Future Tron Clans

[utengineer]

Greetings from a fellow Tron fan!

First let me say I am not in a Tron 2.0 clan. I purchased the game last year, installed it once, played online, nobody was there.....then dropped it because I was so involved in other games. It appeared the online 2.0 community was dead. Anyways, it is nice to see your clan is alive and kicking. I like your forum theme.

Being a Tron fan, I am excited about Legacy. Having seen the original movie as a kid, I was inspired to learn more about computers and programming. To this day, I can say my career and hobbies in the IT world stem back to Tron. As a hobby, I do a lot of website design and have built many clan websites from scratch. Hence, I am excited about a new Tron game and will probably start design of a Tron theme soon.

If you would like to see my latest work for Star Wars: The Old Republic, see http://www.jasaclan.com and feel free to browse around. This game is probably a year away from launch, but, I am eager to build a community for it.

This being said, I am curious about your clan experiences with 2.0.

Was there a lot of clans or gamers that played?
How many servers were there at its peak?
Would LDSO consider forming a completive team for multiplayer....for the new game?

I understand my questions may seem strange. I ask them because if I start a clan for Tron I would want to integrate it in to my tournament site for FPS-PC gamers. Therefore it is important to have active, competitive clans to make the Tron gaming community thrive and be successful. Base upon your appearance and dedication to Tron 2.0, I can tell your clan is organized and resourceful.
Thanks for reading my post. I look forward to seeing a great new Tron game in 2010!

[TronFAQ]

I like your forum theme.

Thanks.

This being said, I am curious about your clan experiences with 2.0.

Was there a lot of clans or gamers that played?
How many servers were there at its peak?
Would LDSO consider forming a completive team for multiplayer....for the new game?

I hope some other members from LDSO and other community members answer, so we can hear their perspective on these questions. But I'll get the ball rolling.

Were there a lot of clans? Not really. There were probably about 5 clans when fandom for Tron 2.0 peaked, but many of them didn't last long. LDSO itself is the merger of two clans. And I think LDSO is the oldest clan that's still around, more or less in its original form.

Were there a lot of gamers? At first, yeah. Probably thousands of active fans. Then Disney shot themselves in the foot by poorly supporting Tron 2.0 on the PC. With little to no after-sales support, the popularity of the game quickly faded. The later Xbox version did even worse.

How many servers were there? Again, at first there were a quite a few. Probably something like two screens worth of servers in the game's online server browser. And again, thanks to poor support the number of servers quickly dwindled within a year. BVG (aka Disney) shut down their own servers about two years after the game's release, and left it up to the fandom to keep things alive. The game's official site disappeared the year before that.

Is LDSO going to get involved with the next Tron game? I think I can speak of behalf of all the members on this point. Most likely, yes. But it depends on whether the game is very good or not, whether Disney supports it better than last time, whether there's a PC version at all, and whether or not they allow the community to do any modding of the game.

I understand my questions may seem strange. I ask them because if I start a clan for Tron I would want to integrate it in to my tournament site for FPS-PC gamers. Therefore it is important to have active, competitive clans to make the Tron gaming community thrive and be successful. Base upon your appearance and dedication to Tron 2.0, I can tell your clan is organized and resourceful.

Well, I think all it will take is for Disney to get serious and better support the game this time around. Last time, they expected the game to sell itself. When that didn't happen, they quickly gave up on it. It's like they were never serious about it. Never had their heart in it, to begin with. They made almost zero effort to promote it, outside of game magazines. If they had shown ads for it with Disney movies, which was apparently part of the original plan, Tron 2.0 would have sold a lot better. I'm sure of it.

It also would have helped if a new Tron movie had been released along with it, back then. A new movie helps to sell the game. Like what's happening now.

[utengineer]

Thanks for the detailed response. I feel your pain, as the lack of support from the game developer can make or break it. This occurred with Star Wars Republic Commando. Punks were able to crash our public servers by spawning excessive weapons. There was no admin access to the server and no kick function. The masses got tired of this and popularity dwindled. Although we did have a great run for about 3 years (~20 servers at all times).

Considering the movie is about a video game, you would think they would develope a top-notch game around it. I hope it comes out for PC. Not familiar with any Disney funded PC games.

Regardless, I think I will start my site designs for a new Tron clan. Even if the game has issues or weak popularity, it will still be fun to do it.

[TronFAQ]

Considering the movie is about a video game, you would think they would develope a top-notch game around it. I hope it comes out for PC.

Yep, you would hope so. Myself, I'm going to remain cynical and pessimistic about it. That way, I won't be disappointed if the same thing happens again with the next game.

Not familiar with any Disney funded PC games.

Disney has produced very few games worthy of notice. Particularly on the PC. The only good PC games that they've ever made are Tron 2.0 and Pure. Turok was garbage.

[win3k]

Evening chaps

Greetings, utengineer, and welcome to the LDSO corner of the web.

Like tronfaq said, interest in Tron 2.0 started on a high, then quickly plummetted thanks to the ever-caring support of the Disney corporation. But some of us remained true, and have (we hope) kept the embers glowing.

The heady days of carnage filled DM, DA and LC are, sadly, behind us now, but by the Lord Harry, it was fun while it lasted. As for the future, I hope that we end up with a game on PC (consoles are for girls) with at least minimal support for the mod community (riddle me this: if the mod community is so crap, compare the number of retail maps in each of the main game modes with the number of fan-based creations. What's that? Can't calculate the ratio? Nuff said.). Assuming that my hopes come true, LDSO will be there, front and centre, as always.

win3k

[utengineer]

Well, let's cross-our-fingers and hope the Legacy game is good. I will be looking forward to the multi-player side of the game. I feel the MOD community, for any game, helps unify clans and bring innovation to the game itself. Yet, I have experienced a unique phenomenon when running public servers with MOD maps.

For a game to remain popular and enjoyable for the average player, the retail version and maps are key. Let me explain this theory more. If you have a server with a MOD, the average gamer will not figure out how to get it. They are impatient and simply look for the next server that allows them to log in without having to do any extra steps. Now, some games (i.e. UT3) would give you the option to download the map directly in game. Other games would have the map's URL posted for download. Either way, I have found that most of the popular servers for any game are the ones with retail maps.

This held true for online tournaments. I found that most of the players in online tournaments didn't take the time to download and install the MOD maps. I would estimate 2 out of every 5 competitors had the maps. In a tournament with 100+ players, you had to satisfy the masses to make the event successful, so we ran the events with retail maps. In some instances, players were not allowed to download them (parents or dl quotas prohibited).

Going back to running a popular public server, it was mainly the larger clans that rented them. As a clan, you want to be able to recruit. Therefore, running MOD maps was a downfall, because you would not get all the retail-only users. Running a public server was key in getting new users back to your website because they could play on your server, meet your members, and eventually visit your site. Most clans could only afford to lease one public server, so to remain popular they ran retail maps.

Even with all this said, we had many MOD maps for practice and happy hour events. This slowly encouraged members to download the modified/custom map. Without a doubt, some of the custom maps were more enjoyable than the retail ones. If I designed a game, I would be sure to incorporate a force download option, so the average gamer could get the map without any trouble.

[SweatyPyro]

uten, I happened to play Republic Commando too a while back...those weapon spawn things really crashed those servers. :/

I'm going to guess that game eventually became deserted online as well? A shame if it did, it was enjoyable...even if everybody called me 'AA noob' or 'rocket noob' etc. Lol, good times pissing people off....

As for clans, Tron got it right. we all had different groups here and there, more or less faded out.

But hey. If we get our game grid rolling again...there's still hopes for the clans to come back in. x)

[utengineer]

uten, I happened to play Republic Commando too a while back...

Hey SweatyPyro! Glad you enjoyed SWRC. I was the leader of {MotR} Clan for about 4 years...The Mercenaries of the Republic. During it's prime, we had almost 100 active members and about 30 tournament players. We always ran a 32-man CTF server. Good times in those days! I still run their website, but don't play much. Hmmm, maybe I should break out my old disk and crank it up. I leased a 32 man server earlier this year for about 4 months and never played much. Yet I think there are still about 10 servers running, mostly in EMEA. I think the Steam RC offering re-ignited RC for a bit. I still get email notifications about players applying to be a member of MotR.

Cheers!

[xistence]

Most things were said, just to round it up from my side: It was a great time with many players, servers and good competitions and - watching it from a realistic point of view - this time lies behind us, but only for the game Tron2.0.
New things are in front of us, might it be Tron or something different. I don't put myself into any sorts of limits or borders, so i wait what comes next, might be a Tron-sequal, a new game made by Disney or a game that is made by fans.
This clan, being one of the oldest clans, exists for many years now, and i'm proud if it. One of its secret is, that we're not bound to a specific theme, though Tron is - and will be - our main interest.
I'm also realistic enough (as most of us in here) to be aware that Disney is not the right producer for community driven stuff as their marketing intrests are going in a complete different direction. So we have to see what they make out of Tron:Legacy and the game. At least i know enough projects that could bring something new if a new Tron film or game should fail.

If you're planning to make a clan or to support clans, i can just say: it is always worthful to support Tron, as there is a hugh community since more then 25 years now, a fact how strong it is. So supporting it can never be wrong.

[zook_one]

Greetings from a fellow Tron fan!

If you would like to see my latest work for Star Wars: The Old Republic, see http://www.jasaclan.com and feel free to browse around. This game is probably a year away from launch, but, I am eager to build a community for it.

Epic Intro!

Looking forward to seeing what you put together for TRON Legacy.

[SweatyPyro]

MotR? Ahh, that's a clan name that I've always seen around the game! Very nice to know, and I hope you swing on by again and tell us how your JASA group is doing!