Assault Cube's niche shrinking.

[Nightmare]

Random observation, not meant to be positive or negative. tl;dr at end for lazy people.

Assault Cube once had a few strengths that made it worth playing compared to other fps games to a bunch of players. Nowadays those strengths have lost their luster a bit.

Low latency/Lag:

Spoiler

The homepage emphasizes this, and there are still dial-up/dsl users out there who struggle to find good ping/pj in their games. Not finding the post but flowtron admitted that the game didn't have lag problems until anticheat was added. Most popular games these days have a bunch of servers that are so close to you, that you can play lag free. And they stick close regional players in the same game, or try to at least. Almost never see lag in commercial games. AC only has a handful of good games to join, and they are usually full of laggers from across the world. If you find a server by ping, you end up with tosok douze. AC can't use this as a strength because it just isn't anymore. You can get 2x-4x better ping on commercial/high quality FOSS games without being forced to play ugly modes/maps.

So ugly that it's so lightweight that it runs on any computer!11111111:

Spoiler

On the right maps, ac_mines built by an oldschool developer designed for AC you can definately get a ridiculous amount of fps in most areas and older computers/integrated graphics can run the game silky smooth. Plenty of maps, even some official ones get worst frames per second than brand new AAA commercial titles with the right settings(both games on lowest) Weirder though, AC gets choppy to a lot of players once you hit 60 fps or lower. Other games run perfectly smooth at 30 fps. Used to play diablo 2 at 20-25 fps and didn't notice choppy-ness, was completely smooth. Part of this is probably a not-so-great engine.(Cube 2 can handle open areas without the huge loss)

Free in money, free in freedom:

Spoiler

Well the code is free to use, but a lot of the media isn't. Plenty of open source games have free-to-use everything, so their art and sounds and everything can continue to be improved and keep bettering these games. Also the gaming industry is gradually leaning towards a free-to-play system. And most have learned from the pay-to-win years, now you can play games like Team Fortress 2 for free and have completely balanced gameplay, weapons, etc. Planetside 2, Tribes: Ascend, Blacklight: Retribution, etc. Whether you like them or not, they're high quality and free.

Unique:

Spoiler

Every time someone brings up an idea from another game, you hear 'omg AC is different and doesn't want to be like those.' Because you know, adding zombies mode will completely transform AC into CoD right? But what is unique about the game? It's an admitted rip-off of action quake, and the older urban terror mod(both pre-date Cube 1.) Every mode is from the 90's/early 2000's and copied from other games. The guns have random fake names, but ar/smg/etc are in every modern fps game. Rifle kickback is a rip of rocket kickback. Only thing I can think of is the package size. You got a small 40-50 mb package with a full, playable game with features 1gb games don't have. That is all AC has left to say 'hey look what I can do.' Sure the map editor, but it's obsolete to cube 2 now.

le conclusion/tl;dr: The niche is shrinking to the point where the only reason a lot of us stick around is because of our friends and nostalgia or just like to kick back and play a quick pub here and there. Plenty of other free games have better graphics, gameplay with more depth, with smoother fps, less lag, etc. Loyalists to AC are the ones who will keep it alive, we shouldn't assume that new batches of players will just keep trickling in to replace those who leave.

Also, this was made for a parody/opposite world dev team thread some of us had planned for fun with plays on their names like Hamz/Sukz/RandumPeeWee/etc. but never happened for some reason.

Spoiler