I'm really curious considering you sold your house and all, how much money did you sink into this project and the company? If I was in your position I would've given up there and there. I'm sure there are still ways around this without having to invest as much money (A common place to advertise are lower-end youtubers these days for example) or to literally invade other games through indirect means.
A while back I kinda
recreated some of the essense gameplay of tremulous into natural selection 2 and somehow it got featured in an official tournament. Unfortunately I was never trained in programming so I literally learnt through trial and error, so something as simple as implementing knockback to a grenade launcher took me about 3 weeks to figure out. I also had recreated a
99% copy of ATCS (It's missing a few features like a few decorative pillars) but unfortunately people think it looks too bland (of course) and the map a bit small (the standard is 15 seconds of walking between resource nodes but in this map it was about 8 seconds). Included with the package are floating tutorial panels in the waiting room with a link to the original tremulous home page, successor projects such as T2/Murnatan and Unvanquished, and installation manuals (because we all know that vanilla tremulous was pretty shite)
NS2's kinda dying too at this point, it is an old game and optimisation went down the drain recently, so it isn't the best game to do advertising style modding. But who knows, with some good publicity and the implementation of filler bots to murnatan, murnatan can ressurect.
A major dissatisfaction I listen to across private messages on discord and on youtube comments is that a lot of people dislike the alien "furry" models. It's not like the alien models are copyright and it was only the Tremulous 2 title that was denied as far as I know, so maybe we could possibly make a reversal, or improve upon the alien models too. In addition to this are the game physics, it's not that difficult to implement quake engine style air physics into other game engines,
but you chose to use the UE style air control physics which actually isn't too bad, it only made a small selection of people disgrunted since the tremulous community largely doesn't know how to strafe jump, but it can mess with things like air physics in what could be recreations of maps such as misson_one.
That all is a lot of work however, so it's mostly wishful thinking at this point. Maybe in the future if I have time I can start learning UE, I was recommended to learn it over unity because unlike unity, they actually have a comprehensible game manual, because unity's manual definition of torque physics spring body function calculations: Torque is torque. Literally unhelpful as it doesn't tell you how input becomes output at all.
I've kinda given up on game dev as a possible career at this point because I had figured it was too much work to learn all the niches of languages, along with a few disabilities I have that weren't recognised nor did I knew about until recently.
But something you can do as a start is an alternative to the forums: Who uses simple machine style forums in this day and age? Discord is a common solution, although there are quite a number of downfalls with it including the 100 server limit, but it's great for pick-up-game bots. If you ever do create a discord server and need help managing it, let me know.
[spoiler]ZdrytchX#4887[/spoiler]