This post is about a month late, but it doesn't change the fact that... Goon Haven is 3 years old and still going strong! First off, credit where credit is much due: teratos - Without him there would simply not be a Tribes 2 server anymore. I operated it for 2 years (and about 5-6 months of that was with your, the players, donations) and then found myself without the time (nor the inclination honestly) to continue dealing with the server side of things. Teratos gladly took the burden off my shoulders and has been running with it ever since. His amazing work with the stat tracking even added another reason to play on our server specifically. I don't even recall how Teratos and I first started chatting and how I convinced him to be the first person to register on these forums, but he's been a loyal friend ever since. Thank you for everything you've done. Eolk - What hasn't been said about Eolk? This man has lived and breathed Goon Haven for the past 3 years. The community has grown tremendously since he launched the Ace of Spades servers and he managed to keep that circus under control. I created Goon Haven, but Eolk has been the chief nurturer, moderator, and maintainer for quite a while now. Thank you. Thalagyrt - New on this list is Thal. Without his partnership with Goon Haven we wouldn't have the Ace of Spades, Minecraft, and (new!) King Arthur's Gold game servers. He's an awesome and very generous guy and I'm proud to call him my friend. I believe Goon Haven has a very bright future with him on board. Thank you, Thal. Upcoming Changes/Improvements/Things-for-you-to-yell-at-me-about: New Forum Engine - We are currently evaluating a new forum app to move off of phpBB. It's a much sharper piece of software with many more community options for interacting, communicating, and following threads. I know I stunned a lot of people when I changed the theme of these forums without warning, so we're trying to avoid that in any way we can. The main theme will still be someone similar to this one (dark text on light background), but we definitely intend on finding a facsimile of the dark theme that many of you prefer. This is the chief reason why we haven't moved to the new software already. See, I care about your theme-related feelings! New Voice Server - Teamspeak 3 - We are looking at moving from the overwhelmingly popular Ventrilo server (can you taste the sarcasm?) to Teamspeak 3. A much, much larger TS3 server (512 slots vs 15). Why? Well, the Ventrilo used to be a 64 slot vent to go along with the Tribes 2 server. Turns out a lot of people simply didn't care about it. However as we've been growing into more games the demand seems to be returning. Plus we want GH players to have a common place to chat with each other even when not playing on GH servers. This is a game server community. The intent is to find folks to play more games with. Make friends and prosper. New/Old Games? - What games, new or old, do you think we could/should expand into and why? For instance, Eolk and I chose to start a server with "King Arthur's Gold" since it is simple to learn, loads of fun, and very inexpensive (currently, due to being in the alpha/beta stage). It also seemed to fit the "indie" motif we seem to be following with AoS and Minecraft. And to wrap up, thanks to the players and forum goers of Goon Haven. New people join every day and make this a fun (and sometimes over-the-top stupid) place to be!
I don't know, but thanks. This seems like one of the last places on the internet that doesn't ban me for not being "politically correct" enough. The last bastion of true unfiltered, uninhibited multiplayer chaos. I know this is probably impossible, but I miss some games off of oldschool "game services" like on AOL and uh... gamestorm I think it was called. Yes... I had AOL at one point, hang me. In particular I remember Air Warrior and Magestorm, really simple games but loads of fun if you can get enough people to play them. There used to be an independent server somewhere hosting Magestorm, but not many people play anymore. Air Warrior was an epic game where multiple people could suit up in a few of the bombers kind of similar to tribes and of course one person could just go out in a fighter, if I'm not mistaken I think you could even man an AA vehicle and shoot down enemy planes. I always enjoyed playing that game on saturday mornings when I was a kid, shooting little dots out of the front of my aircraft at people, dive bombing etc, tons of fun. Not exactly indie games or gfx hogs I don't guess, but they were a lot more fun than most new games in their prime. I noticed what look like a bunch of new people yesterday day on tribes GH, maybe you guys are single handedly bringing back the golden years of online gaming.
Just gotta face it, it's a dying (dead?) game, and there's no hiding that. There will always be some die hard fans who will play, but look at our T2 server - it's about half as active in terms of number of average players as it was even just a year ago. You log in and you see a total of like 25-30 people playing across all the servers. Just like Tribes 1 - it has one active server and that usually has 10-12 players on it. It's sad, but that's how things go. People are all into the new shinies. Now, I don't think GH will stop hosting Tribes any time soon, especially considering that we're thinking of adding a T1 server for more Tribes goodness.
It really started to decline October 5th, 2004. Before then there were plenty of good servers around.
Player Play Time 577:17:15 (per day). That's down from a peak around 6:12:00 since I started watching it, but it tends to fluctuate very heavily around the tournaments that TWL has now. During tournaments there is a big drop and then afterwards it picks up slowly peaking right before the next tournament.
Congrats on making it 3 years guys! I like the new forum software too. I desperately want to change ours, and I've gone as far as considering making the software myself, but don't have the time, nor the money to buy a forum package (like this one). We get way too many bots right now, with phpbb.
The newest version of phpBB has recaptcha (the one that actually works). Between that and the old security question ("this website is www. what .org?") we stopped getting bots entirely. Doesn't stop bad posters though.
My message I posted here on the old forum did not carry over or what have you. Nevertheless, I still think Giants Citizen Kabuto could be another good classic type of game to bring to the goon haven realm. There are three races in it. One is a lot like tribes, another is the delphi, and the third is kabuto. There is only one kabuto though. Of course it could be to dead to play anymore idk.
