I used to play alot of CS back in the day. DM, clangames, pickups everything. I wasn't the best but i wasn't too bad either, until the guy on the floor above me challenged me to a game of quake. I thought I was quite allright at quake, I can remember we played a 1v1 on DM17 (the only map I knew lol) and he completely raped me.

This intrigued me. Although he wasa quite noob by my standards today, I couldn't believe that someone could be that skilled. So I started playing Q3. I still play the occasional CS game, even a pickup once in a while, but for the most part I'm over it. I just figured tat people who play it, and are skilled at it, like the teamplay aspect of it.

Untill the other day I discovered ET. Wow, that game rocks. It's like Quake and CS mixed with some objectives thrown in, and a lot of fun soon as you get the hang of it. It just got me thinking, why would anybody still want to play CS? I can understand that DM gaming isn't for anybody, but I mean really, name one thing CS has over ET?

After thinking over it for a while, I reached my conclusion. A games popularity hasn't got to do with how much fun it is or anything, it's 90% how easy it is to pick up. Look at CS, any monkey that can hold a mouse and a keyboard can score a couple of kills on their first day playing CS. Even with ET you can get lucky, although you have to figure out stuff like 'classes' and revives and objectives which just seems to me to be too much for the average CS player (at least those playing on our uni's servers).

Even though CS has more to offer than just randomly running around shooting people (i.e. deathmatch), those deathmatch games give the complete noob a chance to learn the game, learn the maps,weapons, and basic combat tactics of the game, before that person moves on, to pickups or whatever. ET does this as well, but because the first day's learning curve is steeper, people lose interested. Quake (whether it's vq3, cpm, qw or warsow) is at the far end of the spectrum. I mean try playing with the default config. It's impossible. Even the 'noobier' modes of play (whether it be a random CTF, FFA or CA) are not only hard to find, but real hard, because people are good at it. There is no RNG that will give you kills, no teammates to revive you (50 times) if you keep dying.

So what's my point? If DM games are to survive, the people who make (and play) them will have to figure out a way to make it more accessible. Most people do not even want to read a help file or two, let alone a how-to guide on playing the game, so that's out. We need to make it easy for fresh blood to get going. I dont know what or how, but for warsow for example, a ready made config, with a half life 1 hazard course style tutorial on movement, weapon basics (i.e. remember to switch weapons often etc) may help. If we can get new players to at least stick for a week or two, and get used to the game before going back to a random noob campfest, we'll see growth.

what do you think?