LOL
First of all, the siege servers are up, it's just that nobody plays on them since the summer holidays ended. Why? Nobody knows for sure...
I never really participated strat, so for me the main reason not to play siege is the conquest maps presence. Especially Tueten' ones, added with February patch (Island Outpost - the naval map, which is easy to defend if the whole defending team occupies the farthest ship, and the Raid of the Vikings with a hugely extended timer - one round there lasts 45 minutes or so). There is some more bullshit conquest maps, like Helms Deep, or that bugged one, where you can't select some spawn points because the map is too big to fit on the screen, and so on. So, what is actually happening is that people just leave whenever they see the conquest maps, because they are boring, unbalanced, designed for well-populated server and the conquest mode by itself also tempts people to leech. I don't quite understand, however, why they were not removed, despite the fact that in September Dupre stated that they have to be taken out:
Teeth: Map rotation, conquest maps taking out(admins can change to conquest if requested and enough people)
The last time I played the siege in December and I saw all the conquest maps still in rotation. Thankfully, we had an admin who was switching maps to regular siege, so we had a wonderful day on EU2. People played siege all day long, and EU1 was absent. It just shows that if there would be a proper map rotation, people would have played the siege gladly. But admins are not always online, and populating the EU2 without them is worthless: once you got some people online -BAM!- conquest map appears, and people leave immediately. Simple as that. The lack of Strategus is also a massive blow to siege population, and that's how we lost lots of Greys, DRZ, Quincies, Kalmars, Fenris and so on. On the other hand, I know that there are many true siegelovers, like Cora, Sinisstra, Blockula and others, who would like to play siege only, but right now it is impossible to make it well-populated on every day basis, so they stopped to pop up. To be honest, people expected the map rotation to be fixed many months ago. That one particular bugged map was a well-known population-killer since the time it was added. But Donkeys are gone, Fips left the mod as well and there was nobody to care about it. And this is the reason why nobody plays siege.
I don't really think that it is too late to revive the regular siege, but op ideas sounds fine to me. Maybe these strategus-like events would bring some people back and will remind us about that time when mod was alive and kicking. But I'd like to see the fixed map rotation as well, just to see if we can populate EU2 by ourselves, like we used to, and have our tiny fun. Anyway, I really appreciate your efforts, Dupre. You're doing well
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