I never thought I'd see the day where E. Olsen, someone who I've long considered to be a well informed contributor to discussions like these, the day where he would stand up and essentially say, "Using a text-client to fake a player on a server? No problem! Good server operators *need *some kind of help!" - What irrational, ill-informed tripe...and if he wasn't referring to the use of the text-client in a seeding context, then I fail to see how the comment regarding server seeding was relevant to the current topic matter.
If you want to start a community, get your friends together and start playing on your own server regularly. That's how good communities are created, none of this "use a text-client to attract unsuspecting flies" nonsense. On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 5:38 AM, E. Olsen <[email protected]> wrote: > Server-seeding has been around as long as community-hosted servers has > (all the way back to the original Counter Strike and even Battlefield 2). > Like it or not, players rarely if ever join empty servers, and with the > deck stacked so staggeringly high in Valve's favor in terms of player > traffic, server operators who obey the rules need some kind of help to get > those servers going. > > Let's face it - if ALL servers were treated fairly and equally again, this > wouldn't even be an issue. When the road to your organization is bypassed > by an expressway, and the builders of that expressway have literally hidden > the off ramp for people to get to you, then I don't care how good you are > or how popular you were, your organization is going to suffer immensely. > > I think the real issue here is how difficult is has become to start and/or > grow a community "organically". > > Regardless of how you feel about ad-based servers (full disclosure, I'm > opposed to them), there is no doubt that the harder Valve makes it for > communities trying to grow organically, the more they end up strangling off > the very diversity they claim to want to encourage. > > Think about it - communities used to grow one or two servers at a time as > their membership grew. Now, the vast majority of "communities" (and I use > that word extremely loosely) only offer a handful of stock maps. However, > as opposed to building a server fleet that grows one server at a time with > the community, they take the top 5-6 maps, plaster ads all over them, and > throw up as many servers as they possibly can. That's not building a > community to serve the players, that's building an ad-farm to maximize > ad-impressions. > > ...and therein lies the problem. The current approach has marginalized the > communities that want to offer diversity beyond a handful of stock maps, > and encouraged massive fleets of "me too" stock servers with little to no > interest in adding value to the experience, but with an eye towards > maximizing player connections. > > The lack of a text-mode doesn't really trouble me. It's the absolute and > seemingly insurmountable sense of apathy from the TF2 team towards > community servers that does. > > If these guys would just talk to us again and tell us what community > servers need to do as a whole to get some equitable treatment again, it > would be better for everyone and anyone that cares about TF2. > > All I really want is for players to be better informed about all the > diversity community servers bring to the game. >
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