Sauerworld: Pressing W

Since Acuerta’s retirement from Sauerbraten, the Sauerworld staff has taken some time to think about where we want to go and plan for the future. The first decision we’ve made is about the organization. I, mefisto, will be the head of the Sauerworld project, and bandandit will be Editor-in-Chief of the news and content section.

Sauerworld was originally conceived with a big goal: to make Sauerbraten grow. Looking at the landscape of what games are doing today, and what other successful games like Quake have done in the past, I believed that some new resources were needed:

  • A community-wide account system so players don’t need to have separate accounts for each server system.
  • Community-wide player statistics across all major servers.
  • A skill matching/game finding system, like many Xbox Live and Steam games have.
  • Friendly and well-run community forums.
  • A top-notch news and content site.

We’re not there yet, but we’ve taken major steps forward. The Sauercom and now the Sauerworld team have done really fantastic work, and I am both proud and grateful. We are all committed to the goal of growing this game and serving the fantastic Sauerbraten community, but we can’t do it alone. We welcome contributions and help from anyone who wants to keep moving Sauerbraten forward, so please reach out and look for some more announcements in the near future about ways to contribute.

33 Comments

  1. Rosine

    – A community-wide account system so players don’t need to have separate accounts for each server system.
    – Community-wide player statistics across all major servers.
    – …

    +1

    Reply
  2. swatllama

    A community login system would be interesting. I’m not sure how you’d get it integrated into the game in itself though; it seems like it’d be something users would get into late after starting the game.
    I’ve always liked Sauer’s decentralized structure though. It’s decentralization done as well as it can be.

    Reply
  3. ФЭНТАZИ

    Looks like someone is practising his politician skillz, this article has to do nothing with the reality :)

    To make the game grow it should evolve at it’s core. Some supplementary features can’t change outdated/imbalanced game experience. And more over, nobody will do even it :)

    The biggest part of called “community” is interested in sauer for many reasons, and great game experience is the last thing on the list. Community done nothing about it in the last years, and nothing will be done in future. :)

    And they will be shocked when they realize how many efforts they need to put in the game to make things _right_, just for fun, especially when they try to convert work in real money :)

    And crying “WE ARE THE COMMUNITY!!!111” is free as a bear :)

    gj sauerworld :)

    P.S. Sorry for this post :D

    Reply
      1. Fatality

        Nice client, but how exactly is it helping the community which you think is so broken other than adding some features which you personally enjoy? If you don’t know what I do you obviously don’t pay enough attention, and thus have no position to complain about what you don’t know about. I’m speaking for this team which has allowed me to be a part of them and help in every way I can. You complain non-stop about the shit community, yet you are the cancer that feels it necessary to troll a blog team which selflessly spares their own time to help revive a community and game with nothing in return.

        I’ve been asked to stop feeding you, so this is all you will here from me here.

      2. ФЭНТАZИ

        May be my english is not that good, but i still think that “community” meaning some sort of cooperation to create smth. A bunch of ppl that do nothing is just a mob. That is why i feel kind of frustrated about all of this. Talking is not doing, it has no impact on the game. And i see zero efforts to do smth. Actually this happen when aqrta left. I’ve heard opinions that he is some kind of freak, but he _really_ carried about the game trying _to do_ smth, unlike the current stuff. :(

        Especially this is bad, because it is an open source game, where anyone can improve the game. But so called “community” is ignorant about the best thing in sauerbraten (or developing some private shit stuff, that is ofc fair and fun to play with as they think of it).

      3. swatllama

        Because you’re a total dick, it’s going to be hard for some people to see past that and immediately condemn every thought of yours.

        However, readers of sausage’s comments, put aside his dickishness while you read what he writes, and if you can understand despite the incoherent quibbles, you’ll see that what he says is valid in some portions.

      4. Vanquish

        I don’t think he’s a dick. I think he’s just stating his opinion and people are getting mad at him because they feel somewhat offended by the fact that someone is displeased with the current development status of sauerbraten (which is now largely undertaken by the same people who write for and maintain this blog). I don’t agree with everything he’s saying, and if he chose his words more carefully what he is saying could even come off sounding polite, and I guess that’s the problem here. If people take off their rose-tinted glasses they can clearly see that some things he’s saying are valid, even if you might personally disagree with some other of his points. If there’s one thing I personally disagree with here, it’s how he’s being ostracised from the community simply because he has the nerve to share his opinion (unless he’s a cheater/ddoser/irl rapist and nobody’s told me?)

        A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists – and then in the end how will we ever be able to call that a community?

        *awaits downvotes*

      5. Anon15

        Acuerta may have left but he also left something behind – a great team that he had put together prior to his retirement. They are obviously carrying one successfully.

        That aside, coding stuff and developping sauer was/is certainly not part of his skillset so I don’t see how he could have done anything about the future of sauer itself.

      6. starch

        http://www.sauerworld.org/map-discovery-an-interview-with-papriko/
        http://www.sauerworld.org/map-discovery-t-chens-dust4/
        http://www.sauerworld.org/map-discovery/stahlbox/

        Fatality is doing a hell of a lot more than you are, by starting Map Discovery he’s bringing another, more relaxed part of the “community” into the spotlight, and it is well deserved. It’s not like your client helped the “community” in any way, its just another client. The only thing it’s actually useful for is for you to hide behind it, saying that you help. You always talk about how Sauerworld is crying: “And crying “WE ARE THE COMMUNITY!!!111″ is free as a bear :)”. Never once have I seen Sauerworld try to exclude anybody from anything. It is true that the majority of players who play Sauerbraten have never played competitively, because they just play for fun on public servers. It’s completely their choice whether they want to get more involved in the game, but most people don’t, because in the end its just a game.

        If you’re so sure that we AREN’T the community, how about you tell us who is? The 100 other people that fill public servers during the day? Sure, they’re part of the community, we welcome them, and if they want to play a few public games every day, then let them do that. It’s not like anybody is forcibly excluding them. But obviously, we want to make improvements based on the interest of people who actually care.

        At this point it just looks like you’re trying to kill the game and put down everybody, and you call it helping. What Sauerworld is trying to do is to just bring back some life to this game, and it definitely has. Along with the help of =DK=’s DKSC, we have seen players return that haven’t played in a long time.

        I think it would be awesome for Sauerworld to implement these features into the game, I think it will be very cool. But at the same time our goal should be to make your daily game/gameplay more FUN for everybody, and a global stats system won’t exactly do that.

        Don’t quote me, but I’m pretty sure that Eihrul once said something similar to: maps are the life of sauer. – If that’s true, how about instead of only playing 5 different maps in rotation, give the rest of the maps a chance (perhaps a tournament with a map pool of unplayed maps?). It’s not that they’re bad maps, it’s that it has become the social norm, and has been accepted in sauer, that they ARE bad maps even if you’ve never played them. Personally my favorite instagib map is powerplant.

        Go take your negative attitude and stick it.

      7. ФЭНТАZИ

        And for the real answer, i can debate about many things. I’ve tried to be constructive, but every thing boils down to the fact – for all the real work, that can change things, this community community can’t help in anyway.

        Even new maps, all games have map/resources auto-download features. Not that hard to make it possible on some clients/server. Who will do it? Nobody.

      8. pisto

        for those unaware, eternal’s client is a stripped down version of sdos-test, which in turn is a backport of some tesseract (eihrul’s) code.

      9. ФЭНТАZИ

        Show me any of this features in your shitty client :) I don’t like liars. I have a hard time to remove most of your shit code from the client :)

      10. ФЭНТАZИ

        Also there is history/log, and anyone can check that pisto is lying. Actually SDL2 is not a proper name, all of it could be done with the default sauer client + SDL1.

        nice behavior from sauerworld team member :)

      11. ФЭНТАZИ

        Btw pisto is the most retarded coder i’ve ever seen :) All he is done is 100% BS. He just spreads lies about his useless features like multipoll, and coding cheats, instead of helping sauer ;)

    1. Agalloch

      Funny, that you see a lot of bugs, problems, and “WE COMMUNITY” are almost retards for you,

      BUT YOU STILL CARE ?!

      Reply
  4. Suicizer

    Features like a community-wide account system or a skill matching system are overrated.
    The first thing Sauerbraten needs to update it’s image on the main website; sauerbraten.org.
    That’s the first thing players see when trying to download the game.
    The screenshots which shown there are about 7 years old and the docs are missing information about recently added features.
    The forum could use a new layout instead of the cache-account system.
    Next to all that; the layout of the website (especially at the docs) could use more than just a lot of texts and links.

    Reply
    1. bandandit

      Thanks for the suggestions Suiczier! Much of what you mentioned is something that we’ve been talking about lately and hope to improve on in the near future.

      As far as the content of Sauerworld, it’s true that most of it does in no way improve the physical state of the game. And although it doesn’t help further game development it does something that I believe is just as equally important by bringing players (old and new) to a centralized place where information can be shared and hopefully helps draw new players to the game.

      I know many of you think that the “community” that is always mentioned is exclusive, and you’re only right in the sense that the Sauerworld team obviously has more pull on the direction of it’s structure. But that is not to say that we don’t listen to what everyone has to say but it’s absolutely impossible to do everything that everyone suggests, which will undoubtedly leave some people unhappy. However we do want to be better about making this site more open to contributions from anyone willing and able to do so. But we also need to figure the best way to do so without allowing what has been already been built go into complete chaos.

      Reply
  5. swatllama

    AS THIS HAS TURNED INTO A FLAMEWAR, THE ARTICULATE LLAMA SHALL PUT AN END TO IT.
    IF ANYONE COMMENTS ON THIS, I’LL FUCKING CRUCIFY THEM, RIP THEM OFF THEIR FUCKING CROSS, AND CRUCIFY THEM AGAIN.
    WITH RUSTY NAILS.
    Unless you agree with what I have to say, you can comment to say that. :)

    Eternalsolstice: You were ostracized from the community early on. I was too busy snorting shit to play sauer, so I didn’t observe the beginnings; however, when I returned to Sauer, the only complaints about you were that you MUST be a cheater.

    YES, THE PEOPLE WHO CALLED YOU A CHEATER WERE WRONG IN CALLING YOU A CHEATER AND OSTRACIZING YOU.

    However, you failed your responsibility. YOU FAILED to act with civility towards your attackers, your ostracizers, your oppressors; you failed to be above them, and in your attempt to refute them, to react to their brash and hurtful remarks, you fell below them.
    That’s how you’ve descended to this. To attacking one of our most useful programmers. To attacking one of our best mappers.

    To attacking what may be the best fps community that exists.

    You’re a good programmer. You’re a skilled player.
    You’re an awful person.

    And now, you’ve become a menace to everyone here. People who started the conflict – and I won’t contest that they probably were the initiators – planted the seeds. But you decided to aggravate everything. You decided to press everything, even after the original issues had been laid to rest.

    By the way, you’re welcome to participate in SSL. Even if you’re an asshole, even if you’re an aggressor, you’ll be protected throughout the course of anything I host, despite your blatant and outrageous attacks.

    In Sauerbraten, we are ultimately more merciful than we are for serving justice.
    You can change the way you’ve become to us.

    But you won’t.

    Reply
    1. ФЭНТАZИ

      If you carefully follow this “discussion”, you can see that flame is keeping up by this blog stuff. Why should i ignore it, when they are deliberately spreading lies? It is okay to respond in the appropriate manner. Stupid to expect some kind of better behaviour from them. Your blog stuff makes the mood of all discussion like it.

      P.S. I’ve encored many nice people in sauer, that i definitely have no problem with, but here i see so many imbeciles with ridiculous claims from the entire community behalf. And “calling cheater” is the last thing why i dislike some people here. Maybe your should teach them some manners, instead of giving a silent approval. Then even an awful person can turn into a nice one.

      Reply
  6. swatllama

    GODDAMMIT SAUSAGE, I SAID DON’T FUCKING REPLY. NOW I’M GONNA HAVE TO NAIL YOU FUCKING TWICE

    I DON’T EVEN OWN A HAMMER. I’LL HAVE TO USE MY FUCKING CROWBAR.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.