na skai is right you cant talk down on him for telling the truth, no matter how optimistic you are.

Yes it true, the numbers are dropping

But there is still a hardcore of players, that truly love this game.

I ask if you truly love TCE then lets find ways of keeping it ALIVE as a community .

Coz I for 1, will do all I can, if Have to run the last server myself, and power it from a execsize machine then
SO B IT.


ASK NOT WHAT TCE CAN DO 4 U
ASK WHAT U CAN DO FOR TCE !

ED SOLO touched the right point. Today we have one major problem, which causes non-popularity of TCE - only few e-gamers have heard about this game.

Let's look at the numbers: nowadays we have max. 140-150 players online (Somator said about 180, that was when the NC matches were played), but average is 70-100 (when I post this message we have only 36 players online). That numbers told everything about how TCE is popular today - we could have thousands of boards members, but the number of online players are much more relative.
Now, how many people play ET in the same time? The number of online ET players goes to more than 7000 (when I post this message, ET has 5330 players online). I have played ET for few years and I remember very well, that in the last months more than 85% ET players have never heard about TrueCombat: Elite. What funny thing is, many of them were playing ET and Counter Strike. I am sure, that if some of them knew about TCE, they wouldn't choose CS for the second game - they could choose TCE, cause it's mod for they favorite game. But that couldn't happen for one major reason - they don't know that TCE even exist.

Like ED SOLO mentioned, each one of us could do something useful for TCE. In September and October, I and Somator did some promotions on mostly polish sites and boards. What we did:

• topic on Ubuntu's polish board about TCE (26 replies, 1303 views),
• topic on board.enemyterritory.pl about TCE (2 replies, 436 views) and Dedust map (0 replies, 113 views),
• topic on forum.wiaderko.com (one of the most popular polish CS servers) about TCE (1 reply, 223 views),
• topic on wolfmap.de about TCE & TCE Easy Installer for Windows (21 replies, 711 views, news on the main page) and Dedust map (11 replies, 548 views, news on the main page),
• topic on et.splatterladder.com about TCE Easy Installer for Windows (3 replies, 375 views, news on the main page) and Dedust map (6 replies, 470 views, news on the main page)

There was some other sites and boards, but I don't remember their website addresses right now. Every time we post about TCE we put some visual stuff from TCE - screenshots and videos. My favorite video is Lastscene Life - in every occasion I have put the link to this video. Statistics of this video also shows the results of our promotion campaign - you can see there, that the most viewers of this video came from Poland. But that's not the only one "touchable" result of this campaign:

• in this time (September - October) 30 people have registered on the polish TCE site (before that, to have new 30 faces we needed more about 4-5 months)
• many new faces have shown up on the AK-47.PL servers

What my point is, that each one of us could do something similar to this promotion campaign. It doesn't cost anything, but just a small piece of time to post or just inform people about TCE. But you have to want this.

To be honnest graphics are going to be *i-need-a-broader-vocab* outdated.
Bugs are not that annoying since you learn to play in consequence (+ there is no bugfree game, even commercial ones), but yes the gfx would need a boost in order to keep attractive (just go swim in crysis'WH sea & you will see what i mean).

On another point you are right simons, there is still a lack of communication about TCE.
We should all blame diane, its her fault.

Every few months there are new people that come to TCE that try to revive it and claim that it's oh so dead.

Yes, there is no active official development. Yes, there are fewer players then there were before. The situation has been like this for 3 years - but these people always come and claim that RIGHT NOW is the apocalypse and if nothing is done ATM the game will die SOON.

OFC TCE is going to die eventually (maybe not tomorrow or next month - or even next year) - but for a number of reasons that really have more to do with with lack of publicity or bugs.

I think people need to stop whining or critiquing the game and either play and enjoy it without making some huge dramatic post of your dedication - or not play and stop coming to the forums to claim why you have stopped playing.

I think threads like this kill the game even more because the few new people that do read it get a negative vibe right from the start.

....wait for team combat...

Or any modern world FPS combat.

Considering Team Combat will be just that and not a continuation of TCE.

Play TCE because you like it and not because you are just waiting for other loosely related FPS's to come out.

We should make some TC:E commercials to ET sites and put like the best videos from YouTube as an link to show how great game this is... like ak47 members have done, that should increase the players for a while, and good news travel quite fast too.
Who mentioned Crysis? Hahaha! If somebody is making changes in TC:E, please don't take anything from that game.

^^ The thing is - no matter how much promotion (or even if there was active development) TCE wouldn't expand greatly.

Yes, there are a lot of people who could be introduced to the game and all - but I don't understand why some of you think it would be some huge turning point.

With all the new games out today - I don't really see anything on the ET engine these days being huge.

There are a lot of fickle gamers out there that just want to play the more recent games and don't have the patience for TCE's learning curve.

Even when 49 was released, sure it had A LOT more players - but most of them already left by the 49 b patch.

It's easy to inform people of the game - but the bigger problem is getting them to stay.

I would like to post something more here, but it's quite not easy. Nobody makes any dramatic here, all we try to do is care about this game, cause it's worth it and we enjoy spending our time on fragging bad terrors or good spec ops. I hope there still will be at least a group of people who will try to do some useful stuff. And yeah, you right Diane - it's easy to inform people. And there's no problem with getting them stay - when they enjoy the game, they will stay. But firstly, they have to know that this game exists. That's all from me.

This game can't die! It's the only one I'm good at! NOOOOO!

I truly love TCE, but it just isn't good anymore. This is 2009, wake up people.
Competition is rare these days and it was the most fun aspect of tce... amazing fws with loads of good clans, esl and stuff like that, 98% of it is just gone.

TCE just isn't sexy, it doesn't appeal to players. Like Diane said, the learning curve is quite big and lets face it, the game is ugly. These two things combined, new players aren't exactly around the corner.

So if you want to be hardcore, go for it. I'm not stopping anyone, but things aren't going to get better. I'm probably still going to play TCE a little bit, as I haven't found anything that beats it - yet.

Learning curve of TC:E ain't really any harder than any Quake or other FPS (just think proper FPS noob on a server with 10 rocket jumping "pro's", or a ET pro server or...).

Problem is us. No matter what server the TC:E noob joins, he ends up in middle of 15 guys who have been doing it for years and years. In fact the noob is the only one there who is not a pro. Yes, low end TC:E player is far better than average FPS gamer (your average casual gamer has never heard of TC:E, don't know where to get it and even when told, wouldn't know how to install it).

Steady flow of new players is what keeps game a live, nothing else. ET in it self is a huge success, not being what you can really call a commercial game. But, I can't think of a single mod that has had huge success. Or yes, commercial ones where millions has been put in marketing. But all mods have fairly limited life time, and player base is much smaller than with "proper" games. All mods die to the same reasons as TC:E. There's nothing you can do about it really. Us, the old gamers who fell in love with the gameplay, will keep it struggling for a long time, but there is no miracle cure and only one direction...

TCE has survived through ages for being free MOD, and it will still be there when CoD 13 will be released (maybe next year, 'cause it feels like they are releasing new CoD for every *i-need-a-broader-vocab* week).
What is strange... TCE still is just so much better game than all of those.
TCE has only 20 pros, I think, all others... noobs.

im not happy with those numbers - max 150 players online aint great number and i do belive it could be much higher if we would do something to change that. but how could that happend if for all those years there were no allinone instaler for most popular system, and still is none for linux and mac (suporing those 2 platforms is a big unused advantage), when even instaled game makes lot of kicks, and there is less then none support for beginers (i mean pb kicks database/faq: you were kicked?-we have a solution!). where nobody made an backup of old forum knowing it will go down shortly. there is no pak files archive... this may go on and on