Thanks for your insight so far.
The singleplayer mode sounds cool. For some types of games, it is a real no brainer:
In racing games, you just do time-trial, training or race against bots until some human players show up, after which the “real” race begins.
In shooter games, you just play against bots which are removed when humans show up. Practically all online shooters do this, which is very important,
I bet this already prevents players from instantly running away from empty servers.
For other game types something similar can be done, a game against bots or a training or whatever. Developers could get creative here.
Now I share what I have seen in the meanwhile:
For Xonotic, there is a an IRC channel called “
#xonotic.pickup”, its only purpose is for players to find each other for matches in Xonotic. It has some bots so players can announce in what game mode they play. When enough players are interested in a match, the bots make another announcement. I don't think IRC is the best method to do it, but it certainly works, I have found one match with #xonotic.pickup.
Xonotic is not a terribly obscure game and you usually find a few players if you just start Xonotic. But sometimes there is nobody around so something like #xonotic.pickup sounds still helpful.
Another common concept, although less efficient is to make regular tournaments of some sort. Of course, this will only work for certain periods of time so this is very limited.
In Terminal Overload, some matches were planned beforehand and announced in the forums, and some players actually showed up. Like tournaments, I think this approach is also very limited since nobody is looking at the forums at all times.
You have already mentioned the browser thing for Terminal Overload. I think this idea is generally quite nice, because players don't have to install any extra software to be seen, even if nobody is inside at the moment. But it is annoying to have a browser open just for that. This approach could be generalized for more games. I have seen the software
Obozrenie which allow you to browse server lists, but it has not an notification feature at the moment, nor does it support Terminal Overload.
The bigger problem with Terminal Overload seems to be that development has stalled for a while which is probably the real reason why interest went down (including mine
).
So there are some ways people have come up with, but none of this is really making me happy, each approach is kinda limited, most of them only work with one game.
The Xonotic solution is certainly interesting, but it is limited to Xonotic and IRC only.
But I like the general idea of Publish-Subscribe. I wish there was some general tool which works with (theoretically) any game. Players could announce in which games they're interested in general, other players could be invited, or they could announce that they are “ready for play” for game XYZ and other players can join in, etc. With such a system, players even with the most obscure type of game should easily find to each other. At least that's the hope.
Or what about opening an IRC channel similar to #xonotic.pickup, but open for all games? Yes, it has been suggested before, but I personally don't really like the IRC approach since I hate talking to bots, typing cryptic messages and all that (and probably there will be not many users either). On the other hand, it is better than nothing.
