Due to the game generating far more attention than planned for by this stage of development, as of Monday the 12th of September (or shortly after), Zero G Arena will be becoming temporarily unavailable to new players. Anyone who already has the game will be able to continue playing it, although you can probably expect there to be fewer people hosting servers during this period. I haven't decided yet how long ZGA will be unavailable in this manner (although I probably should soon, or I expect I'll be inundated with people asking). A few weeks to a couple of months seems a reasonable estimate, but there would be something to be said for longer, so it depends.
Now, I don't actually want people to rush to download the game before Monday, but I feel compelled to point out that if you were wanting to play the game in the very near future, knowing it's current state, you'll have to make sure it's in your library before then. In any case, I plan to continue working with the existing community to improve the game while it's unavailable, so if you were wanting to be involved with that, then you are particularly welcome.
During this period, I hope to develop ZGA to be more ready for the amount of attention it's getting.
Here are the reasons I've decided to make it temporarily unavailable while I do so (I do not expect many people to read this, but if you were going to ask why I want to do this, it'll save you the trouble):
1)While the game is free, anyone who downloads it will never have to pay later, if it becomes paid. With the amount of downloads ZGA is getting at the moment, lost sales are becoming a real concern. I could just make the game paid now, but this is sooner than I'd have otherwise wanted to. My plan is to make some key improvements while the game is withdrawn from sale. There are also various things that need doing that won't have such an obvious impact for players, so it would be best to try and get these done during this period too. When the game becomes available again, it will probably either be paid, or I'll leave it free for a little while to build up the playerbase. As it stands, the game being free isn't helping build up an active playerbase so much, because there's not enough content to maintain anyone's interest for very long.
2)Following point 1, it's important to be getting out new content regularly, in order to maintain the interest of new players. If the game's going to become paid though, there are also a lot of usability features and general improvements that I'd prefer to add first. If I were to work on these now, then there would be very little new content for a while, so I hope to be able to work on things like that while the game is withdrawn from sale, so there will be more time for new content when it becomes available again.
3)Following point 2, with there not being time to work on both content and usability features, there is also currently much less time to work on either, with the amount of technical problems people are running into. I think it's very important to be addressing these as soon as they're reported, but with the large volumes of new players, it's a little unmanageable. For what it's worth, the majority of these, I do not believe have a great deal to do with the game itself (all the various installer issues, for example), but I still think it's very important to help people get the game working. Another thing that I plan to do while the game is withdrawn from sale, is to first of all, get on top of actual technical faults in the game, and also find and document the workarounds for as many of the dependency installer or connection issues as possible, so that hopefully I'll have to spend less time addressing those when the game becomes available again.
4)Lastly, this is not so serious, since the response has been very positive anyway, but it's better if the game gets more publicity later, rather than now, just because I hope it will be a lot better in several respects by then. Hopefully this "time out" will temporarily reduce publicity while I get the game to the next major stage in development.
Those are probably the main points. I don't regret putting the game in Early Access or anything, but I just wasn't expecting all the YouTube videos and whatnot, so I think this is the best course of action.
Although I can't make any specific predictions, and this will also be dependant on how long the game's withdrawal from sale is, some examples of the kind of thing I'm planning to work on during this period are:
-Matchmaking/Servers
-UI stuff
-Visuals
-Bugs
-Possibly promotional material too, if I'm going to be making an actual marketing effort afterwards
Let me know if you have any questions.