ok, following the "favorite games poll" thread about the currently hosted I also wonder what other games you could be interested of getting hosted here at some point of another beside them. let's clear this, with this I'm not implying now that I will indeed host any other/more games here any time, no currently all the spots here are already taken and after all the work that just ended I definitively won't change them any time soon. however that being said with the time on the future depending on how things go is possible (likely) that I end up replacing some of them by something else so I think that it's good to have a thread to talk about it.
overall, it's obvious that the Quake III Arena servers (UnFreeZe/FreeFUn and the server for the tournaments) are meant to stick for the long run, needless to say that. for the rest, like I said at its forum the Urban Terror server was even comparable to the UnFreeZe thing (i.e. top 14/20 daily players) when mainline Urban Terror was version 4.3.1 unfortunately everything went downhill from there. however you never know what will happen next (once it split again a few months later the 4.3.2 version got even more top again for several months for example) and Urban Terror has been scheming to release a new version based on the Unreal Engine 4 for like a decade already that could potentially spice the things up there so initially I think that I will stick with it too. similarly the Open Arena was never as top but back in the day when it started (2016) it used to have games going in a daily basis without problem (typically 6/10 players) unfortunately as time passed the whole Open Arena community (not just that of the server) has been significatively shrinking with each new season. however at the same time that server still has overall some good stats and I think that it's cool to have some solid ctf alternative to the Quake III Arena servers plus I typically use it as a test base for the main Quake III Arena servers and I even took a couple of things from it so I think that it's also gonna stick.
surprisingly although the community there is also small (similar to that of Open Arena) the new Xonotic server is doing "ok" with usual casual daily games thus I won't be looking towards replacing it any time soon either. it could be said that of the free games hosted here is the one that is doing the best at the moment (not overall or in the past but now). Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory although is almost as old as Quake III Arena is probably of the free games the one which surprisingly has the biggest following. unfortunately the standard version of the game isn't all that good (there's obviously a reason why they release it for free) and most of its activity revolves around highly modified/custom versions and making it not that accessible/appealing to the newcomers. I hosted one such "standard" server here for around two seasons and it definitively failed to make a impact altogether, in two years it never got full not even once and it rarely had any games going all that it was making was a few casual connections per day, like 10/20 a day probably at best. nothing remarkable, it ended up being replaced by a quakelive server this season.
absurdly although quakelive is not a free game but a commercial one and of this classic tier of games is the newest and it was supposed the one to have the biggest community in practice is the one that end up performing the worst of all them with zero connections and almost even no lookups in its first weeks. I'm obviously not going to replace it straight away because of this, I have more important stuff to do than deal with that and I even still have to dig it a bit more before but at the moment is clearly the number 1 candidate at being dropped here. one possibility for it is to replace it with the original Rocket Arena 3 1.8 ra3map1 dedicated server that it emulates but I know for a fact that it's not gonna work either plus I already run "enough" quality Quake III Arena servers, there's really no more needs there.
then than bring us here
unfortunately I don't really know of any more quality, currently active, fun, free/"affordable", classic games to host here beside these ones, in fact, in addition on the past (first season) there was even a completely free version of the top UnFreeZe thing but for Open Arena (OaFreeZe) that it was virtually the same thing but that it also failed altogether, so I guess that we'll still have to see what comes and what doesn't for the next season. in the mean time, feel free to discuss your impressions on the topic here.have a good a time
