🚀 go-pugleaf

Folk wrote:

> The question is.... why?  I doubt that the two-dozen people still
> playing UT3 will really care.

I found it quite interesting watching the player stats at Multiplay.

Multiplay hosted the official Epic european servers as well as almost a 
hundred UT3 servers when it was released. Through that time they've also 
hosted just over 20 UT99 servers (which I run with my happy team - all 
volunteers).

I think at the height there were over 150 UT3 servers.

 From memory (icba digging it all out so this may not be accurate).

In the month before UT3 was released, UT99 had a surge of interest with 
about 50% more players.

UT3 released, slight dip in ut99 and UT3 instantly overtook it.

Within a month, UT3 numbers had dropped below UT99's which had recovered.

In the following 3 or 4 months, UT99 climbed steadily while UT3 
declined, with some spikes caused by the patch releases.

We were having big problems with aimbotters on the UT99's and added UTDC 
at that time, which lost us a lot of honest (and not so honest) players. 
That version of anticheat blocked versions of ut < 432 and despite 
advertising the upgrade patch, many never returned. Also some players 
disliked intrusive anticheat and left on principle. That led to a sharp 
downfall in ut99 players (initially about 40%) but slowly regained 
leaving perhaps 15% lost.

UT3 overtook us again then, but has since dropped even further so that 
now it's pretty much just a handful of VCTF servers which are popular.

Taking a look now (lunchtime), the multiplay servers have:

Players/Slots

UT99 - 30/442
UT2k4 - 0/36
UT3 - 12/1074
UT3 Demo - 0/2

So a nine year old game is now 250% more popular than one made last year.

The player demographic is also significantly different, ut99 favouring 
more mature players and occasional gamers - with a lot from eastern 
european and soviet countries, and nowadays even regular players from 
India, north and south americas and even Australia! (ping of ~200 btw - 
roughly what I got with a 56k modem in the same country!)