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Whatever Happened to Netrek?
FWMiller asks: "Yea, about 5 years I was skilled at a wonderful network game called Netrek. This game was really a sport, requiring not only arcade skills but strategic thinking and extremely well developed team play. Today I was thinking of trying to play again and to my dismay, the entire sport, which used to encompass hundreds of simultaneous players and games has all but disappeared! Does anyone out there have any idea if we witnessed the extinction of one of my favorite graduate school pastimes?" It seems that the home site of Netrek is alive and well, but the metaserver, which showed current active games, is not. Is anyone still playing? Will the Metaserver be replaced or is there some current or future alternative?
May I suggest rec.games.netrek ?
k
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rec.games.netre
metaserver.us.netrek.org worked as of a few days ago. The syntax, as I recall, was netrek -m metaserver.us.netrek.org (for the COW client at any rate). There aren't nearly as many players as there used to be a few years ago (I played for a while just after starting college).
And both are still alive.
metaserver.netrek.org is the round-robin for both metaserver.us.netrek.org and metaserver2.us.netrek.org, FYI.
Netrek is still around, to be sure. There are quite often full servers on the main bronco and hockey variant servers. It is definitely on life support, though.
Why is netrek so tiny now? I can probably offer a few personal opinions, in order of importance.
The decline in University UNIX labs and the rise in Windows systems without a stable (or even available) Windows client during the Windows boom. There are now 2 good clients available for Windows, but during the critical time, there was nothing, so people couldn't easily play. On top of that, being in a UNIX lab gave exposure to the game. "Hey, what's that guy playing? I wanna play too!" was/is Netrek's only source of advertising. We can't buy ad space in gaming magazines.
The rise of twitch games. "Lets blow this guy away with a rocket" sounds more fun than "Lets escort this guy to such-and-such a planet and hope he can take it." Netrek, being mainly a strategy game, requires more thought and concentration and less reflex and adrenalin. Twitch games are essentially "mouse, move, and fire." Netrek requires that the player learn tons of nuances, rules-of-thumb, and situational awareness skills, which Netrek calls "clue," for a team to be successful. But before he can even learn that, the keyboard control scheme and operation of the client requires much practice. The steep Netrek learning curve is a big hurdle for newbies.
The simple graphics. Netrek is a strategy game with simple pieces that were hashed out 13 years ago haven't changed in a while. On top of that, those pieces were developed from Netrek's predecessor, a 2-D text based game. There's no need for anything more than just sprites to represent those pieces. That makes the client look lackluster compared to high polygon count, bump-mapped, real-time generated backgrounds with tons of gore games on the market now.
People got real lives. The original player base isn't in college anymore. We now have jobs, families, and a house or apartment to take care of. I stopped playing for a bit because I was working full time, getting a graduate degree, and am currently recovering from spine surgery, for example.
And finally, of those remaining, a small subset of players are rather abusive of newbies. We should be encouraging newbies and teaching them how to play. However a few expect new players to be uber-clue the moment they first start the client. To be fair, a great majority of the old-clue aren't like that, but the abusers are rather loud.
Netrek isn't dead. There are still organized league play groups active, and I would imagine that the regular league playerbase is bigger than the pickup playerbase. www.netrek.org should show you where to start.
--Carlos V.