I've been following the custom tab topic through the digest for a few weeks. In general, I agree that the custom tab seems like a really bad idea. However, Valve probably figured that they had to do _something_ to try to get players back. Take a look at the history graph that Zeitgeist keeps for online FPSes:
http://www.onlinegamingzeitgeist.com/games/ TF2 has gone from a high of 3rd overall to 19th. It has seen its online player count go from from a high of 11,000 players back in late October down below 1,400 players today, and the slide shows no sign of stopping. It's slid so far, you have to go down to the bottom graph in order to get a good view of its current status. Meanwhile, CS and CS: are dominating the charts with online player counts at 95,000 and 50,000 respectively. (#3 CoD4 is hovering a bit below 15,000.) I don't think it's any single event that's driving the player count down. Personally, I just don't find the game as much fun to keep playing over the long haul as I thought I would. Based upon this chart, I'm clearly not alone in feeling that way. I wish I could put my finger on why the mod is doing so badly. Personally, I thought the original TF on QW was a fantastic mod. I played it to death and played a lot of TFC, too. (TFC, btw, is chugging along with just under 1,000 players.) The implication of all this is that we TF2 server administrators have to ask ourselves whether it's worth our time to keep our servers up if we can't keep them populated. The custom tab fiasco hasn't helped what is clearly a bad situation. Personally, I'm just about ready to shut my TF2 server down and find a game that people actually want to play. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
