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Epoch Dead?


XTamiiX

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Like always, been only 2-3 servers that get populated and most of the others are empty or have 2-3 people playing at random times. Such is the demand, I suppose. Without quick updates and improvements, mods always gonna receive at least some decline in players playing it. There hasn't been essential update for a long time in Epoch, and I mean here snap building which was introduced in 1800s and new GUI. :D

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1 hour ago, KPABATOK said:

Truth is there is no need for any new additional servers. All the players that still enjoy Epoch would easily fit in 3 servers right now and they wouldn't be even full.

See I don't think that's true. Different servers have different settings/AI/loot/admins.

 

Having GOOD admins can make it or break it for me.

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6 hours ago, KPABATOK said:

Truth is there is no need for any new additional servers. All the players that still enjoy Epoch would easily fit in 3 servers right now and they wouldn't be even full.

Guess I should give up right now then... How are we supposed to regrow the community without providing new servers that don't take Epoch to another level or give it another feel... Jeez :blink:

Then again, I agree about Black Market traders, that's why I am very slowly working on modifying that script to be more like DayZ/Epoch's (REDIS does not help there btw)... But sticking to standard Epoch does not necessarily attract players or interest for the mod. For example, standard Epoch adversaries are (IMO) boring and not a challenge at all.... that's why I added lots of zombies over a year ago (together with many other things)... now I'm porting ACE3 and almost there (everything works and is good apart from medical persistence, which should be completed in about a week or so)...

I have my approach to Epoch and I know that some agree, others don't but there are plenty of other servers out there providing their own customizations (I believe @He-Man and others are involved in a server that has customizations that I envy). Some are fed back to the community, others are not, but unless we keep the environment vibrant we can kiss goodbye to the mod on ARMA3 and that would be a very bad thing.

 

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8 hours ago, salival said:

Having GOOD admins can make it or break it for me.

Want to also highlight this. Has been a learning process for me as a server owner and admin to get the right admin team. I have banned more admins than I have right now because they can make or break a server. But I now have a great team who follow a rule set that is more detailed than the rules for players... I also early on made sure that no admin (not even me) has GOD MODE! Worst thing ever introduced into the game  :ph34r:

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Sappers are great, and cultists are amazing, especially when they spawn at night time (which is disabled on every server). They add a lot to the survival feeling. Unfortunately they are all disabled on most servers and we are left with KOTH style pvp only, where you do not have to worry about anything else, just other players. Saying "people do not like this and that" is not a good argument. I think it is the server owners who do not like Epoch antagonists are the real problem, not players.

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11 minutes ago, KPABATOK said:

Sappers are great, and cultists are amazing, especially when they spawn at night time (which is disabled on every server). They add a lot to the survival feeling. Unfortunately they are all disabled on most servers and we are left with KOTH style pvp only, where you do not have to worry about anything else, just other players. Saying "people do not like this and that" is not a good argument. I think it is the server owners who do not like Epoch antagonists are the real problem, not players.

I only swapped out drones for zeds, plus the last hours is night time so the cultist is utilized

its not poch without the Sappers and cultists

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been an A2 Epoch server owner for 4 years now. I can tell you from current and past experience, with new updates there is always a 1-2 month period of working out the bugs. So a new update comes out and people come flocking in expecting everything to work according to plan, scripts magically adapt themselves, and the skies open and everyone has a blast like before. However, the reality is it does not work that way with coding. I've warned my player base multiple times that it takes time to get everything worked out and to come back in a few weeks. Most good players understand. So, we're in that period of time where people are probably playing other games, taking a break from whatever bug annoyed them. Before 1.0.6 my server was steady 10-15 players (good for PVE server), and was steady through the beginning of 1.0.6 but now that the reality has set in for them, some people go back to old updates or play something else until all the hard work is done. In like a few weeks to a month, probably be a different story. Epoch is not dead, its in beta testing. Give it time. And by the way, word of mouth is most important promotion of all. You'll have like 2-3 months of quiet days and nights, but if you do a good job and provide a good product, it will pick up.

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  • 6 months later...

@Runewulv

Epoch is dead, you just have to take a look at the server list. Servers keep shutting down because lack of players..... Only servers with strong community, great admins, awesome challenge..... survive. Others go down one by one. I own servers for  5 years and  I can see the difference I use to have non stop between 20-35 players on a PVE server and now If I have 12-20 its good.

Players when they come back after a while say same things, bored of the game not updating, glitch and shit not fixed. Or new better game out.

There is no give it time, when a creator of a game doesn't take care of his product it slowly goes down, period.

Sad because this game is awesome.

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16 hours ago, Petite said:

 

There is no give it time, when a creator of a game doesn't take care of his product it slowly goes down, period.

Sorry ... but what ?

Take a look here : https://github.com/EpochModTeam/Epoch/commits/experimental

Then you`ll see that he cares and some other contributers too. Thx @vbawol + @He-Man btw. and the whole rest of the team for your work.

 

Keep in mind that they do it for us in their spare time. And they do it because they want to do it and for nothing else.

So ... i just wanted to point out , that he cares. But i think the limiting factor is simply the time and the team is not as big as it was 2 years ago. 

 

 

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I have had at least one Epoch server up since its introduction. Despite some ups and downs it remains populated and sometimes even busy. Like all things with servers, our epoch server seems to get busy in waves, but has a loyal following of players, some of whom have been on it for years. If you look on the discord there is new life in the dev team with many great ideas that will add content, much needed features, and continued improvements in the UI. There is an each to his own element of Arma, with many mods, addons, skin packs and so forth to choose from. It is a game for which the major limitation is your imagination. So for me, Epoch is alive and well and looking like the mod to watch for the next year.

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I still play Epoch.  I don't think it's dead, but it's not what it used to be in 2015 or so.  There's always been this "mystery" about the admin menu and apparently the consensus is to purchase the infistar admin menu rather than improve the one included with Epoch.  I don't really understand that, but I am aware of the controversy of Steam ID back doors in earlier versions (it's not still there, right?) of the antihack.  I'm not aware that the Epoch team ever formally addressed that controversy.  Perhaps not updating the admin menu (thereby motivating people to purchase the infistar software) is some form of contrition.

For me, it's not the speed of progress toward a 1.0 release.  I would like to see a better inventory system.  If you've ever moved inventory between uniforms, vests, or packs, you know how painful it is.  I think someone said they destroyed their right mouse button playing Epoch.  I believe it.

I noticed that in the last few releases, most of the changes/fixes are coming from the community, not the devs.  That, to me, is the biggest indicator that the devs are either distracted or have moved on to something else (or some combination of both).  And that is a harbinger of the demise of Epoch.  I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that.

Something that isn't usually discussed in this context is the popularity of non-Epoch AI in Epoch servers.  I still haven't seen anything better than A3EAI as far as static patrols in towns/cities.  The popularity of these AI packages (I've used others, none have static patrols like A3EAI) is an indication that Epoch is still incomplete.

When browsing the Arma 3 server lists, it's obvious that Epoch is becoming an outlier.  If most server admins are disabling all the Epoch antagonists (except for cloaks, but hardly anyone wants to play at night it seems), that should send a message.  In their apparent zeal to not cater to people wanting a "babycore" gameplay experience (I learned that word from this very forum), the devs have made a game that is not interesting (maybe even annoying) to most people wanting to play on an Arma 3 server.

So while I might count myself among those who still enjoy playing Epoch, I will concede that I have also disabled most of the antagonists.  Because the inventory system is so slow, I just got tired of being killed by a sapper or a drone patrol when moving inventory to a new, bigger vest or backpack.  I know some people like the idea of "anti-camping".  And a vanilla Epoch server instance should more than satisfy those "babycore haters".  But Epoch can satisfy everyone with a little more granularity of antagonist configurability.  Cloaks should be able to be configured to appear in the daylight (yes, I know currently they replace the "standard" sapper at night) or at whatever hours the server admin chooses.  If I want a drone to appear every hour, or two hours (instead of 10 minutes), that should be possible.  I would love sappers again if they only appeared like once every 4 hours or so.  That would make them rare and something to look forward to.  But every ten minutes?  It's too much.

Haters gonna hate, campers gonna camp, and server admins will cater to what they believe "most people" want.  Now, let me get back to stealing some guns from this base I just found...

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Still getting these type of questions at this point seems like just another attempt to detract from what we have done. So, forgive me that I do not get this obsession with wanting to find out if a mod is "dead".  

Making a mod used to be something that had a start and a finish and it did not consume all of your free time and demand more and more else it be considered "dead". If players moved on the mod would still exist and the only thing that changed was that you just no longer play it.

I put a lot of work into both projects because I like modding Arma, and it has allowed me to learn and grow as a developer. Yes, some day soon, I do want to go on to make games and work on other projects, not necessarily Epoch related. First and foremost, I want to make sure Epoch is in a good place and those community developers that want to help have what they need.

I am happy to have been able to work on these Epoch projects for almost 5 years in my spare time but the reality is that I will likely have to find a second job soon. So, sadly I will likely have even less time to spend on the project going forward. While I would love to spend my time coding new ideas for Epoch, all that would do is increase the scope even further requiring, even more, time that I do not have.

What most seem to ignore is that everyone that has ever worked on Epoch was a volunteer and graciously donated their work.  Epoch is open source (APL-SA) so that others can collaborate, even fork the project to make a something new if they choose.  So as they say if you love something, set it free.

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That said 1.0.0 is in the works and is going to be feature packed, there is a lot of work going on both experimental GitHub accounts from the community devs. I can say that the changelog is way out of date so if you are curious check out the commits. 

Client Files:
https://github.com/EpochModTeam/EpochCore/commits/experimental
Server/Game mode:
https://github.com/EpochModTeam/Epoch/commits/experimental

Also, I will touch this quickly. @phm The only build that did have a "Steam ID backdoor" was an early leaked version that was intended only for use by the closed group of server admins we had testing at the time. They all knew about it.  Just as you mentioned the "controversy" you refer to was manufactured just to get attention to drive sales. I.E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect 

Gamers are never satisfied for long and if you try to please everyone you will ever finish. While we cannot please everyone when it comes to an Epoch survival game mode we tried to lay the best groundwork we could so that others can leverage our work. So, If you do not like something change it. That is the beauty of modding.

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Hello guys,

@vbawol - and other guys from epoch team ... and guys releasing addons:

I cannot express how I'm greatfull for your hard work. As a developer I can understand the cost of that work ... you shared your skills, free time, money, heart...
Let me tell you something:

Epoch is not dead and never be!
Why? Because you created something wonderfull for many kids - kids that started coding the most effective way - write some code - see the result immediately - in your favourite game.
That means, you helped a significant amount of people to start something new and grow as a developer-beginner. And you will never know - someday someone
asks famous developer - "How did you start coding?" - and he answer - "Well, once I played Epoch mod and ...".

And there is more what your work means for others... Thank you guys from deep of my heart! You guys are my heroes...

Cheers

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12 hours ago, vbawol said:

Also, I will touch this quickly. @phm The only build that did have a "Steam ID backdoor" was an early leaked version that was intended only for use by the closed group of server admins we had testing at the time. They all knew about it.  Just as you mentioned the "controversy" you refer to was manufactured just to get attention to drive sales. I.E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Thanks for this.  What about infistar's allegation that AH code in Epoch was derived from his work?  Is that why the admin menu has never been updated?

I really appreciate you putting a little time into clarifying where things stand today.  Like I said, I'm a fan, and I've even contributed.  I totally understand that you want to move on and things need to be amicable so that we don't have a situation like "Face" and A3EAI where some users got a little too demanding of his time and attention and he just walked away and pulled his code off the 'net.

With all the sincerity I can muster, I want to say THANK YOU VERY, VERY MUCH for all the work and time you've put in to Epoch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Not sure where you get that it had not been updated, The admin panel has been updated many times by me personally. The Epoch admin panel and anti-hack have been open source for almost 2 years now and anyone can audit my work, the same cannot be said in reverse. see: server_securityfunctions.sqf

To be perfectly honest, I do not care to get into the details again as it will more than likely cause drama.  When it comes down to it we offer a free and open source alternative and to a paid product. 

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