On 13/09/2012 23:13, Essay Tew Phaun wrote:
You don't put a SRCDS instance under your pillow at night and wake up with a
full server in the morning.
You're right. It took 2 minutes for my server to fill the first time I
started it.
That wasn't enough time to get any sleep.
But, as ever, there will only be full servers if there are players to
fill them. There's
nothing you can do about it. Messing with configs, adding plugins etc
doesn't make any difference.
The proof? Valve's (and others) vanilla servers are full.
If the current TF2 stats say "70000" playing, you need around 3000
servers. If there are 5000 servers
then 2000 of them are empty. Empty no matter what you do. When the
current stats later in the day say "50000 playing", then another 1000
or so servers will be empty. There's absolutely no point or purpose
running more servers than are required - and
no great community service is performed if people are chasing after the
same set of players.
(We've seen what happens when they try. You just end up with a bunch of
insidious methods to try and get people to join, fake player
counts and so on) The truth is, no one has any great ideas or inventive
ways to attract people to their server - and
if they did, 5 minutes later everyone else would copy it, negating any
advantage it had.
There's no shortage of bad ideas though.
The rule, as I've said before is always : you can make your server worse
than the rest, the same as the rest, but not better than the rest.
A good server is, aside from one or 2 technical things like ping and
whether it has enough cpu and so on, entirely made by the people who are
playing on
it at the time. You might have different criteria as to what makes a fun
game, but you join a server, you might think "this is fun"
the next time you join, with different people, it may well not be. The
only way to find a good game is to hop from server to server until
you find a group of people playing in a way that you find fun. You think
"I can add these people to my friends list or we can agree to always
play on this server"
Unfortunately not. This is Gabe's theory that they can identify some
kind of "Good gamer Gregs" that are fun to play with and find some way
to pay them to play. But the
gotcha is, the guy that's helping make this the best round of TF2 you've
ever played one day, will be camped as one of 6 snipers being part of
the most dull game of TF2
you've ever played the next.
There are no great or significant costs to recover to run a server,
unless you're being overcharged or
have made a bad purchasing decision.
e.g my son's clan server costs a few pence a day from one of the bigger
UK providers. Cheap enough that one of them could
swallow the costs. Shared between just 6 people, it's peanuts. That is
13 slot, but it's not significantly more
for 25 slot.
We can assume the people providing this server are making a profit
because they've been
in business for years. So, if you run your own server rather than going
to a provider then it should be cheaper still.
If it's not then you are doing something very wrong, regardless of
whether you have adverts or donations or not
(which I personally think will make your server less attractive because
the interface is clunky. It comes from a time years ago
before Valve added a reasonably decent web browser, and today we can see
the even slicker big picture shift-tab interface and you realise there's
so much about TF2 that's just there because a decade or so ago games
were like that. All these cfg files and mapcycle.txt too, no one sane would
do that today, but these things take a lot of effort to change and
writing a new co-op game mode is, obviously, a much better use of time.
If they'd written TF3 rather than keeping this game alive, it would look
slick and maybe your server info and adverts would too.
But now it just looks clunky and out of place.
--
Dan
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