I think only one way is here for now... just tell it to all your friends, show them game and play with them. Learn them how to jump, line, shoot... play jumping servers via ts3, skype for fun... it's how most of players who still play now "grew up". My school friend learnt me how to jump, shoot, ....
I tried showing it to my friends, even sent them link when streaming. All they said was basically "omg, you playing tetris again", they are correct i guess. The idea of new players joining is less likely to happen the longer time we mess around. Because there are so many new games, with much better visuals, which compared to PB are just on the next level. Altho i agree, pb provides unique style, still... visuals > style. People will always prefer playing game, where they can see every single water drop, instead of playing PB, where they die in 2 secs if they dont invest enough time into it (referring to the 2nd paragraph).
Also, what they didnt like, was that there was probably no way to play for fun. If you join speed server or any other except jump server, you just die in 2 secs. Even on jump servers, its pretty hard to actually do anything, because of constant blocking (its hard even for me to enjoy jump server, NOT talking about q2jump mod). And jump servers are much more challenging than speed servers IMO.
So, basically you need to invest ton of time to at least enjoy the game, that isnt good. What i take from all this, is that we need some way to play the game, even for unexperienced players, who just picked up the game. We need some singeplayer maps, with easy jumps, fun things to do (i guess sth like tutorial map, but better ^^), obviously making playing vs bots fun/challenging gonna help too.
Ideas:soccer target shooting map, just a thought, not full idea, basically making a map where you are behind some obstacle and you need to shoot the ball in diferent positions or you have to nade some place which is far away. That would teach new players how physic works here, maybe adding some targets where you would need to get speed through DJin crate would be fun too. (nadewars or w/e is that map called, just for singleplayer)
making soccer NORMAL again, srsly, new physics just fcked up soccer, ball now bounces 100000x times before stopping its movement, pls, just fix this, it isnt that hard is it? Just put some exception for soccer mode, which would force old physics only in soccer mode
, i started playing DP ONLY because of soccer!
labyrinth map (eg: cratewh, but with some good goal and not a secret way to flag), its fun to play and try to get to goal before others.
interactive jump map, maybe a jump map with elevator (or 2 elevators, to bypass the requirement to travel to dif levels with dif buttons, basically you would have 2 elevators for each level, each trvaleing to lower/higher level), that way, newbies could just jump through a level and when you get bored with it, just move to the next one.