A big problem is an almost total lack of anyone playing it to be honest. I've been away on holiday for 3 weeks, but since I've been back even though I've been busy I've had the chance to bob on to play First Strike perhaps 5 or 6 times, one of those days was a weekend night and even then we only had about 5 players which is really poor.

It is just so frustrating that for the most part new players who try the mod out think it is really fantastic, but with no population playing this mod they just don't get a chance to see its true potential, and thus leave.

A games art student yesterday (not one of mine, one from the latter years of the Degree course) mentioned our mod in passing to me (he was unaware that I worked on it) as he was doing a dissertation on the ease of use of various game engines which obviously led on to the mod scene, and he said pretty much the same thing, absolutely awesome mod with excellent work put into it, but next to no population playing it, which is the kiss of death to any multiplayer gaming experience.

No matter what people say about the bugs or complications of getting the game up and running, the fact is that if there was a population regularly playing it which allowed the full experience of playing the mod to be felt by all newcomers? Then these issues would be a minor problem as the experience of playing the First Strike in a fully populated server would totally outweigh these minor bugbears. As it is new people go to the trouble of downloading and installing the mod only to find empty servers. I'm not surprised that the feedback from most new people who have tried the mod lately has become largely negative.

That's not to say that it isn't up to the dev team to sort out these bugs and issues to make the installation and general experience of playing First Strike smoother, but it is also up to the mod's gaming population to spread the word about the mod and also play regularly so that newcomers do get the best possible experience when they do try it out. If you want more players playing First Strike then you have to be there to encourage more players to join and get word of mouth going. You can't get anything if you start with nothing.