Jump to content
 Share

Flops

What drives you to keep on playing ze?

Recommended Posts

On 6/20/2017 at 8:11 PM, Unorth said:

I was going to write a post about what keeps me playing ZE, it would have been short, boring and rather untruthful given the current circumstances which is affecting not only this community but the overall ZE community in general.The past few months Ive pushed myself further away from ZE across all servers for a number of varying reasons. I could rattle on about map pool (go make a map yourself) or make some outlandish comment about settings, defending or some either meaningless topic that is bland & hasn't been said before.

 

The main reason I have been moving further away from ZE community itself is the people. The community is full of arrogant egotistical assholes who are so fixated on their own ego driven agendas and elitist circle jerk that they cannot see the untold damage they are dong to the overall ZE community.

 

The maturity level of your average zombie escape regular is reasonably low. Lets be frank. The average of most regular ZE players hovers around the late teens early 20s. With some outlying exceptions player characteristics such greediness, self entitlement and insulting behavior as the average method for people to express themselves or to vent when things are not going there way. On a daily basis there is a constant level of drama and bickering over clans, items and ability to dodge laser expressed by your average zombie escape regular. Be it classified as "tryhard" or "casual" this is a double edged sword and there is people from both sides of the coin who are guilty of this.

 

I have seen people victimized in circumstances such as people being finger pointed for "skipping lasers" or other petty shit that may seem like a joke at first, but a lot of you tend to forget that people log into a video game to escape from reality. They come to chill out after a hard days work or to have fun playing a game they enjoy. Hearing one person belittling another for no other reason other than "for a laugh" or that the person "deserves" it is not and should not be tolerated by either the direct GFL community or the wider ZE community. Sure a joke can run for a couple of days and usually it can be funny for a week at best, but if you lads seriously think 6 months of telling someone they are shit is "funny" then I am sorry but you are part of the reason why ZE has not taken off in a bigger way given the global reach counter strike has in terms of player population. The average age in the community is very low,  demeaning comments about a video game can have untold affects on the person behind the keyboard. Mental health is a serious conversation and anyone who continues to target individuals in the community on a regular basis should be called out.

 

CSGO like CSS before it peaks at a relatively low value for repeating players. If you look at the statistics of unique player hits via steamid's on gametracker you could be looking at anywhere between 10,000 - 30,000 unique vistors per month. Of that id say about 25% of those players relog back in to play a second time. Taking 20,000 as the median thats about 5,000 people who decide to try ZE more than once. The return rate after 10 visits drops off relatively high with only ~10% or 500 of those 5,000 per month converting into regular players across all community servers. This is a very low value given the divide in time zones, peak hours, server distributions, language barriers and ping. Given the turn over rate of players also leaving the game due to stagnation for various reasons this is not a healthy model for maintaining yet alone growing the overall ZE community.

 

ZE is a team based game. Pure and simple. Yes ZE has trim mechanics which will result in the deaths of a new player if there is nobody there to tell them of that fact well in advance. Contributing to the drop off of players and stagnation of "new to regular" ratios is the fact that people are unwilling to sit and teach people how to survive and complete a map. There has been a rise in people "claiming" leadership qualities who are only capable of reminding players of mechanics they already know from playing the map before. Partial tactics, false tactics and staying quiet to achieve the "appropriate" trim to complete a boss so the map can be beaten only drives no players away. The argument that they learn by doing does not stand true when you look at the statistics. From a median of a guesstimated 20,000 per month only ~500 of these people actually stick around long enough to have even played a map twice. Shitty mentalities towards achieving your own screenshots is the reason why people are dropping off this game mod.  Team wins that gives ample opportunity for new and regular players alike is what motivates new players. Team wins such as the paper escaper win with a load of new players is far more rewarding than winning Tilex ultimate for the 20th time solo because you practiced the laser mechanics offline. 

 

This is not a rant where I decide to point fingers and recall specific members of the community up on there actions. I am simply highlighting certain examples that I have seen in my travels in GFL and beyond where by the behavior of high profile members in the community continues to have a profound affect on the overall ZE community and as a result keeping it the small, toxic and an unhealthy environment for new,regular,casual or try hard players to have fun playing over an extended period of time. 

 

As a whole the ZE community has a long way to go before it can take off. Team play and coordination needs to happen at a day to day level and peoples attitudes need to change in order to attract new players in. Otherwise 2-3 years down the line the ZE community will be severely lacking in player population, servers, map development and community.

 

 

Stay comfy 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites


Posted  Edited by Zoom

I feel like this post is more about asking why older players are still playing ze. Lacking of new maps is the main reason besides the fact that people are simply moving on to other mods or games. There will always be new players coming in as long as Valve isn't attacked by ISIS, but for older players, there's no more thrill in winning the same map over two hundred times, it's more of " just chilling in ze", and obviously, they start to play less and less and only for certain maps. It's just the way how a game or game mod is gonna go, no one stays forever.

Edited by Zoom

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites


Posted  Edited by sweet

I think the reason why I keep on playing ze is because when I bought cs all those years ago, it was because of zombie mod. So its more of a nostalgia thing, but the people also keep me coming back too (talking about css btw). It doesn't take much to be decent at the game mode, but most people are still shit at it for some reason.

 

Ze is a little bit more involved than just point shoot and trigger, there are some little subtle things in ze that sets apart the experienced players from the inexperienced ones, things like how well you space your self from the zombies, not panicking, how well your movement is (not so much for cs:go i presume), well timed grenades and all that. And with regards to team play there are some interesting little 'psychological' aspects, like keeping up pressure as a zombie (will make the defenders slink back) and stabbing defenders who are too close, usually makes them panic and fall back. Or as a ct, if you are defending with a group of people and just 1 or 2 people fall back early, if the rest of the people don't know what they are doing (which is usually the case) they will fall back too, and the people who aren't paying attention might get nipped by a zombie. On the surface, it doesn't really seem like there is a lot going on, and i'm not saying that ze is hard either, but of course there is more than meets the eye. 

 

Another fun aspect is trying to develop a strategy to beat a map, and when the majority of the server is working together it makes the process a lot more enjoyable. For instance a couple years ago or so, on css fapescape was an "unbeatable" (at least on our settings, sonaki beat it many times because of their dumb grenades, and probably other servers too with freeze grenades) map, and for like a month or more we kept on grinding away at the map, and eventually beat it multiple times after many fails, it was great because the same people kept on coming back like every evening, and we were all on the same page. Nowadays I'm not one really one for tryhard maps, but in retrospect, times like that were some of the best times I had on ze, and css in general. Of course other fun times were just what you would expect from GFL.

 

So in summary what keeps me coming back to ze is mostly nostalgia, the community, the fun moments and the difficult moments. There can be some people who are just absolute cunts on the server, but it doesn't take much effort to just mute them if you don't want to hear them. 

Edited by sweet

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites


  • 1 year later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now


×
×
  • Create New...