The Shame

[Oldsparky]

You know I have thought about the state of unreal a lot as of late. It's a shame the game has fallen to the state it's in. The Sickpup server and the Dog clan will be 10 years old this year and I am picking a date of Dec 20th as our aniversary date, because the actual day is unknown.

I wish to thank all the silent contributors that have helped make 10 years possible. The financial backers, the code writers, the map makers, the admins, the web master, the Dog members and most of all the hundreds of players that have come and gone.

I have watched the clan members slowly dwindle to just a hand full of active players. We have spent hundreds of hours on the servers and the web site. I must admit I am very discouraged at the recent turn of events in the clan and in the game itself. I see petty bickering and whining causing people to grow apart from the strong family we have had in the past.

The few players that remain are very good at the game, and will most certainly discourage any new player from trying the game. The uncertainy caused by pressure from other games (created by unreal players), community acceptance of hackers since our commmunity numbers are so small, the separation of players from various clans for just plain petty reasons, all of this is contributing to the decline of unreal in my opinion.

We have offered other types of unreal games, Monster Mash and Coop. We literally have put hundreds of hours into these servers to make it as fun as we can. Many have moved to the Monster mash server and seldom if ever appear on the Flag server(Sickpups in case you have forgotten). Remember, the KOTH server is our roots, and you should be appearing there regularly.

The unreal players have spent hundreds of hours together over the years, yet some just slip away, no word, no reason, they are just gone. This, in my opinion, is a shameful way for one to treat friends. Many of us, are closer than the real people we have occasion to meet in the work place or in real life. We have all played together, laughed together, cried together, and many of you grown up together. To treat others who wonder about your health and welfare in such a manner as to just walk away without a word, is very shameful.

Everyone is under the impression that they can at anytime, pull the unreal cd out of the drawer and re intall it and find their friends and favorite servers anytime they want to re establish the connection to their online friends. This is a warning, this may not be the case soon if things in the community don't change. That's up to the people that don't play for whatever reason? This whole problem, as much as we would like to blame it on one person, is a unreal community problem brought on by members that just walk away or fail to do their part for some reason unknown to us. The future of the game depends on YOU.

[[IMA]BlondePsycho]

Ummm blame it one which person...lol
yes things have been kinda bad here of late... yet like I said before it's a 10 yr old game....
Times and people DO change....sometimes it just isn't possible to hang onto the things we expect to be able to hold onto.
Just bear with it.. realize it's summer..( the game always changes in the summer..lol)

Me

[[IMA]turok_um]

Ya chris blame it on which person,,?...The game is always slow in the summer ,Thats when some people play outside..lol.....Wish i could play outside.. Its gonna get better spark,Hold on man...

[Hyper]

I think it is hard or impossible to change the community because a community is really not more than a bunch of people bound together by a a singular topic of interest. In the end we are all individuals with our own interests and characteristics. Old players and young ones, casual players and diehards, team players and soloers. Also there is quite a difference amongst the cultures of coop, deathmatch/team and infiltration players.

Problems like hacking are not new. I even think that things are better now than it used to be. Years ago it was quite common to see botters headshotting everyone with the rifle in Deck16. One of my first experiences as server admin was being visited by our beloved Klingon clan members to mess stuff up. Protection is better now.

Generally I think the community is still quite okay. (At least for the cooperative oriented part of it - in which I spend by far the most of my time in Unreal) Especially when I compare it to games like Guild Wars where age differences usually lead to irritation. In Unreal I still see a great amount of effort done by programmers, mod makers, server admins and webmasters to keep this game interesting. And not to forget all the diehard players who continue to play this game for so many hours. I still like this community and will keep supporting it with my site and servers.