On Sunday 04 June 2006 13:30, Dave Ahn wrote:
> I think this has been discussed several times over the last decade and
> more, and the conclusion has pretty much always been the same: newbies
> don't have the patience to learn a sophisticated game that has a 1980's
> look when there is an abundance of competition from modern games; and,
> clues don't have the patience, interest or time to tolerate the
> inevitably irritating behavior of newbies.

I have seen exactly this pattern in most non-trivial but popular games, eg 
Team Fortress, Tribes, etc..

It tends to devolve into a state where the clue pool diminishes through 
attrition and is not replaced fast enough by newbies because of the scary old 
people who don't tolerate people who haven't played for the last 5 years 
solid.

As a newbie it's not much fun getting repeatedly thrashed by people that are 
so far above you in skill you can only kill them one time in 10.

One benefit netrek has is that it IS cheap in both cost and hardware 
requirements compared to, say, Battlefield 2 (which is at least as 
complicated strategy wise) :)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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