Why is this game not more popular?

[daraofp]

The funniest thing I've found is that when you read these other game forums for far more arcadey run-'n'-gun type FPS's, the issues that those guys bitch and moan about are never a problem in Arma2

you are right about that...I just stoped playing COD 4 online and uninstalled it because every time i play it with my friends and go to TEAM SPEAK all i hear is bitching and moaning "god d...t"," mother f....r","that sone of a b....h","why wont you die mother f....r" and so on!!!
And recentley two of my friends got angy at each other in that game like little children and did not speek for about 1 month

80% of those guys dont know how to play thats why they play arcade games they just now how to charge the enemy like in the ww1 tactics, no flanking or any thing else!!!
COD 4 is not that challenging and is a little boring to me after a while (bullets go trough 5 walls and have no time travel so shooting with sniper is a walk trough the park and you can kill a guy with a pistol at 150 yards while jumping around!!!

Here are 2 video i posted on youtube of my playing COD4 and kicking they're ass with a frickin shotgun and a sniper!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjaohqYRJnk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVA-S...eature=channel
Hmmm i wonder how long they would survive in OFP or arma---i think they would get lost somewere in the woods and die from hunger

[Opticalsnare]

I dont play online anymore simply because its boring and theres still a lack of addon support. Its rather sad and depressing to modders like me and others who spend alot of their time on something for arma2 only to get told to basicly f*** off when it comes to playing arma2 online, pretty much all of my friends who i used to play online with dont play arma2 online and if they did its mostly themselfs hosting a server for like 2 or 3 people and nothing on the scale of public.

Its like arma2 was meant to be a large battlefield type game big scale and stuff and yet when it comes to the online gameplay or whatever it just basicly is one big fat fail & falls apart and becomes a complete and utter mess of not catering for the public at all, its far too restrictive when it comes to allowing differnt addons and differnt missions, why do we need 20-30 servers hosting the same shit all the time its like all they do is copy eachother, most of the time all i see is warfare + ace, warfare + ace, warfare + ace, warfare + ace some small servers try to hosting something else but you try and join and its basicly a vanilla server that dont allow any mods at all, so nobody plays on em and they are empty most of the time, and when a server is empty its hard to fill as of course theres such a small online base going on right now, you can sit on a empty server for a whole day and nobody will join. If i had the money spare id host my own goddam server that allows most of the used mods to be used and has a differnt rotation of games but i dont.

You can scream and shout and question about addons and the advantages or whatever but at the end of the day, addons & mods is what keeps games going longer and on the basis that arma2 online is basicly the opposite, then its more or less making the game life shorter, its basicly killing it. Because people are going elsewhere.

[Herbal Influence]

When I started playing ArmA 2 back in Summer 2009, the peak global online players in the evenings (US time) as shown on arma2.swec.se were around 1200. Now its 350. According to the X-fire stats, ArmA 2 has lost 25% from December to now alone.
That's not a good sign at all - many people seem to abandon the game (at least MP).

There you can see that x-fire stats aren't trustworthy in this regard.

I steadily watch the swec stats and they are at about a 400 during the day and reach more than 1000 each night I checked them. On weekends they grow up to 1500-1760 as far as I remember.

Now at 17:00 European Time it shows:
Players Online: 521
Servers Online: 696

EDIT:
Now at 22:50 European Time it shows:
Players Online: 1231
Servers Online: 710

[whisper]

I dont play online anymore simply because its boring and theres still a lack of addon support. Its rather sad and depressing to modders like me and others who spend alot of their time on something for arma2 only to get told to basicly f*** off when it comes to playing arma2 online, pretty much all of my friends who i used to play online with dont play arma2 online and if they did its mostly themselfs hosting a server for like 2 or 3 people and nothing on the scale of public.

True that, the lack of addon auto-download is a huge drawback

[DevilBass]

Not popular, probably, because the game is not yet stable, have too much bug, and they engine is not fixed, actualy much peoples play arma 1 again, because have not a huge group of peoples have the computer to play arma 2, probably need a couple of patch again to fix all the issue and stability problem.

When all be fixed, peoples will come back again, for me, arma 2 is the real Arma 1 suposed to be! but very unstable.

[Herbal Influence]

Not popular, probably, because the game is not yet stable, have too much bug, and they engine is not fixed, actualy much peoples play arma 1 again, because have not a huge group of peoples have the computer to play arma 2, probably need a couple of patch again to fix all the issue and stability problem.

When all be fixed, peoples will come back again, for me, arma 2 is the real Arma 1 suposed to be! but very unstable.

Well, it's quite a long time ago 'stability issues' with Arma2 have been reported.
Since 1.05 everythings more than fine to most of the people I know.

@whisper:
Has there been another auto-addon possiblity than this very third-party-program which name I can't remember for OFP?

Maybe for Armed Assault - I didn't do that often enough ... it seems.

[qwertz]

There you can see that x-fire stats aren't trustworthy in this regard.

I steadily watch the swec stats and they are at about a 400 during the day and reach more than 1000 each night I checked them. On weekends they grow up to 1500-1760 as far as I remember.

Now at 17:00 European Time it shows:
Players Online: 521
Servers Online: 696

That's Europe. In the US, the evenings are now around 350 players during the week according to swec, down from over 1200 in summer 2009.

[Slyder73]

I think the oft-mentioned marketting, but also the near complete lack of any good dedicated PvP servers.
Many working adults like myself have that hour or so in the evening or a few hours on a weekend mainly to play. I'm looking for exactly what Arma2 has to offer and love when I find it once in a rare while.

I'm looking for playing with and against real people, no AI, no matter how good folks say the AI is, it is not a real thinking person.

I think another reason that discourages players from making servers a regular stop is the lack of servers using the ingame voice. Too many use VENT or TS, which is another side program and a hassle, also no easy way to go back and forth between squads, private local chat etc....the game voice is great, it's not used and that turns at least me off. I already have VENT open and chat with my buddy who I play with, we need ingame voice to communicate with team and typing...well we all know that most typing chat goes unnoticed.

If there was just ONE PvP server out there that had proper voice on, and had squad loadouts and icons on (as opposed to incommunicable servers with nothing but riflemen who all have some sort of missle), it would develop a strong and repeat playerbase very fast. Especially if it didn't require the extra hassle of finding a clan website, getting on there, finding passwords, getting permission to play etc.

Thats why I still stick to Darkest Hour, not because Arma2 is too arcadey, but because there are no good PvP servers that encourage communication and teamwork in a realistic way.

[wamingo]

When all be fixed, peoples will come back again

No, I don't think they will. Well a few might, but they won't make any real impact. Not without another product. First impressions are everything you know. The only thing that can revive a franchise is the next product and the publicity created with it.
...or a mod of counterstrike-like proportions...

I think the reasons why people quit arma are really much simpler:
A. They weren't actually as interested in the game in the first place.
B. They ran out of content and got bored.

Arma features no addictive achievements systems to keep people coming back. And the mods tend to add a lot of stuff, but little or no content. The content (ie missions) that is released takes effort and knowledge to install and use and there is no guarantee of quality... And it's virtually all mediocre quality.
People may watch user made rubbish on youtube all day long, but only as long as there's no effort required.

The (public) multiplayer population is small for several reasons besides the above: hard, slow, high fear of death (eg long wait and travel times), mod hell, hacker hell, non-standardization, barely any official content, demands teamplay to be enjoyable while rewarding soloing, unremarkable content, and stuff like that.

So if you want the player numbers to grow you need to look at the bigger picture and realise that bugs is but a small part of it.

There are many things that I would suggest are key to success, but they could pretty much all be summed up into these three words: Polish, polish, polish. The impressive bits are in the details. BIS please take notes

[galzohar]

The main problem with in-game chat is that for many people it's just impossible (or very hard) to understand what people are saying on it. So until BIS improve it, there is no real other choice than using 3rd-party voice chat.

Probably the main reason for the lack of PvP servers is the lack of PvP missions that actually work. To make a good PvP game you need people who actually know how to make it with a massive amount of players testing them, giving feedback, playing the updated version and repeating the process. Right now even the biggest PvP communities IMO don't have enough players to get the testing needed for a proper PvP mission.

And then you have a huge difference in opinions of players on what is good PvP and what is bad PvP so even amongst those that prefer PvP, most will not play most types of PvP missions.

To top it all off, the stuff that do get played require a rather high minimum amount of players to get the game going, so if your server isn't constantly populated and well-known by players who like to play the missions it's running then it's going to stay empty. Especially when searching by game mode is not possible if the server doesn't already have players playing it.