I mostly agree with Zach.

I don't play sturgeon, and I'm concerned about its impact on bronco,
but I'm not willing to condemn it out of hand. I think the whole
sturgeon-bronco issue is a bit peripheral to the fact that we rather
desperately need more players. Bronco wasn't in great shape before
warped sturgeon went online; it'd been a year or two since I saw T on two
servers at once. 

I'd like to think the preferance for sturgeon was a preferance for t-mode,
even if it was twinky and had bots, over df-ing with one or two other
people. 

If the clients are soon to be able to make a composite list from
multiple metaservers, then the policy change doesn't matter, right? 
Or am I missing something? I assume the client distros would have
multiple metaservers built into their configs, yes?

> The vast majority of the old timers and clue have spoken through their
> absence and it seems clear they'd rather not play netrek at all rather
> than play sturgeon style netrek.

I'm not sure I buy this. Continuum used to have daily T and full games, 
then warped came, and it had daily T and full games while continuum 
didn't. This says to me that the player base was not markedly different
in size, though the bot/nobots issue does muddy things a bit. 

> the same satisfaction from it the way I do bronco pickup. On another
> sad note we've not had a single bronco clue pickup game in nearly 16
> months.

Has the new list not successfully generated a game? 
This week was only the second try, and it was the eve of the 
US thanksgiving holiday, which probably cut into attendance. 
Do we have any ways to find more former players and get them back?

> Empirically I have witnessed the truth of this myself and it is sad. I
> believe that the way to resurrect netrek and ensure it's future health
> is to:
>
> 1) Take measures to grow the player base:
>    a) Client side development (some eye/ear candy)
>    b) Healthy bronco pickup servers

including one with bots, so you can always play.  

>   d) Promotional efforts. Joe is basically the only who has done much
>      on this and I appreciate his efforts.

This should be first on the list!


  --akb