It has been two years since we set out on arguably the biggest project this community has embarked upon. It's been a long road with many hurdles to take, many lessons to learn but also with many joyful moments in which we saw our little baby turn out to be exactly what we envisioned from the start. We sculpted Crossfire 4 to our liking with a mutual goal in mind: giving this community what it deserves.
Back in the days when Crossfire 1 was created, the site was brilliant in its simplicity and usability, a beacon of light in the middle of the early 2000 Internet landscape. Throughout the years the community has prospered, grown and successfully fought for the survival of ET, yet Crossfire never really managed to follow up with technical improvements. After 2010 it became apparent this site has become obsolete and certainly not in touch with the web 2.0 sites that were popping up like mushrooms.
After AEF I asked myself the question what would be most beneficial for the survival of the community and its beloved game. The beauty of this site is that even with limited assistance this community keeps itself going, not in the least because of the friendships that have been formed throughout the userbase. Most Crossfire users don't even play games anymore but enjoy the journal section as a Facebook alternative to stay in touch and do their thing. But site statistics and game activity shows a slow but steady decrease throughout the years. Organizing events and tournaments, writing tons of coverage and opinion pieces helps, but stagnation is the most we can get out of our mutual efforts. Many more projects can help our community and ET, but often the most basic tools are missing and make it far more difficult to achieve our goals. When we host LANs, Crossfire and the community peak in activity. Yet that activity never reaches outside of this website because we simply don't attract people anymore. The times where every month hundreds of new unique users registered on this site has changed to merely a couple users at all (ignoring the spam bots). If we want our projects to mean a lot more than what they achieve right now, our technical tools have to be brought up to date. This is where a major improvement can be made. This is worth major investments.
Two years we've built on this thing. It's been by far the most contained project I've worked on. People were openly questioning the longevity of the project. A true testament to the sealed lips of the people involved. I sincerely want to thank everyone who contributed and was brought into this project for not partaking in any leaking which to me was a huge surprise for our community.
Let it be clear the project never stalled throughout these past years, it was the considerable feedback from this userbase during the first open beta that resulted in the extra six months we invested in this project. We completely reworked the design, fixed countless bugs and increased the usability.
Every day I will shed light on some core features of the new Crossfire, starting out with what is most dear to our users.
Tomorrow you'll experience the new system with all its features and functions. Let us know what you think of it, share your opinions and thoughts as it's those that brought you to the new version of our community portal!
Back in the days when Crossfire 1 was created, the site was brilliant in its simplicity and usability, a beacon of light in the middle of the early 2000 Internet landscape. Throughout the years the community has prospered, grown and successfully fought for the survival of ET, yet Crossfire never really managed to follow up with technical improvements. After 2010 it became apparent this site has become obsolete and certainly not in touch with the web 2.0 sites that were popping up like mushrooms.
After AEF I asked myself the question what would be most beneficial for the survival of the community and its beloved game. The beauty of this site is that even with limited assistance this community keeps itself going, not in the least because of the friendships that have been formed throughout the userbase. Most Crossfire users don't even play games anymore but enjoy the journal section as a Facebook alternative to stay in touch and do their thing. But site statistics and game activity shows a slow but steady decrease throughout the years. Organizing events and tournaments, writing tons of coverage and opinion pieces helps, but stagnation is the most we can get out of our mutual efforts. Many more projects can help our community and ET, but often the most basic tools are missing and make it far more difficult to achieve our goals. When we host LANs, Crossfire and the community peak in activity. Yet that activity never reaches outside of this website because we simply don't attract people anymore. The times where every month hundreds of new unique users registered on this site has changed to merely a couple users at all (ignoring the spam bots). If we want our projects to mean a lot more than what they achieve right now, our technical tools have to be brought up to date. This is where a major improvement can be made. This is worth major investments.
Two years we've built on this thing. It's been by far the most contained project I've worked on. People were openly questioning the longevity of the project. A true testament to the sealed lips of the people involved. I sincerely want to thank everyone who contributed and was brought into this project for not partaking in any leaking which to me was a huge surprise for our community.
Let it be clear the project never stalled throughout these past years, it was the considerable feedback from this userbase during the first open beta that resulted in the extra six months we invested in this project. We completely reworked the design, fixed countless bugs and increased the usability.
Every day I will shed light on some core features of the new Crossfire, starting out with what is most dear to our users.
Tomorrow you'll experience the new system with all its features and functions. Let us know what you think of it, share your opinions and thoughts as it's those that brought you to the new version of our community portal!
Imo ET is just an unattractive game for new players, so I dont think you well get hundrerds of new users with CF 4. So keeping the members that you currently have active as long as possible is also very important, and I think most of them didnt like the CF 4 Beta.
On the other side, CF4 was just not 'feeling' like the CF we are used to, so maybe we just need some time to get used to it.
I do admire the effort, dont get me wrong, and there certainly are things to improve. The content contribution and notifications updates are great. Keep up the good work!
personally I'd still make it a separate thing so that you'd have friends and people who you want to follow (even if they're not your friends). for example I might wanna see what some retarded user is writing if I happen to find his comments amusing, but would never want to be a friend of them
Trust me that
I feel theres potential for cancer joke here.
but please dont drastically change the design/layout
What can i say to cf:
- well, the new CF4 is really good feature wise. I am sure most people will enjoy it, atleast comparing to the first CF4 Beta. This one has this little CF3 feeling, somehow!
keep the good work guys!
Gonna have a reason to refresh Crossfire daily from now on ^^
CyberGamer went through the exact same change management issues with existing users when they changed over to the latest installment of their website. The important thing was they just got on with it knowing that the framework they were putting in place would overall, change things for the better.
While this community has its roots heavily tied to ET and RTCW, we all also like other games for differing reasons and ultimately it is other games that keep groups of players together over longer periods.
Have patience, give it time and be thankful for all the hard work the crossfire team have put in for us.
and please remove the space on both sides and the space between 2 comments is way to much. in some days i can name my finger a scroll finger :( :)
all in all im happy although i cannot login in anymore with mozilla. now im on inet explore which is fucking slow. worked proper with mozilla.... - cookies deleted worked
e. using cf on anndroid i cannot reply to messages, just dont recognize the username so i have to click profile/pm and so on instead of just reply. fix it pls.