While traffic is certainly down to our servers, it's not down 70+% as some other communities are reporting - but then again, only our servers that weren't quickplay enabled are still filling up reliably everyday (our "vanilla" quickplay servers are now ghost towns), so it's a mixed bag.
We ARE seeing new players finding us, with pretty positive comments on our forums as well. However, none of our servers are as "resilient" to sudden drops in traffic as they used to be. Frankly, I think the whole "casual" game mode needs to be turned over to community servers entirely. Make the "ranking-up" mechanic community-specific (i.e. ranks only apply to the server group they are earned on), and let Valve handle all the official competitive stuff. Probably won't happen, but I think it would strike a nice balance if it did. I think the communities that are being most drastically affected by this so far are the smaller communities that relied entirely on quickplay traffic combined with ad-supported (i.e. MOTD ads) servers. Unless you're one of the huge server groups with the dozens of servers in various locations (I supposed there's only 2-3 of those left?), I doubt the current UI/server browser is going to support that model going forward. What will really be interesting is if the MOTD ad companies will be actually a viable business for very long after this. Let's face it - quickplay drove their business model, and without it automatically feeding them players/ad impressions, I'm sure their overall revenue has already taken a big hit. In fact, that in itself could start a bit of a "feedback loop"....if their traffic/ad impressions drop too far, I wonder how long they'll be able to stay in business? If they go out of business, how long will the "major" server groups be able to continue operations? Heck, for that matter....how many community servers as a whole would be left standing? There's a ton of things Valve could do to increase interest in community servers again. I still consider this a first step - placing us back on the UI AND removing the 5000+ Valve servers from the browser is definitely a big step forward. A few more things I'd like to see: 1. Casual mode turned over to community servers (as it should be) 2. Daily/weekly highlighting of non-official community maps in the UI, and a button to search for servers hosting them. 3. Community-specific leaderboards to highlight the competitive ranks of our members only. 4, A new, idiot-proof (and stable) map editor that just about anyone could use. 5. Better bots with all game modes supported. 6. MVM servers moved to their own tab in the server browser (a simple change to un-clutter the browser). ....just a few of the many ideas we've discussed over the years. I'm sure you folks have alot more. On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Robert Paulson <[email protected]> wrote: > Is it just me or was there literally zero benefit for community servers in > this update? > > The only thing Valve did was rename quickplay into "casual" and completely > blocked all community servers from participating in it. There was no real > change. > > The reason why everyone saw a bunch of players in the first week was > because casual mode was temporarily broken. > > Anyone remember this little gem? > > On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 2:50 PM, epi <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Perhaps you will get the attention you so desperately seek from Valve in >> the next update: >> >> https://twitter.com/4G_b4nny/status/729839464684490752 >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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
