XeNo

Apologies for the delay, I had something that came up. The winner of the giveaway is... Congrats! Rilex has won Payday2 + any 1 DLC of his choice! Please add me on steam (http://steamcommunity.com/id/thisisxeno/) and I will gift you your prize.

I haven't been able to find any answers to why PayPal wallet can't be used for PayPal subscriptions, or a work-around for it. I'm sorry. If anyone else has any ideas, Elemental can't use PayPal wallet to buy Subscriber which I'm not sure why.

Early-bird Subscriber Giveaway! As a special thanks to the first couple dozen Subscribers, we're doing our first Subscriber-only giveaway! Rules: Must be a Subscriber by the time I randomly pick a winner (Which will be one of the people who are a Subscriber at the time of the giveaway)! You must have a game on your Steam Wishlist with a cost of $40 or less! When: I will be choosing a random winner tomorrow at NOON (12PM!) CDT. Roughly ~24 hours from this post. If you'd like a chance at the giveaway, feel free to Subscribe to SteamGamers in the next 24 hours! Good luck!

This was a mistake on our part for the most part. We really should have, but we had so many projects running at once we lost focus and fell behind. We're learning from this mistake in the future as we pick ourselves back up. We're actively thinking of new ways to make Subscriber NOT server-dependent. Giveaways, raffles, tournaments, or whatever we may come up with in the future to ensure it is not entirely reliant on server-based perks. The idea will be that even if you don't play in our servers, it's still a benefit to you to sign up for Subscriber.

I'll make a thread in the Subscriber section about how to cancel subscriptions until I can work out a "cancel subscription" button for people to easily use. Unsubscribing a person who gets permed is more or less on them, to be honest. I don't think we need to add more things for us to keep track of just because someone doesn't realize they should cancel. Any angry parents or anything that we get will just be dealt with by replying that they should keep better track of where their money is going if their kids are using it to pay for things. I don't see why SG has to be the parents in this situation. Ensuring someone re-subs could be something we can implement. I don't know about 3 warnings, but I think setting up a PM to go out a few days before their subscription end date will be possible. There's no plans to have different levels of Subscribers, at this time. In the future we may offer deals like pay more for 3 months of Subscriber at a reduced monthly cost, and/or we may increase the amount Subscriber costs. Keep in mind though, the first 50 Subs that stay for 3 months will only ever have to pay the $5 fee to get the perks.

Spiked gave a good explanation to some of this, however I figured I would chime in and share a bit more of the future for Subscribers. The reason for the 50 Subscriber-if-they-stay-for-3-months incentive is just as Spike explained, so that we can get a steady income for at least 3 months to regroup ourselves and stay pushing forward with our new form of revenue that will be steady and cheap for people to afford. The amount 50 Subscribers gives us, is more than what the upkeep of SG's finances will cost once we downsize the servers. The idea for this excess income is to give it back to the Subscribers, we will host raffles or giveaways for our Subscribers only, allowing them to get their some money back for supporting us. This is a direct answer to Zaraki's question about why they should continue to donate. While we will also give back to the community with community-wide events and giveaways/raffles, the first few we host will be Subscriber exclusively. This means you donate $15 (Sub for 3 months) and you get a chance at more than likely $180+ in giveaways for those 3 months. This is roughly the equivalent of us giving away a $60 game to subs only per month. Which will be entirely financed by the 50 sub goal we're aiming for. I made a point with our higher up staff (Namely Revenga) that as we gain excess money we are going to pour that right back into our Subs and community. Our profits are your gain, so to speak. Rather than saving it for a lower-donation month, we're going to give it right back so people hopefully realize there's a real benefit to staying a subscriber. As we gain more subscribers and donations in general, the rewards will be greater and you guys will hopefully see a direct impact of where your money goes. By greater I mean we may start off with a pre-purchase of a hot upcoming new game, RP in league, but then as the donations and subs keep rolling in, we'll upgrade that to Knives in CSGO, Rare gun skins in CSGO, Bundles of $60 games from steam sales, and more. We will also try to be more transparent in the coming months about where our finances lie and where your money is going. Expect to see our costs on the donation page, and hopefully giveaways that are fully paid for by you guys. Spike is entirely correct in saying Subscriber will become the early-access club, and we're going to make a point to keep it that way. I'm watching as people keep signing up for Subscriber and it only makes me smile to see you guys giving this a shot. I promise SG will not let you down for it.

If you subscribe and your rank does not update on the forums after ~30 minutes, please post here so we can address any possible issues there might be with Subscriber not updating properly on the forums.

Oh it does a bit, it's not as noticeable as the main forum page though.

This is pretty much true. Zaraki your idea has merit, but it's not realistically something we should be looking for. It is far better to focus our efforts on our own progress and maintaining our own servers than attempt a start-up collaboration server with another community. Mixing two communities is nearly impossible unless both communities have been mixing before any "official" merge ever happened. What I mean by this, is that by doing a collaboration, SG may gain players, traffic, population, and possibly revenue. However, SG loses power at the same time. We would have to work with another communities' staff in order to resolve any issues that come up, which there will be, and if we aren't on the same wavelength, that's going to be a major issue. Hellsgamers for example, they have almost no moderation of their admins. Their Admins have been known to kick people for just being better than them, force players to switch sides when they don't like dying to them, and overall abuse. This is mainly because you could (Don't know if you still can) buy admin from HG and they give it to you. Also the management over there is pretty shoddy. This means if any of our long-time members have a problem with HG members, we can't just simply take care of the HG members like we would normally, we would have to work with HG management to fix it, and if they aren't willing to do something about their side, there's "not much we can do" if we're in a collaboration with them and relying on it to sustain ourselves. Not to mention that fact alone will make any community we approach feel like they have power over us if we ask them to help us out by co-hosting a server with us. I just don't see it turning out nicely for us in the end. We're better off looking for ideas that we are in full control of, rather than bringing in an outside community to merge or even partially merge with us.

MozillaMomoneyFirefux.

The snow only follows the cursor on the main forum page. When looking at a thread/subforum they don't follow it. When I say follow, I mean the snow falls in the direction of the cursor. So if you put it in the lower right of your browser, the snow goes down towards the right, and vice versa for the left side.

Huge shout out to Revenga, Floffy, Spiked, TheVirus, and others who helped make the Christmas Theme this year. I noticed there wasn't a thread about it and there really should have been. This year's theme is way above and beyond what last year's theme was like, thank you so much guys for making this happen. THE SNOW FUCKING FOLLOWS THE CURSOR AND I AM HAVING TOO MUCH FUN.

Overrated existence.

I actually had this exact idea today. Bit more in-depth thought about it though, rather than simply recognizing random members for things they do. I like it. It'll be discussed as a future thing we could do. Look towards maybe having something the start of next year we'll do a preliminary member of the month thing. The community meeting for Dec is the 3rd Saturday of the month (Dec 20th) at 4PM EST, try and be there and feel free to bring this up and we can discuss what we've got so far on it as an idea.

Yes, Potatoes as well. I apologize, was tired when I wrote this and figured I was going to forget something.

Hello SG, We're pleased to announce the following promotions: Revenga is moving up to Board of Directors! His constant interest in SG and invested time has been noticed and we're giving him a well earned promotion to take part in more areas of SG and help shape it for the future! WickedZealot is moving up to Community Advisors! He's always had great ideas and has been noticed as well. As he's one of our longest time members and an avid Zombie killer, we're sure he has plenty of ideas for the future of SG! We're also looking at him closely for a future TA position due to his extensive technical background, so be on the look-out for him to be going up even further in the ranks! Usually we don't announce when people step down or we demote people. However, I feel it's worth noting that Bob Loblaw has been put to Retired Staff today as well. Bob has been with SG for many years and done plenty for us, we can't be thankful enough for his efforts as a TA and when he was a BD. Jen has also stepped back down to Retired Staff, and we appreciate her help with the servers during the brief time she was AO again. Thank you to everyone here for your efforts, whether you were promoted or demoted, SG appreciates you the same!

I DO SAY THAT THE QUOTATIONS OF MY FELLOW GENTLEMEN ARE QUITE SPOT ON, INDUBITABLY. TALLY HO.

You are also part of the reason for its shrinking to the state it was now. When most people who have been here a long time think about around when it was that SG started going downhill, they are reminded of the time we were sold and no longer owned our own name. The president responsible? You. You take pride in it being bigger when you were in charge, but also you're partly responsible for why it went downhill. Hold onto that for whatever it's worth. SG no longer needs your services, love SG from outside of the community. You only ever come back to bitch and moan about how it is now and then claim you know everything about making it better. Your attitude is toxic to this community now and will no longer be put up with.

What a sad view of the community, you see no potential for SG to become bigger? It's not healthy to keep this kind of vision for SG. That's the kind of ideology that kept SG in the same spot for like 2 years where nothing happened. You sold the community for a Macbook, being the one solely responsible for us not owning our own name. Already discussed as on its way, and also we have more perks for dedicated members than SG has ever had, tiers of regular give people something to work towards on forums and rewards for said things. Also supporters were given some more perks on different servers since you were president. Never getting promoted is what caused MANY potentially great higher ups to quit this community, putting effort in and getting zero in return caused them to turn away. People had to wait for months for someone to finally decide they wanted to step down before getting promoted. We have less ranks now than we did when you were running things, and our community meeting (What caused the creation of this thread) we already discussed lower our servers to have more focus. Even then, we have less servers than SG has had in the past. We haven't opened a new server for a new game outside of CS:S, CS:GO, and Gmod. We aren't jumping game to game. We moved from CS:S to CS:GO because CS:S population in general (Amount of players playing it) has decreased drastically. Something else you would know if you actually took time to look around. Appeasing people who are currently here is of course a priority, but saying not to work with getting new people in is just not logical at all. Eventually people leave and if we are never working towards getting new people, the community will inevitably die regardless. Seems pointless to me to never try to get new people. People are more involved and invited to be involved with the future of SG more so than ever in the past, people who put forth effort get promoted and rewarded for their contributions, encouraging people to work towards populating and expanding SG slowly but surely. Most of this is yes and no, overall true, but expansion doesn't come from doing nothing. If our current community doesn't populate the servers and actually play in them or anything, how will it naturally expand? We have appeased our current members by putting for efforts at expanding, people aren't yelling in outcry at us trying to get new people. You earlier stated trying to get advertisement from places and partnering with people was a bad idea and that it won't help anything, and youtube is a social media of sorts and we don't have to achieve stardom to get our name out there and get a few people interested, which always helps. Regardless of this contradiction, we already are working towards these things. It was discussed in the meeting we had with the community. I reiterate my statement of where you sold SteamGamers to someone for basically a Macbook. I don't think people who love SG want you talking for them. Let them speak for themselves. Short answer: More than you did. Long answer: Attend our next community meeting and find out! We have plenty on the way, or already implemented, and most of it is discussed around the forums, I would have encouraged you to look around a bit more on these forums before posting, as a lot of your post is already answered or proven to not be accurate.

-D6_eiV3X34 Youtube video of the meeting with audio and chat so you can listen/read along if you missed it. I don't know how you guys stand my voice. Good lord that's atrocious to listen to. Edit: Also the community meeting will be made into a monthly event. Every 3rd Saturday at 4PM EST there will be a community meeting. Someone will send out an event reminder before every meeting.

Ideally we'll take it away from being so server-reliant. More and more new games do not support dedicated servers, or are not made for a "community". For example, you can own L4D2 servers but due to the "match making" feature of it, no one searches out specific servers or cares for the ones they end up with to the extent of wanting to be part of the community. That's just an example and I'm sure there may be some instances of communities getting a L4D2 server and constantly using it with their own members, but it rarely generates new members. Taking SG away from server-based, to make it more about the community, will hopefully allow SG to continue to thrive in a way that server-based simply will not unless you already have a monopoly on the population to begin with. An example would be the TF2 scene where there's maybe 3-4 huge communities that have 30+ servers constantly populated with their members, trying to compete with that with no population would be next to impossible without considerable effort. However, if we make our community based around gamers getting together and playing a variety of games, inviting those we meet to join us and hang out with us, we may be able to continue this community for several years, even after games shy more and more away from dedicated servers (Which they seem to be) we will be able to offer a community of gamers for people to join and enjoy. Hopefully in 3 years we will have continuous events and tournaments hosted in SG's name, people will be streaming for SG and showcasing in a way what our community is about, having fun and playing games together with other gamers around the world. For the most part we will start with only the ones that consistently populate without too much effort. BuildRP, TTT, and ZE come to mind. As far as one or two others to keep, that's a bit up for debate. It comes down to what we think we can do with that 4th or 5th server to make it popular enough people will want to keep playing it and populate it from the ground up. Most likely it will be a CA+ decision for which ones we keep, since we have a bit deeper understanding of what we think we can do with the servers versus a server we may not think is worth investing time into but the community really enjoys right now.

While this is a good idea, keep in mind this is more or less for questions. Server suggestions and ideas have its own forums.