Why is the Empire at War community dying?
It is an old game, yes. From memory, it's about 2 years old. I've always wondered why it's being slowing down; I've noticed that it's now grinding to a halt. While fan sites such as Petrolution and Petro-Gamers are centered around Petroglyph games, which is a smart idea, why the halt all of a sudden?
2 years old is not old, really. I've seen many stronger communities with older games than that.
The 3rd Age is a good sample.
I'm what's called a "lurker;" I come and go when I please, without notice, and I watch from the "shadows." I've noticed several things that get on my nerves:
People complain about no SDK - uhhh... why should there be a SDK? It's only XML and Lua, why ask for an SDK to modify such a simple markup and scripting language? The only tools that are required would be the map editor (and everything else Petroglyph has released) and Mike.NL's tools. That's it.
Peharps you also need to export models from 3ds max and other modelling programs, create maps for UAW and few other things that the Petroglyph modding tools will allow.
A large amount of amateurs - this one annoys me the most about the community: a bunch of amateurish ninnies without any sense of social ethics. I mean, it's alright to ask how to install a mod, but please ask at the right place. While every community has these, but I've never seen it this bad before.
Every community has a large amount of ammateurs. There is no where to run.
The thing is that you need to have places where you share information with others and people help each other to improve. I had good experiences with this in Command & Conquer modding communities.
Everyone's afraid to try something new - here's a short list of projects I've worked on: tactical trading posts and ships, infantry that can do hand-to-hand combat (I actually got this one to work - no animations, dammit!), army morale (not done), being able to upgrade your Dark Troopers in-game without having to call in another squad, and a Company of Heroes-style duck-and-cover. Most of these have failed. I've noticed that almost every single mod just adds new units and/or factions - does anyone realize how redundant this is? Try something new! Be creative! (Pheonix Rising simply adds new units, but they're polished and more canonical, which makes his mod somewhat of an exception; let's not forget his tech tree). People are either afraid, don't know where to start or don't talk about their experiments.
I agree, but this is one of the many things. Sometimes other engines are more interesting to try new things. Or you may have the problem of having your project become totally unknown in the internet for lack of sites covering it and lack of fans. The problem is very complex.
Desperation - now that the community is grinding to a halt, people are getting desperate. Just look at the recent maps that people are submitting on EAWFiles.com - how many of them are even commendable, in terms of creativity? The space maps, especially, look like they were done in no less than 10 minutes.
No offense to the FileFront guys, but this is FileFront. They accept any kind of crap.
Limited game engine - it's underestimated, is what it is. Yes, it doesn't stand a chance against today's game engine, yes, it's more limited than other game engines from it's time, yes, it's difficult to debug. But it's underestimated. It's not as limited as people assume; it just requires more work and loopholes.
EAW is very limited. So far UAW is actually looking to be better than the C&C3 engine, to be honest. We are just waiting for the tools.
