As we all know, SS community servers are practically dead except for few coop servers while 2014 version had a flourishing one. Furthermore, the 2014 Ins had so many game modes and didn't "split" the community which was the reason why NWI killed off skirmish, the second most popular game mode after push at the time.
NWI has been afraid of "splitting the community" while not understanding they have been doing it themselves while damaging the longevity of the game. I believe that a game will last longer when you have community servers with mods and mutators and communities are well supported and having many game modes will maintain a sense of novelty and makes the game less dull of an experience doing the same game mode over and over and over again. These two are not difficult to encourage and I believe it's one of the reasons why the game's popularity suffered and people moving back to the 2014 Ins. I'd like to suggest low effort but big impact changes to the match making that will encourage community servers and more game modes without splitting the community.
Now why has this happened? And why didn't Ins 2014 suffer from it?
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Community servers are only accessible in a separate tab outside of match making
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You cannot switch between game modes while in a game server.
So how to fix things?
- Allow community servers as part of the match making.
Put some filters on it on the match making tab, you literally have most of the space taken up by background art. Have filters for community vs official servers. Have one for mutators or modding. Have one for max ping and so on. What's the point of having mutators ig no one plays them outside of the occasion one is up temporarily on official servers?
- Allow vote to change game modes WITHIN the game server, not just a filter in match making.
It's always nice to switch things up a bit and it is always a good idea for the longevity of the game and a healthy population to have diverse game modes. And a big reason why so many people left the game after the huge fuck up over the triple experience debarcle was because of how they managed game modes. (Skirmish RIP). Instead we got a battlefield game mode. (Albeit it's ok, but dam you've killed off skirmish AND firefight which had the soul of Insurgency for something so generic)
If people REALLY just want to play one single game mode, perhaps make dedicated servers for those, and have a mixed game mode filter on your match making.
Both of these were already in the previous game. It was working well where community server flourished, and diverse game modes made the experience enjoyable for longer and didn't split the community. For any kind of longevity of this game I think these two are very key to success. I don't think NWI would need to invest too much to apply this so I hope this would be considered a priority.
And something of a side note, if you want to make a competitive a thing, let people practice on a casual server, not firefight. Same amount of people, same amount of supply cost and so on. Not just the map and objectives.
Then they can finally address the bloody awful level designs and do something about spots where RPGs and MGs destroying people right out of spawn. Think about people with a lot of time on their hands and who will cheese the map the best they possibly can (to give you an example, you can go on top of the building next to the bridge on snowjar while attacking as Ins while point C is active, you can now down the only path the Sec team has in open from 150 m away with an MG no problem exposing only your tip of the head). So give some fucking consistent cover until we can divert into different lanes at least. Then, finally that would actually make this game a better than the previous one in my opinion, and I'm sure many would agree.
