As I type this, Space Station 13 has 603 players. Why are they so popular?
I would like to imitate their success.
What did they do to be so successful? Do they have some sort of advertising system to get new players?
ID:1504269
 Feb 23 2014, 8:25 am (Edited on Feb 23 2014, 8:38 am)
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People have also spoken of its sandbox-like nature in a formerly rare or unavailable setting such as space contributing quite a bit to its success as well, but that is purely speculation by various members of the BYOND forum community as far as I can tell. I do have to agree with it, though.
I think it has roleplay aspects too, so basically the players make a majority of the content, and it goes by rounds, so it's much harder for the game to ever get harder over time compared to most games. | |
Probably for similar reasons to games like Minecraft. It's a sandbox game people can mess around in. The game it's self might not be the biggest or most complex game, but it's open and allows people to play in many different ways (I believe the proper term for it is emergent gameplay).
Other than that, it's basically a community run game at this point. There is no one lead developer, but lots of groups of people who were once players. Most of these groups come from their own community and their version of the game is played by people from their community (and is tailored to that specific community in a lot of cases). | |
It also managed to hit a 'critical mass' where the number of players supports a self-sustaining environment... Basically, it has so many players because it has so many players.
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The math behind any game, or server is just: more players = more players.
Beside that, SS13 is big and fun. | |
I believe SS13 is successful mostly for the fact there are separate rounds where the game is reset and becomes a very different game. Each of these rounds can be so dramatically different that it can make roleplaying quite exhilarating. If you look at a game like Cow RP, each round generally goes the same. Namely, people build houses, farm, grief, and wait for everything to go to hell when someone gets the king's sword and kills everybody. SS13 seems to do this much better by providing a much more dynamic and deep environment where the outcomes of the roleplay are limitless and much more than just text.
Basically, the game plays like crap, but roleplays like none other. | |
Emergent gameplay is crack cocaine. Nothing wrong with SS13, be it clunky controls or anything else, matters.
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Pretty much what others have already said in the thread. Space Station 13 is popular because 100% of the gameplay is player actions and there's so many wild and different possibilities that every round is new and exciting.
Even if you try to do the same thing every round the rest of the players are going to monkey wrench your plans. Also it's one of very few games you can win by talking. It wasn't even supposed to be a game, Exadv wrote a finite element analysis air pressure simulator in BYOND to see if he could and then made a space station to test it. Somehow it was really, really fun and people got hooked. Since BYOND makes it real easy for anyone to add content and features the game just kept getting more complex and refined. Even now it's just getting bigger, there are multiple groups working on different branches of the same core game from mid 2010. There's an awful lot of people making the game better and better every day. It's not really something that you can imitate. We don't even have any idea what we're doing, we're all just having fun, from players to staff to coders. | |
SS13 has an incredibly storied past. There's one legend I heard way back about how the source code was closed at one early point, and someone ripped the .dmb apart to retrieve it, I believe against Exadv's wishes at the time.
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Actually Exadv lost the source code completely and our (LLJK's aka goonstation's) current host spent some time reverse engineering BYOND and wrote a DM decompiler to retrieve it.
Every current server is still running parts of that decompiled code. | |
Aah, that's how it went.
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idk how or why its successful, the game to me sucks always has and prob always will. The game play to me is just to horrid to play. and dont even speak about the icons.
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More or less people just noticed the game and that it was something fun to play. From there it just grew and grew due to people talking about it and sharing stories. As far as I'm aware there wasn't any sort of advertisement system in place aside from good old word of mouth.