Gnalvl; Take CPMA in the Quake community for example… When Quake 3 hit, many diehards felt that it’d been too casualized and that too many key aspects of QW and Q2 had been discarded, so a group of them developed a consensus on how to improve Q3 and executed those changes as a mod.
Granted, CPMA did start out as a small subsection of the larger Q3 community, but at least it was there for the people who wanted those changes,
OSP borrowed CPMA’s ruleset wholesale and popularized a ton of its changes. UTComp’s key ideas like brightskins and hitsounds came straight from CPMA.
If OSP borrowed anything it was interface/quality of life changes from CPMA. None of the movement, armor or weapon changes were adopted by base OSP. None of the actual features you would consider the “game” of CPMA was taken for OSP – or if movement/weapon/armor/etc changes were taken as a voteable option in OSP, they took a back seat to brightskins, improved HUD options, stats, voting, ready up, minor visual/clutter options, spawn algo(?), netcode(?), etc for duel or tdm – these were the real reasons people used OSP in vq3. If the game changes were included in OSP it could almost be said that this was an attempt to expose CPMA movement/weapons/etc on a wider player base via integration of the base CPMA game in OSP. Which was clever as OSP had a much larger uptake. So players+severs that had OSP also had the core CPMA gameplay but no additional content – maps primarily?
The casualised q3 aspect was primarily related to speed and perhaps some of the movement options in q2. Not brightskins, ability to vote or the options that OSP was used for in vq3 for duel or TDM.
OSP was used up to ESWC 2004 and CPMA was used in at ESWC in 2005, however it was not for CPMA gameplay, rather the aforementioned “extras” that improved the game while not really changing the game overly much from the “casualised” perspective. Why was it used here? Was OSP ever updated at this point while CPMA had people working on it still? Was it purely lack of support from the OSP camp or ease of use that finally got CPMA onto servers for vq3? By the time CPMA was replacing OSP (even as just a competitive mod) it was too late, the game was essentially dead. It could be said that similar things happened in ut99 with newnet and faster weapon switch.
The bold options were available in the two older quake titles, either via competitive mods or some recolouring skins that were not cheat protected at the time. The only thing off the cuff I can think of that these mods bought that had not been done previously was hitsounds. Saying that these are features of CPMA is ignoring 3+ years of competitive/server control mods that came before it in the older quake games.
If CPMA created a divide it was not a minor one, as some of the better later day q3 duelers were original CPMA players. Daler and Fox come to mind. Did people play CPMA? Sure, some. A small community. I bet more than ut4.
[QUOTE=’Gnalvl;n391398′] which is more than we can say for a lot of the requested changes in the UT community which either never got implemented at all or if they did, never made it on any servers.[/QUOTE]
I agree with your general sentiment about ut players and not accepting anything non-epic. The base ut99 maps had problems but could have been “fixed”, more easily than the q3 maps as we could edit them. They were never addressed. For example curse had issues in duel because belt vs pads yet it was never addressed and while it was somewhat popular early on one of the reasons it lost popularity was surely because of the perceived “imbalance” between control/out of control. Map authors were even aware of this as the 1on1 maps were much better setup in this regard, they were received by the community as better and a big part of that was the item balance. Yet they were still not played.
You are being disingenuous pitching CPMA as the savior and an example of mass uptake – when its use was not due to the gameplay changes in CPMA but its ability to be a competitive mod for quake 3. This would be akin to utcomp implementing large movement changes alongside its base options, then saying that uptake on the movement changes was good because utcomp uptake was good – while ignoring the fact that noone really used the movement changes and just used it for voting/brightskins/hitsounds/etc.
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