I do love how all communities still get painted with the same brush - even those of us who STILL run rotation servers (hell, one of our payload servers has a mix of 54 stock/custom maps - all of which get played almost everyday). Of course, we run those servers along side 24/7 servers as well - even some with *gasp* instant respawn - because, guess what....a whole lot of folks like those kind of game settings.
The current state of community servers (and their lack of diversity) is simply a result of those community servers that are left doing what they had to to garner any traffic at all. Ask any long-term community server operator over the past 3 years what type of things would kill a community server, and most of them would say: 1. Changing the map (when there's almost no new players flowing to your server, losing half the server population on a map change effectively kills it off). 2. Custom Maps (self explanatory). For 5 years we ran a dozen servers, half of which were custom map servers. After quickplay, only our custom payload server still lives on. 3. Anything but the top 5-6 stock maps. (again, self explanatory). Good community servers grow organically. For example....when we launched our community in 2008, we started with a single server. After about 4 months, our community members asked for a 2Fort and a Payload server. Once those servers started growing, our members started asking for specific settings (i.e tweaking things like slightly altering the blu/red spawn times on Dustbowl, or slightly decreasing the spawn time on 2Fort, etc.) We made those changes, and the players that liked them stuck around - thus building a community of like-minded, long-term players. I think that will be the test here. Let's face it...despite Valve's efforts with building updates for the game over the past couple of years, the needle hasn't moved as far as average daily player count. To me, that simply means that what they were doing wasn't developing long-term players of the game (something, by the way, good gaming communities are quite good at). Today alone we've had half a dozen people join our forums and send me a comment to the effect of how they never knew so many custom payload maps existed, but were glad to have found our community. These were all players who've been playing the game in excess of at least 90 days. I'm sure there are some tweaks that could be made here and there, but I don't think any of us will know the real impact of this until Valve's system can stay up and running consistently for several weeks. As it stands now, no one can really get a good read because the system is so overloaded it's not really working as it will be. On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 3:50 PM, N-Gon <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm with Mr. Wagner on this one. > Valve's QP system let anyone join essentially any official map they wanted > and there would be players, this was (and still is) much harder if not > close to impossible to do with community servers. Can any of you guys > honestly tell me that you don't have servers that sit dead empty unless you > get all the admins to sit in and play for half an hour or more to get it > filled up. > > I'm hoping with this new change communities will be more open to trying > different maps as "Valve steals our players" is pretty much a non-issue now. > > On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 3:45 PM, Lucas Wagner <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I ran them too. And they all died. Rotation is one thing, and having >> on-demand maps that I can join instantly is another. It's a video game, >> nobody is interested in waiting 20 minutes to play a map. The beauty of the >> previous Valve model was this was not an issue. There was almost always a >> full server on any given map, even some of the more obscure payload race >> maps. >> >> I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I remain skeptical. >> >> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:32 PM, 1nsane <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> There were plenty of rotation servers before quickplay. I ran a bunch >>> myself as did my friends/competitors. If it's something the community wants >>> you can bet servers will pop up to provide it again. >>> On Jul 8, 2016 3:27 PM, "Lucas Wagner" <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> I think the thing that worries me the most is that, at least with Valve >>>> servers, there is a nice assortment of different maps, etc. I can find a >>>> game on most maps with little or no effort. Communities largely serve the >>>> interests of the server owners and operators. I know right before QP died >>>> that it was very difficult to find anything but 24/7 servers focused on a >>>> small handful of maps, mostly 2Fort, Dustbowl, Turbine, Harvest, etc. If >>>> you wanted to play something like Frontier, for example, it wasn't easy to >>>> find a community server offering that. >>>> >>>> Perhaps Valve can provide some bonus referrals to servers hosting maps >>>> that are not being played currently, and an interface for server operators >>>> to queue what the community needs (Hey it'd be really great if you host >>>> upward next) and set the next map to it within 2-3 minutes of a map ending. >>>> Or it can just give more referrals to maps that aren't very well supported, >>>> thus giving some incentive for operators to branch out. >>>> >>>> I'm all for community servers provided the plugin set is clean (I don't >>>> need to download all of your special files just to play a map), is >>>> unobtrusive or interferes with my gaming experience (i hate plugins that >>>> make me acknowledge the open menu before I can do anything), are fair (my >>>> friends and I know of a few servers in which mods are abusing critical >>>> chance plugins, and SM plugins in general), and perform well. Running >>>> custom plugins is great and all, but it was definitely out of hand. I've >>>> come to appreciate the vanilla playstyle on Valve pubs and quite frankly, I >>>> will miss them if the community cannot provide a reasonable replacement for >>>> that system. I played on some last night and some were fun, some had god >>>> awful performance, and some were unnecessarily encumbered with plugins. >>>> Quite frankly, I wouldn't mind requiring sv_pure 1 or sv_pure 2 even for QP >>>> servers receiving referrals. >>>> >>>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:09 PM, Robert Paulson <[email protected]> >>>> wrote: >>>> >>>>> People said the same thing about quickpick at the time and we all know >>>>> how that turned out. Everyone was claiming higher player counts at first >>>>> and now they are dead. >>>>> >>>>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 11:52 AM, E. Olsen <[email protected]> >>>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> Frankly, it's a win just by shining light on the fact that there ARE >>>>>> community servers at all. For years now, they've been effectively hidden >>>>>> to >>>>>> the point that a large portion of the F2P playerbase didn't even know >>>>>> they >>>>>> existed. At least with this UI change we've got the chance for players to >>>>>> find us. >>>>>> >>>>>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 2:47 PM, Lucas Wagner <[email protected]> >>>>>> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>> I would imagine a big reason why things were so great last night was >>>>>>> people just wanted to play TF2 and the only servers they could connect >>>>>>> to >>>>>>> were community servers. Not trying to rain on the parade, bu I think >>>>>>> Robert >>>>>>> is right. It'll be a few weeks before we have any clue how this will all >>>>>>> play out. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> Lucas >>>>>>> >>>>>>> On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 1:28 PM, Robert Paulson < >>>>>>> [email protected]> wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>>> I am not sure why everyone is celebrating so early. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> Population is only high likely because of a new patch, summer time, >>>>>>>> and reportedly many Valve servers being temporarily down. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> Maybe casual mode is bringing in more players, but it is just as >>>>>>>> likely that matchmaking is yet another drain players that community >>>>>>>> servers >>>>>>>> will never be allowed to participate in, while some of you are excited >>>>>>>> about fighting for scraps from other community servers. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list >>>>>>>> archives, please visit: >>>>>>>> https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>>> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list >>>>>>> archives, please visit: >>>>>>> https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>>> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list >>>>>> archives, please visit: >>>>>> https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, >>>>> please visit: >>>>> https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds >>>>> >>>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, >>>> please visit: >>>> https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds >>>> >>>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, >>> please visit: >>> https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, >> please visit: >> https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds > >
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