This is the story of Ground Control 2.

This is not meant to show paralells to Demigod, i just describe how a market life-time of a software product happend.

In June 2004 Ground Control 2 was released, it was years ahead its time in terms of strategy, gameplay, controlls, tactics.....

I found myself in the PERFECT game, which attracted the competitive community from all over the world. In the first few month we had thousends of players in three major leagues (Europe, North America, Asia).

After a few more month´s cheats appeared (strong cheats like unit multiply, god modes, farsight, etc...)

The ladder got messed up in few weeks, all the clans, pros, communities etc. left the game......

ONLY the hardcore addicted were left....about 300-500 players.

The different leages were combined.

Those players waited for the patch for about 6 MONTH´s.( In the end the pros got that good that they could defeat cheating noobs ) After the patch the game was perfect again...no cheat..all fine (very few exploits)

Because of the hardcoreness of the Game any expererienced player could easylie take on 2 or more noobs....so it was very tough to find balanced games....crying, whining, flaming etc...

BUT  there was never the silly discussion of "premades" like in Demigod. The players grouped up, made clans and got competitive.

I remember players that went through "bootcamp" in few month and then started to own badly.

Anyways...those small community declined as time flew by.....

There was only one thing that kept the game alive for such a long time ....

S M U R F I N G (everybody knows why, and in the end im happy that it was there)

myself had about 60 accounts...i know people who had more than 200 

so we played the same people...our frieds..clanmates...enemies ..over and over again....just with different accounts

It sounds silly, but why do we wait 15+ minutes in games..because they see how good someone is and just dont want to loose...the SECOND option that helped alot was the "Unrank" button. And ranked games were automatically set to standard settings. So...costum settings only in unranked games.

Actually more and more players left the game and the skill level of the remaining players got incredibly high. Which prevented some new players to stay with the game. Only few could take such torture.

Finally (and we speak now about 4 years after release) a community of 50 players was left, most of them knew each other for years now and most of them were friends in skype or xfire. So....many arranged games via xfire or skype happened...and it still was fun...

Suddenly the wind of death was recognized...and only few month ago the last servers were set off by Publisher.

R.I.P. GC2

The new game Massive Entertainment did "World in Conflict" is state of the Art in terms of Multiplayer features, performance and long time support and development....shame i dont like the silly rushes there...

greets da micro

p.s. have experienced similar things with games...?