Sad to see the decline in the playerbase

[MerCyKiL]

Oh, I remember I was like you: young and brave and naive and spilling these types of ideas to the forum :DD

Masterserver

I agree here. The thing that differentiated AC from other games was the ability to play pretty much anything you wanted. Some of the reason the restrictions were put in place were performance issues with toasters. Others related to the fact that mods didn't want to see EzJemVille and ac_oldvillage popping up on all of the servers. I feel that relaxing the restrictions would bring the game some good but good luck with the devs

Art style

This is a cube engine game. That means the only objects you will see on maps that are not cubic are mapmodels. With the new auto-download system in this version, I feel the devs have done a fantastic job with reshaping the way the game looks. Also: if you check your defaultmapsettings.cfg you will find a ton of textures edited out (there's a max limit as to how many textures can be available in a .cfg). This game already has a ton of textures. New ones are pretty easy to download as well (so I've heard. never tried it).

The pause thing

Would be cool. I think the devs are contemplating this for a future version

Lack of community requests actually making it to the releases

We gotta keep in mind that the devs have jobs and livelihoods to tend to. They are indeed listening. Community requests, if popular enough, are added to the next version. New versions come out sporadically and the last one took about 4 years. The more things the community requests, the longer the version will take to come out.

Lack of advertisement for AssaultCube

This is really on you, me, and the rest of the community. The makers of the game aren't going to spend even more time marketing their free product to the world. That's our job. Let your friends know. Post on FB and forums.

Competitive Scene

Yup. I see you here. In all honesty, the pros (the people who tend to play the most) are the people who tend to have the most sway about what gets done in the community. And what gets done in the community often happens to benefit the pros the most. There's no way to change this by just saying "hey man dafuq" to the people who make the game. You gotta become a prominent member too. And you can. Host AC events that don't involve professional play (idk like a gema tourny or something). Speak often but make sure what you say with worth hearing in the community and people will listen to you.