now. It has to do with the fact, that some, more popular servers shut down and it broke communities and many chose to leave the game instead of playing on another server.

[P]etya wrote:It's a 14 years old game. Many games don't even live this long and start declining after 2-3 years, if not earlier. This game started declining quite late, only after ClanBase was shut down, which kind of decapitated the professional play. The thing is, this game has been past its prime for really long now, it likely won't get any better, only worse, but small communities are still alive. On Discord you can find a few of them. They usually do organised matches, which you can join if you want. For example every Sunday some guys actually play Bombing Run, but public servers have been abandoned for a while now. It has to do with the fact, that some, more popular servers shut down and it broke communities and many chose to leave the game instead of playing on another server.

Yeah, it has had one hell of a good run. I will be around for when the servers are empty and maybe get shut down.

Til the end !

It's safe to say that people are actually still interested in this game. On the Steam forum I always see new and eager players asking for where they could be playing. Even if most of the gamemodes can be considered dead, they can still be played in organised manner, but overall the public scene of this game is becoming negligible.

Since Lichy still seems worried about this, I will say a couple of words.

I can only speak for CEONSS, but we are holding up quite well.

Now, before I start going into more detail, I should say that I tried to collect some stats for you, but I only have some raw file sizes to use for comparison, because we are still working on how to "count" our individual players. So I added up the size of our Player Join logs of each month, which will at least give us a general idea of when the server is busier or less busy. I've looked at the data from the past 3 years for this.

What are Player Join logs? Each map, the server logs which player joins or leaves the server. When the server is empty, the log file will be "0 KB". The more players join, the larger the file. I selected all the Player Join files for each month from January 2016 to November 2018 and noted down their sizes.

Now, we have two months with incomplete logs (Oct 2017 is missing one week worth of files and Oct 2018 is missing a day), so I estimated the total file sizes for them.

Here is a graph of the past 3 years on CEONSS: As you can see, our busier months are around Christmas to Spring, while Summer to Fall tend to be slower. What that means is that we can look forward to seeing more players soon!

We can also take a look at the past 3 years and compare the months side by side: I've marked the two months with my estimates in grey.

What we can see here is that we had a good start into the years 2017 and 2018, while this year's summer was a bit slower. The last months looks decent again (a bit better than the previous year). December's values for this year are obviously not available yet. Interestingly enough, 2017 seems like a stronger year than 2016, with some months in 2018 also stronger than their counterparts in 2016.

So you can say that our player numbers have been pretty stable.

Considering the age of this game, this is only possible thanks to the amazing community here and the many players who will come back every day, as well as our awesome mappers who continue to breathe new life into this game. So a big thank you to you all for sticking around and investing your time and energy into this game and server.

If you want to keep this game alive, just play it!

Not talking about Ceonss specifically, I mean UT2k4 as a whole.

Many servers empty or half full a lot of the time. Ceonss is still popular compared to others.

I just chose to make my mark here because it's a notable website.

lichReen wrote:Not talking about Ceonss specifically, I mean UT2k4 as a whole.

Many servers empty or half full a lot of the time. Ceonss is still popular compared to others.

I just chose to make my mark here because it's a notable website.

I understand what you mean. But I think the servers have been like that for a few years now. I think the players that are still playing UT now are here to stay.

Oft times I wonder if I have dichromacy, the 2016 hue is on the left side innit? What are them greyish bars for Oct/Nov Ema?

But otherwise it's true! The server is always packed full that I can never manage to connect due to the player limit!