How about creating an online petition which we all sign and then deliver it to Valve themselves. I think it would be better if we were proactive and found out precisely how many communities these changes actually have affected.
I used to have a relatively active TF2 community with a server in the top 10%. I stopped hosting for a while due to real life commitments and tried to start again around February, initially as part of my old community. Our most popular servers were mostly stock with a few enhancements that the community loved. When I relaunched in February, a number of the original core members had moved onto games such as DOTA and thanks to QP changes that I was unaware of at the time, those of us that were left were scratching our heads as to why the server wasn't filling again. Initially we thought it might have been the branding of our old community, so we created a new one this June or so. I went to Reddit and found out about this, only to find it had bitten a number of communities as this mailing list shows. It has been a bitter struggle to get the server half full for even 3 hrs each night. At this rate I've decided to forget Quick Play and I'm going to be looking at creating a highly customised server that won't really reflect the true and vanilla nature of TF2 at all. It is futile trying to compete with Valve servers at this moment and very few want to sit on a server for 2 hours waiting for it to fill up. If there is no obvious difference between your server and a full Valve server, other than a reduced player count, guess which one they will choose. It is all well and good saying pre-existing communities aren't affected by this. But it really depends on their size. Even ones with 10K+ members seem to have difficult filling more than 2 servers, and definitely can't maintain that player number for the same amount of hours. All the new players go to Valve servers and eventually the old ones join them because it is fun for them to pubstomp and 24 player games are better than ones with 10. On 2 October 2014 14:59, dan <needa...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > On 02/10/2014 14:15, Frank wrote: > >> Valve uses the community to make and create all these nice items they are >> putting out lately...letting everyone else do their work for them >> > > That was an easy thing for them to do though. Rubbish items are easy to > dismiss and you > pay the ones that get picked a percentage of money they actually earn in > the store. > > So it's a bit disingenuous to suggest Valve "lets everyone else do their > work" - they pay them > pretty reasonably for it. > > You can't do that with servers. Firstly because it requires few skills to > run one. > There's no barrier to entry. There's barely even a financial barrier these > days. > > If Valve rewarded server owners then people would all crawl out of the > woodwork > to run servers to get that reward. Who then decides who gets it? The > people that connect to the server? Valve? Some arbitrary scoring system? > > We've all seen what you do when you decide you need to fight over the same > few > players, and it's not pretty and it does nothing other than hurt the game > for players. > > The other side, as I've said many times, there really is nothing to > distinguish > a good server that an admin can do. You can create a bad server and you > can say > what a bad server is like - high ping etc etc etc, but there's nothing you > can do to the config files > that will make your server any better than anyone else's. > > If there's one thing valve have proven it's that you can run thousands of > vanilla servers > and fill them and they work fine. If anything with fewer problems than > many communities have. > > Besides, you're not a community of nice people. Why would anyone want > to help you do anything? If you can make money from TF2 servers today > you're > on a cushy number. You can't expect Valve to implement some get-rich-quick > scheme for you. > > Even if you say "Just want players, not a reward" the argument remains the > same. > Why should you get players and not valve or someone else? What did you do > that was so special? > We didn't get a response from Valve on that statue of you that TF2 staff > could bow humbly before > it on their way into work to remind themselves of who put them where they > are today. > > Maybe if you offered to pay for it? No wait, get the French to make one, > they'll put it somewhere everyone can see it. That's worked for statues in > the past :D > > -- > Dan > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: > https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: https://list.valvesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
