The term "community servers" is accurate as a) this is the term Valve
uses and b) "private servers" means "password-protected".
And no, servers with custom gamemodes aren't necessarily doing well
apart from quickplay. Those servers took a big hit if you happen to have
crawled stats of various servers during the last years (which I did).
You also seem to purposefully misunderstand the meaning of my idea,
while you fully acknowledge a huge diversity and therefore a problematic
signal-to-noise-ratio. Therefore the idea of said group. Those few
selected would not represent the ideas of all server operators, but
would function as moderators (what I have said). I think this was pretty
obvious.
On 18.12.2015 07:43, Cats From Above wrote:
Matthias seems to be confusing two separate issues, deliberately so I
suspect. It is, in my view, the height of intellectual dishonesty to
confuse the creation of custom content with the existence of
privately-run servers; it is possible to have a strong custom-content
community without the need for privately-run servers and I suspect
Valve has been posturing Team Fortress 2 toward such a reality for
some time. For example: Workshop map integration inside the server. If
I was a betting person I would preempt that the true reason for Valve
implementing this feature is to allow their soon-to-be-implemented
lobby system to assign a lobby to an official server, with a stock map
or a custom map selected from the workshop. Such would completely
negate the need for custom map servers run by private operators.
As for custom game-modes, which presently do require privately-run
servers, last time I checked private operators with servers featuring
custom game-modes, who put effort into social networking and publicity
etc. are doing quite well irrespective of the existence of Quickplay.
The servers struggling the most as a result of Quickplay are privately
run servers which are directly competing with official servers whilst
only holding half the cards. Ergo: Stock-map servers, which miss out
on things that official servers get. Even if the default option was
addressed, those servers would still be holding half the cards. Hence
a lesson of history relevant to privately run stock servers: Steve
Jobs was smart enough to realise that if Apple was in a zero sum game
with Microsoft, Apple would lose. He was also smart enough to realise
that he didn’t need to play that game – That Apple could do something
that Microsoft wasn’t doing. Perhaps stock server operators could come
to that same enlightenment in terms of private servers and Valve.
Finally, I would note that the misunderstanding of Matthias’es use of
the term “community” was deliberate as a means of pointing out the
inappropriateness of the term. I personally dislike the term
“community servers” and much prefer the more accurate term “private
servers” and “private server operators”… and I would again express my
awe at the fact that some elements of this mailing list would seem to
think that they could represent other private server operators –
Despite the diverse range of views and gross amount of hyperbole that
infests every debate like a bad stench (Case and point: Just bring up
Pinion or Motdgd) I can only imagine that such representation would be
a lot like herding cats. Whilst cats can make a lot of noise, getting
them to go in one direction is impossible… and it’s not the first time
that someone had attempted to establish a coalition of Team Fortress 2
servers …just look at the failed TF2 Alliance.
On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Rowedahelicon
<theoneando...@rowedahelicon.com
<mailto:theoneando...@rowedahelicon.com>> wrote:
There's no need for negativity, just because server owners now are
a small minority doesn't mean we can't grab people's attention. A
lot of the TF2 community simply may not understand what all is at
stake.
On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 11:18 PM, Matthias "InstantMuffin" Kollek
<proph...@sticed.org <mailto:proph...@sticed.org>> wrote:
Congrats, you managed to exceed the level of pragmatism and
transform it into a rant. I don't see any reasons for this. If
you have doubts about Valve caring about community servers, I
do too. The situation is quite obvious. However I'm not
presenting a solution, but a way to make our voices count for
the last chance we apparently have.
You also misunderstood my reply entirely. I never said we
would be speaking for the entirety of the players. I also
don't see a reason why Valve would not at least a bit care
about community servers (that tiny tiny bit), given that they
respect minorities like the competitive groups (compared to
other games like csgo and dota). I also don't see any
re-playability of small event minigames, some gamemodes that
start in a pre-alpha state and barely ever get finished (and
create situations that require weapon balancing for the next
20 years), few maps of the same gamemodes and some contracts
compared to what a decent community can provide for itself.
You're completely oblivious to the weight communities and
their gameplay mods have on Valve's products. Please realize
that almost all Valve products started out as mods.
Killing future products and the talent behind it in its tracks
by limiting the platform seems like a very dumb strategy for a
company that basically ships ideas created by its own community.
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