Zandronum is a Classic Doom Sourceport designed with Multiplayer in mind, it is the spiritual successor to The Zdoom derived port Skulltag. It’s the most popular Multiplayer port in the Doom community thanks to it using GZdoom as a base. Allowing for OpenGL rendering, an enhanced library of graphics options and support for *Most* gameplay and total conversion mods.
While all that is well and good, Zandronum is far from a perfect option for anyone wanting to relive the glory days of arena shooters. There are several glaring issues with this port, not just issues with the port itself but issues with the community surrounding it.
The most glaring issue is that there are next to no players playing this game. A large majority of the servers are empty and the ones that arne’t are far from full, the most populated server on Doomseeker at the time of writing has only 10 out of 32 players on it. Even if you do find a server that’s populated it’s highly likely that those player’s will actually be bot’s and not real players, sometimes the server browser will indicate that they are bots but most of the time it won’t. The only way you can tell if a player is real is if they have a different coloured name.
The only way to find players consistently is to join Discord communities and play in the event’s they hold (Oh trust me we’ll get to that). Alternatively if you do manage to find a server with real people on it, chances are that server isn’t very well managed. In one server we joined while conducting this investigation, an anonymous user simply named “Player“ was calling people the F slur in text chat. He was able to get away with this because Zandronum doesn’t have the option to censor profanity from the chat.
Profanity filters are an industry standard feature in Multiplayer Video games, even Mature rated games like Call of Duty allow users to filter swear words and slurs out of the chat. You would think that adding this would be trivial for the most popular Multiplayer source port in the Doom community but apparently not.
This problem is only going to get exacerbated by the fact that voice chat is allegedly being worked on for a future version of Zandronum, And judging from what we found it’s probably going to be just as bad, if not worse than text chat.
The only way that this won’t end in disaster is if they take a page out of Overwatch and Call of Duty’s book and have an A.I. monitoring the voice chat at all times.
This port is based on an older version of GZdoom and it shows. One bug with this port is that trying to play the game in Full screen will cause it to freeze, the game was trying to display it self on my second monitor. I had to play the game in Windowed mode to fix this but this meant that the window was stuck at 1920x1080 in the middle of my main 4k monitor.
Recent patches had failed to fix this issue. The dev’s instead putting there recourses into useless things like revamping the scoreboard, because I’m totally going to be looking at that while getting skullf**ked by 10 Super Shotguns at once.
On that note, the weapon balancing (At least for the Vanilla weapons) is abysmal, most players will gravitate towards the super shotgun due to how much damage it does. Somehow doing more damage than Rocket launchers and fully automatic chainguns.
This is due to the Weapons stats not being adjusted for this new style of play. As an example, the chaingun only does 5-15 damage per shot. In other arena shooter like for example unreal tournament, the Miniguns low damage is balanced out by a fast firerate. Meanwhile the Doom chainguns firerate is more comparable to an Assault Rifle but with the damage output of an SMG.
If the problems with Zandronum ended there than It wouldn’t be so bad, but as to be expected by this point, the games community is just as problematic as the Port itself.
The following information was taken from a user on the JMAA goon forum that came forward to talk about the abuse they faced during there time using this Sourceport. For there safely they will be kept anonymous.
The Victim stated that they used to frequent Doom community discords back in 2022 and take part in Doom multiplayer events. Most of these events were held on Euroboros, a “Server Cluster“ located in Europe. It’s run by Kaapeli47, A doom modder and streamer who has ties with Hellforge Studios and contributed to the Hellforge mods “Hordemex“ and “Culling Strike“.
The Victim reports that the discourse in these event’s was unpleasant and usually turned sexual which the victim found uncomfortable.
Kaapeli was reportedly very rude and disrespectful to the victim. During one session the group was playing “Execution Deathmatch“ a collection of Multiplayer maps that were designed with Vanilla Doom’s 4 player limit in mind. This resulted in a poor gameplay experience where you were constantly being killed right after spawning.
The victim suggested to Kaapeli that he should add more Armor pickups to the map to which Kaapeli responded “Power Armor is for P******“. An oddly vitriolic response to such a simple suggestion.
There was also a time when the Victim and Kaapeli were in the same Discord VC and the Victim parents were talking in the background. Kaapeli reacted to this by unfairly server muting the Victim.
It’s also been noted that Bridgeburner and Major Arlene were frequent attenders at this event, Bridgeburner routinely streaming his point of view on Twitch. The Victim decided to join this chat after leaving the game and lamented the lack of professionalism on display. Bridgeburner responded by banning the victim.
No long after Kaapeli would DM the victim and berate them for expecting the So called “Face of Hellforge“ to behave like a professional. Kaapeli also threatened to ban them from Euroboros if they dared to question him again.
The Victim also faced Racial abuse inside and outside the Euroboros community. While testing a friend’s mod on a Euroboros server a player named “George Floyd gaming” joined the lobby and said the Hard R N word, a similar incident would occur shortly afterward when a user would join the Victims game with the Hard R N word as there username.
(Content Warning: Censored Slurs)
This behaviour would follow the Victim outside the cluster. While playing on an unrelated server with their IRL friends, a popular user on Euroboros named “No more Megagame.WAD it shits ass“ would join the game and call the victim the N word.
Megagame is a popular player on the Euroboros server cluster, Taking part in every event and even making a cameo on Bridgeburner’s livestream.
And trust us this was far from an isolated incident, Instances of Anti-Semitism have also occurred on this Sourceport. One comment on the official Zandronum Trailer reads.
“I installed this, there was someone named “The (k-word) hunter” in one of the servers. I uninstalled.”
During our investigation we began looking through the trash section on the Zandronum forums and we found several posts from a user named Metal Danny 420, A youtuber from the Netherlands who makes Videos on Zandronum and also host events similar to Euroboros.
After inspecting the videos attached to these articles it was clear to see why Danny was actioned for them. All of these videos contained slurs, In one clip Danny is goaded into Killing himself while his teammate calls him a “Fucking dumb [N-Word]“. In another clip Danny see’s that one player has a black skin and says “The [Hard R] says something N****rdly“ while trying to explain how Zandronum’s taunt system works.
After everything we’ve discussed here I can conclude that Zandronum is a terrible platform for gaming and socialising. The Sourceport’s technology is about a decade out of date and the communities moral compass is non existent, It’s almost as if people are only playing this game because they got permabanned from all the mainstream titles for Hate Speech.
To any parents that may be reading this, Please do not let your child use Zandronum, there are far better alternatives if you want to play Video games online. You would be better off playing a game that was actually designed with PvP in mind, Like perhaps Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, UT was delisted some time ago but second hand copies can be found on Ebay and CD Key resellers.
Alternatively, if you want to stick it to the Boomer Shooter addicts that wronged you. I would highly recommend the new Modern Warfare III, MWIII has precautions in place to protect your child from Hatred and the community is less toxic than Doom.
Thank you for reading, Stay Safe
JMAA.TV
