I don't think that the developers only work on the code, I was simply refuting ViruS's point. Also, the developers definitely have some "pen and paper", since they've added many gameplay features (eg. new stage system, new buildables, human parkour), however, the grave problems (floor headbite, human camping, lack of a cooperative server, snowball effect, inability to defend while building) remain ignored.
Without the knowledge of the floor headbite you can't play aliens at all, you just die all the time.
With human camping, games become stalemates and players get annoyed and quit.
Without a server where humans fight against bots, you can't have fun playing alone (bots don't build and play badly, so you can easily defeat them), you can't have fun playing with much stronger or weaker teams. Note that Unvanquished had more players while the training server was online.
The snowball effect means that the stronger team gets more upgrades and gets even stronger while the weaker team gets nothing. There's little point to this, since a stronger team would win anyway.
Without being able to defend while building, it's not fun to play 1vs1 games. A game should be fun to play with just a few players or else it won't get off the ground. You can't build a skyscraper without a foundation.
Yes, there are of course successfull team-only games, but they are PROprietary have ★DRM★, so they start large-scale advertisement campaigns at the time of launch to bring in many players quicky and then use the ELO system for match-making, and thanks to the amount of players, there are always players online in every ELO group.
