How to attract players?

[Baseplate]

As the title says, how is it possible to attract players on MTA nowadays? I've seen a lot of servers with unique gamemodes and ideas fail or simply closed cause of lack of motivation and players.

[Noki]

Top position.
Word of mouth.
YouTube (abuse the tag system to gain massive views).
Launch from another community.

The most important one in my books, is time coupled with consistency.

Keep the server consistently up and for a long time. There will be times when the server has more players than usual, and there will be times when the server has less players than usual. But it's up to the owners and players to stick through with it for a while. People love things that are reliable and consistent, look at relationships or cars. No one wants an unstable partner or an unreliable car.

Or you can just get really lucky. That always helps.

[UserToDelete]

Quote

YouTube (abuse the tag system to gain massive views).

Dont "invade" youtube system. Word of mouth and visual it's more important than functions like Minigames

 

Low download is a big factor to gain players, same to mods

[Blast3r]

4 hours ago, venadHD said:

 

 

Low download is a big factor to gain players, same to mod

Actually low download is not as big of a factor as it used to be 2-3 years ago. With the nets improving world wide I barely heard anyone complaining about DL sizes anymore in the last 6 months or so.

[Rudransh]

17 hours ago, Blast3r said:

Actually low download is not as big of a factor as it used to be 2-3 years ago. With the nets improving world wide I barely heard anyone complaining about DL sizes anymore in the last 6 months or so.

Then i am here to complain

[marty000123]

As Noki said, be lucky! Ofcourse, adding some nice and good scripts always helps. Myself, I got very lucky in the zombie server branche. Being successful in freeroam or RP servers seem to be quite hard.

[Mega9]

Without paid advertisements and active advertisers in your team? Hardly. No matter how original your gamemode is or how hard you work(ed) on it, nobody cares honestly.

Speaking from experience and you have a hell lot of examples to choose from, Need for Speed server, was peaking 300-400 players at times, now its number is halved, I mean 100 players is pretty successful too, but you get what I am trying to say, Advanced Gaming had a try at RP, although it is a small team of developers they didn't give up and kept trying, but the current mentality of players is that they cherish leaked gamemodes and stealing more than originality of work. Developers lose significant amount of time on protecting their servers, files to be specific because today everyone is out there hunting rather than doing authentic work to share with community.

There's so much more to rant about; but with SA-MP slowly shutting down, or at least lacking maintenance from developers opens new doors for potential server owners in MTA. Board the train of originality or hop on the "free ranks and money for players" cartwheel.

[ManeXi]

About download, well, honestly, if I would have to download 150 MB+ and if it's an random server for me I wouldn't waste my time, if the server keeps <100 MB I wouldn't doubt giving it a chance.

[Captain Cody]

1 minute ago, OverMind said:

About download, well, honestly, if I would have to download 150 MB+ and if it's an random server for me I wouldn't waste my time, if the server keeps <100 MB I wouldn't doubt giving it a chance.

What if the server runs one of the best maps ever made for SA? And it is apparent that it is indeed the map.

[ManeXi]

Cody I played your server cuz u spamming around this forums, and you do a massive campaing of your maps, I would play it in release but as I said before "random server", in my case I'm lurking around this forums I see what's going up, but most MTA players are not lurking around here and if heretics would be a "random server", I wouldn't wait to download 900 MB, but that's not my case.

[Captain Cody]

13 minutes ago, OverMind said:

Cody I played your server cuz u spamming around this forums, and you do a massive campaing of your maps, I would play it in release but as I said before "random server", in my case I'm lurking around this forums I see what's going up, but most MTA players are not lurking around here and if heretics would be a "random server", I wouldn't wait to download 900 MB, but that's not my case.

I don't recall spamming.

[Blast3r]

3 hours ago, OverMind said:

About download, well, honestly, if I would have to download 150 MB+ and if it's an random server for me I wouldn't waste my time, if the server keeps <100 MB I wouldn't doubt giving it a chance.

Exactly my point about download, you said less than 100 you wouldn't doubt giving it a chance.

About 1 year and a half ago I had people complaining on ~24 MB of download which is why we were forced to take drastic actions and lower it to 7 with background download tasks etc.

Now on my second server we have ~60 or ~70 MB of download and we haven't had a single complaint about it (although we do still plan to do an drastic decrease).