The "model" of running community based servers has changed since i
started nearly 10 years ago. Back then, there were no Valve servers in
any of their games. It was up for the communities to run a server, have
a good environment for players to play on, on a decent hardware with a
decent connection, without cheaters. This also led to more and more
people buying the game since their friends played the game also and
Valve earned more money by this act.
Now Valve has overwatch, tightened VAC ban time when it kicks in sooner
and such, so non-administrated servers aren't that much of an issue nor
the cheaters who play on them and ruin others experience. There is also
more money involved in post marketing of the sold game - crates, skins,
item contributions, etc. None of this would be even possible if they
wouldn't had invested time and money to run their own servers. Post
marketing is what is most important, that alone brings in more money
these days than game sales. With TF2, it's even more apparent. This old
game, so many players, so much people spending money in different things.
Valve has been running servers since release of Left 4 Dead and noticed
that it is more profitable for them to have a unified experience for
their playerbase, rather than get the players frustrated and driven away
by bad experiences. Let's face it, there's a lot of really crap servers
out there filled with 10, 20 or even more plugins with different garbage
that doesn't add into the game at all.
It's really hard for any community based server to compete with any of
the servers they run in the eyes of regular Joe, who just starts up the
game when he has time and wants to play. If that average Joe and
thousands of his friends were having a bad experience in quickplay due
to advertisements, donation whining, garbage plugins, instant respawns
and other settings, it's understandable that Valve did something that
improved the situation.
Let's be clear, there is less and less need for community servers these
days. Only thing we seem to be good for are offering different player
experience. There still will be those bad apples among us that will not
follow rules and Valve folks also noticed this. Instead of fighting
against a windmill, they put us in our own little pool to play on. We
never get out of it and have things like they used to be.
2 years have now passed since the change and the little change they did
(hide valve servers from browser) wasn't done out of their good graces
alone, but to prevent players from going to empty valve server and
earn/farm the contract faster. But a lot of people again had bad
experience and they thought having someone farming the contract is
lesser bad than someone not finding a Valve server to play on.
We are just expendable assets. I've been wondering what to do since i'm
gotten a bit of tired of all this in 10 years and i'm not sure what i am
going to do after the summer is over. So far i've been throwing money at
the servers but i'm not quite sure if i should use it to something more
important instead.
-ics
Saint K. kirjoitti:
We are a donation driven community that’s always been able to purchase
their own hardware for colocation.
Up until the time that advertisement in the MOTD and QP came around
there was nothing seriously wrong.
Properly ran community servers received donations and could sustain
themselves.
I for one never understood why the situation was handled like this.
Allowing the advertisements and introducing QP has simply killed off a
lot of community servers and the community building it involved.
Maybe I am too much stuck in the past, hosting VALVe games since 1999,
but this is just my view on things.
Saint K.
*From:*[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *E. Olsen
*Sent:* Sunday, July 05, 2015 7:07 PM
*To:* Just a random guy; Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list
*Subject:* Re: [hlds] hlds Digest, Vol 51, Issue 47
Trying to run donation-driven servers is getting harder and harder
every day, and unless you have a very large community(~400
concurrent players at all times or more) - you're simply not going
to afford the hardware you need to run said servers._//_
Perhaps if you try to throw up dozens of servers without a supporting
community behind it, but if you grow your community "organically"
(i.e. starting with a single server and expanding as your community
grows), then the costs involved are minimal. A couple dozen
like-minded folks are all it takes to get the first server off the
ground.
On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Just a random guy <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'd like to step in and make a a point, even though none of you
know me, nor have I participated in this discussion.
My servers(currently six 32-slotters with all custom
gamemodes/maps) run MOTDgd advertisements, and my entire
playerbase is happy and contempt with them, except the three
occasional non-regulars that come on once a week and */_bitch
_/* about the ads. And it's not even the annoyance of the ads,
their toasters simply cannot run anything past a staic page in the
MOTD.
My point is - your ads have to be unobtrusive(or, at least, not
annoying) and you still *_have_* to provide a high quality
gameplay/experience to anyone that joins.
Trying to run donation-driven servers is getting harder and harder
every day, and unless you have a very large community(~400
concurrent players at all times or more) - you're simply not going
to afford the hardware you need to run said servers._//_
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