I don't know if the last paragraph is meant sarcastically, but ads are a
huge problem on community servers. Feel free to write a script that
connects to all tf2 servers and keep the speakers on.
Yes, motds can be turned off client-side. But please don't expect the
average joe to be able to do anything else other than maybe setting his
display resolution.
In the good old days younger people would just gather a few friends,
create a clan and throw together part of their allowance to rent a
gameserver. Later on they would actually survive on donations. Hosting
was driven by passion.
Nowadays every person that can barely even write and their mother wants
to run a server and pay nothing for it. And use ads and whatnot to earn
money from the servers. Sorry, it never worked that way.
Solution is fairly simple. Have a strict report system to remove servers
from the list. Yes, for gods sake, it won't remove every single shit
server there is, but it's a decent first step. Evaluate, and go from
there. It's not like Valve wouldn't spit in server-ops' faces. The issue
is they don't pick the right ones.
Luckily, I can't say much about the pinion-official-server debate, we
were quite unaffected in the EU. I must say however, the pinion people
on spuf get a lot of respect from me. A lot of people shit on them for
the right reasons, and they keep it together. I couldn't do that, god
only knows.
On 05.07.2015 19:59, Alexander Corn wrote:
Are we just ignoring the fact that for a long time, Pinion hosted many
of the CS:GO official matchmaking servers, which had terrible
performance issues (like Valve servers now!) *and* ran MOTD ads? It's
okay for Valve, a multi-billion-dollar corporation to do it, but not
average Joe trying to make some money back on what already isn't a
negligible expense?
But I digress. Ads really aren't a problem anymore in TF2 and if
players still have that delusion, then there's really nothing that can
be done about it. Best to just flip the switch back to all servers by
default (and reset Valve's quickplay scores, they're very artificially
inflated now).
On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 10:29 AM, E. Olsen <ceo.eol...@gmail.com
<mailto:ceo.eol...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Agreed.
Donation-driven communities were how servers were operated for
years (and how many still do). To suggest that there has been some
kind of fundamental shift in the game's demographic that would
prevent that model from working now is simply not true.
In fact, those very same people who were willing to support a
server community in the first years of TF2 existence now have even
more disposable income should they wish to do so.
The difference between the two funding models is that as opposed
to those MOTD ads, a server community that is supported through
donations has to provide enough actual value to players that they
CHOOSE to support that community/server. MOTD ads simply monetize
anyone that connects, without providing any additional value (and
in so many cases, because the system is so open to abuse, the
servers are/were barely suitable for running TF2 at all in terms
of performance).
There seems to be a misconception here, though. I'm certainly not
saying that all servers/communities that run those ads are "bad".
Far from it. Nor am I saying that those who use them are somehow
doing so in a malicious or underhanded manner.
However, I AM saying that when something that has been allowed to
be used on community servers sullies the general reputation of
those very servers so much that we actually have players that
resist the slightest change that would give community servers a
little more exposure, then perhaps it is time to start the
conversation about whether it is in the best interest of community
servers operators as a whole to continue to allow those ads to
function.
Frankly, if we have choose between restoring and rebuilding player
confidence in the quality of community servers, or allowing those
ads to run until there are no players left willing to set foot on
a community server, the answer would seem to be an easy one.
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