Check back occasionally, there's usually a game or two every evening. Or host one yourself. You can leave it running and minimised, and check if people have joined. Just remember to disable Pred Disc & Pistol and Marine Skeeter & maybe Grenade Launcher. It should improve the chances of people staying on longer ;)

I'd love to jump on, but have to leave right now :( Hope there's some action when I come back, though :-)

Unfortunately, the online community aspect is not developed enough on GOG to maintain an active community in a bare bones peer to peer game such as AvP Classic 2000 (having a forum is not enough).

As a Steam player, I can say that we got really excited with this GOG project since we thought that it could bring a lot of new players in and help raise the multiplayer overall activity in the game. Sad to see the GOG community dissolving into the same state the Steam community was in not too long ago.

The good news for whoever sticks around though is that we're pretty organized on Steam at the moment with an active multiplayer group that hosts competitive tournaments and events on a regular basis. We can be found here: http://avpct.com/

Whenever the merger does happen, you'll be able to find a place where you can meet new players, organize games of your own and compete for prizes.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. There's no incentive for people on GOG to keep playing. When servers were populated, almost every game was dominated by proxy spammers and disc spammers. Nobody knew how to play or wanted to learn. Of course people would stop playing the game, because nobody knew how to set up a server or how to play the game properly. Surprise surprise, the players who spammed the no-skill weapons didn't end up having a good time (because it took no skill to get kills) and the people who were trying to play legitimately kept dying cheap deaths. And when people tried to explain the problem, the spammers wouldn't stop because the weapons were enabled and the tactic was getting them kills.

As Skorp said, GOG also has zero community aspect. How is it possible to organize a game when you can't even add people as friends? I know you can have friends on vBulletin forums, why not on GOG? There's also no way of being able to tell who's good at this game, and who therefore knows more. I've seen a lot of players who have no idea what they're talking about saying things as though they're facts, for instance, that aliens are OP. Well, since nobody knows who anybody else is, everybody thinks that only they themselves are right and that nobody else knows as much as them. So I can say "You're wrong, aliens aren't OP," but who am I to them? Olde72 is just a name. GOG doesn't even have an "hours played" feature.

Now, there's also a very realistic answer for why so few people still play this game on GOG: it's because the game was released as a freebie to test out GOG's servers. Really, let's see it for what it really is, a way to test multiplayer servers. And people played it because it's kind of a novelty item. It's not a generic shooter; it's different enough to catch people's attention and get them to play for a bit. It's also in keeping with GOG"s trademark for supporting classic games. But those reasons aren't enough to hold people's interest when they don't know how to play, don't know where to turn to to improve, hardly know how to set up servers, and the client has barely any community. In fact, it may have never even been intended to breathe new life into the game. The way people consider the game on Steam versus how they do on GOG is extremely different. So the way I see it, the drop-off in players is not only understandable, not only predictable, but inevitable.

I just played against you! :) I need to get the little skill I had playing the demo back.

I agree, either they need to bring in more "random" players or add a few community functionalities to allow people to organize games across timezones and find players that have a similar level.

Maybe leaving the game free would attract more players. More players = more testing which should be good for GOG.

Are they really going to merge with Steam ?

They should be, I believe they said they would a while back. Whether they will remains to be seen.

If by "merging with Steam" you mean a full-on company merger, then the answer is a sound no.

What GOG said, when they announced their upcoming DRM-free client, GOG Galaxy, some time ago, was that, unlike clients like the one Steam uses, that only allow you to play online with people using the same client and distributor, GOG Galaxy allows you to play with people that have the same game but bought it from a different store and use a different client to access the game's online funcionalities. GOG isn't going to "merge" with Steam, they're just releasing a client for those (admittedly few) GOG users that want online games to be able to play them with other people that have the same games on Steam without having to own the game on both GOG and Steam.

groze, what we were talking about was a server merge, so that AVPC2K players on Steam could find servers that were hosted by GOG players and vice versa. Nobody's talking about GOG getting subsumed or combined with Steam, and in fact, that would not be preferable for either company.

I just finished the Marine campaign and whence I get the Predator one done I'll have to give it a shot. Obviously where I am the connection and lag and all of that is a joke but so long as I'm playing with you people it's worth the effort.

One things for sure, I'm not playing as a Marine. Those fuckers are worthless! :D

Depends on the map, but for the most part I agree. Some marines are very good, although the best ones tend to be minigun specialists.

Are anyone playing around this time (UTC 02:00:00) or just me? I am not seeing any hosts. Not getting much attention also when I create one...

I will be running a host game all day Wednesday with no time limit or score limit so that I can keep it running, I live in the est. time zone. I will be naming it my username on here, gradtaz. Please let me know if anyone was able to find it and was able to connect.