Server Removal / Suggestions

[Dominic]

Hello everyone,

 

The Board is in constant talks about the state of the servers, what's working and what's not, and new opportunities. Recently we've discussed removing more of our older servers that aren't doing us any good anymore. The servers that are on our radar for removal currently are Bhop and Retakes. In reality, despite Bhop's tendency to sometimes pick up in population at random, it hasn't done us much good since it was released in 2016. We don't really retain the players, and it's always acted as a secondary server that our community members use once they're already apart of our community. The same with Retakes, it's a situation where it isn't really bringing us any new regulars.

 

Now, we're coming to you guys to ask for your thoughts and opinions on the removal of these servers. However, we're also interested in what else you'd like to see or, rather, what you think will do us good. A lot of these projects we've released recently are ones that we see massive potential in. GMod TTT, CSS Gun Game, and TF2 Casual are servers that we definitely see massive growth potential with, and we're interested in any additional projects that offer similar potential. Clearing useless servers out gives us the opportunity to make space for more potentially fruitful projects such as these, which is our goal with this.

 

Please share your thoughts, they're greatly appreciated.

[Cept For Her]

40 minutes ago, Dominic said:

The same with Retakes, it's a situation where it isn't really bringing us any new regulars.

The issue with retakes is its never going to be a one server pull for bringing in new players. The whole idea behind retakes was to eventually expand it into multiple servers in order to promote SG towards a more FPS centered group. The same was being done with scrim and 1v1 Multi-Arena at the time of these servers coming around. 

 

I understand the idea behind removing these servers as they don't bring in regulars, and I applaud the outreach to the community on these concerns as it shows you realize there may be players within the community itself that enjoy these servers as a whole, and wish to keep them alive so they may continue enjoying them (similar to how our scrim server is private, but there for members to have fun amongst themselves).

 

In case anyone is curious, my plans for retakes during my management of the server were as follows:

• Fine tune the weapon allocator plugin for use across multiple servers
• Fine tune spawns on each map to allow for the best recreation of retakes in mm, and decrease predictability of spawns
• Adjust the ranking system to provide incentivize and promote newer players to stay on our servers
• Create multiple servers (2 static maps like mirage and inferno, 2 rotational map cycles)
• Add a priority queue plugin for subscribers to incentivize promoting the community through the subscription services
• Possibly have ranking based whitelist servers in the event the servers got popular enough
• Have a point decay system, where players would lose X points per week of inactivity, thus promoting them to play on a semi-regular basis (in favor of just nuking their points after a month)
• Implement the server swap plugins to easily switch between different retakes servers, and promote higher populated servers

Theres a lot that can be done for the server given someone has the drive and dedication to making it as successful as it can be, but it mostly stems from having a better system than the rest of the servers out there, which is something i believe our weapon allocator does well in separating us from the competition.

Personally with retakes I wanted to hook into the official CSGO Retakes mode that is available now, making the loadout selection be of a couple custom loadouts you would be able to set yourself, adding more variability and customization into the mode, as well as accomplishing the fix to the spawn problems mentioned above.

[Phoenix_]

Removal opinions:

Retakes- Sure, most of the time the players on those servers are already SG members and now with potential(?) renewed interest in scrim it might not be too big of a hit.

 

Bhop- Obviously I'm gonna be wayyy biased here but I think bhop is still valuable to keep, even if you downsize it. I myself still play bhop sometimes and it's a gamemode that still has a niche, unique market that actually sees a decent amount of non-current SG members on.

 

Suggestions:

Gmod Half Life RP- it's a super fun gamemode with a fairly large market of players with a non-super saturated market of servers.

[Acer]

11 minutes ago, Phoenix_ said:

Gmod Half Life RP

While I haven’t looked into that gamemode in particular imo its best to not go into any gmod mode that would take a lot of time developing and releasing since once s&box comes out it will render that server dead.

[Phoenix_]

18 minutes ago, Acer said:

once s&box comes out

he doesnt know

 

nah but fair enough, I say we all in on a HL2RP server when s&box "comes out"

[Acer]

32 minutes ago, Phoenix_ said:

he doesnt know

its supposed to be this year let me believe

[Caido]

When coming back I went and hopped on some of the servers I frequented prior or saw usually populated like Bhop.

 

When I got on Bhop I was their for some time and not a single additional person had appeared. In contrast to how a server like surf is at the moment if one person hops on usually within 5 10 minutes people begin to role in with out any "call to server" action.

 

Feel like Bhop is a good server to have but at this time it may not be what is needed. This stems from not only the fact that the server is not frequented often, but when you think of it CSGO is not as popular as it once was in a community server game. It still has a massive audience for Competitive play, but the Casual play has dropped a fair amount. This just makes it harder for more niche type servers like Bhop to gain a consistent player base. Especially, since to most and from an outside perceptive Bhop has usually taken a second place to servers/ modes like surf or even KZ. Looking through game tracker it shows. Bhop at this point has become an oversaturated niche server with a limited player base, so I feel it may be best to drop it if we are looking to drop an underused server for something new.

 

In terms of retakes, it looks like it self pops at moments and has some people who may go on at times. But even with retakes it seems to be a more niche clientele that wants to practice specifics within their completive gameplay. Looking through CSGO and other servers, for the most part the mode seems to be very unpopulated all around. If we want to keep a competitive edge server, a server for those who like to practice/ play the game in a comp sense. I could imagine something like an FFA server (a little saturated but because of the high demand it is easy to get stragglers in when they can't join an established server). That itself can usually fill up a server, the only thing we would need to work on is adding somethings to keep people joining. Maybe some form of rank system as a basic first idea. Another server I still enjoy and see some more pop on is 1v1 servers.

 

 

 

[Lucid]

Probably won't happen but I always want to play on a CSS zombie cade server with unlimited ammo and can never find a server to play on except ones that have weird prop spawns and are filled with bots

[Karma]

I have not launched CSGO (other then hopping on to check out the servers) in about a year, so my opinions may be invalid and the community may have changed entirely, but I will state my opinion anyway b/c SG was once my home in a dark time and means a lot to me.

 

23 hours ago, Cept For Her said:

The issue with retakes is its never going to be a one server pull for bringing in new players. The whole idea behind retakes was to eventually expand it into multiple servers in order to promote SG towards a more FPS centered group. The same was being done with scrim and 1v1 Multi-Arena at the time of these servers coming around.

Cept made a very good point about retakes and I think the same applies to bhop and surf. There is no point in repeating what he said, but I would like to add that the same is possible with bhop and surf given the time, effort, and money wanted to be spent. I can obviously see why that might not be a possibility currently.

 

On another note I would like to bring up TTT and maybe JB as well, although I don't and didn't play JB so I couldn't tell you if it truly suffers under similar circumstances.

 

I noticed TTT start to go in the direction it is currently when I still played on SG servers. Not to beat around the bush, there is too much shit. As a previous TTT player I hopped on the server and didn't understand anything that was going on. I think one thing that made us stand out from other servers was how simple we were. It was very easy for a new player who has never touched TTT before to hop on and play with the only real rule being RDM (gamemode wise). There was a small shop that had minimal but useful items that once you learned how to type !menu you could understand and use. This allowed us as a community to see a large influx of newer players, in turn they came to the forums and teamspeak b/c of events like raffles and seeing admins always on the server. This allowed SG to always have more active forums then almost every other community. I remember times where we got the teamspeak server to lag b/c of how many people we had in there.

 

There is a lot of bullshit in my paragraph but the point is that these seemingly easy and fun gamemodes that once ran the community tab have become cluttered with rules and items and so much shit to learn that they are not enjoyable for a new player. I have 15 days probably more at this point on that server, and I got on not knowing what rules to follow and how to even play the game. I can go into more detail about what I think is exactly wrong and should/could be changed if warranted.

 

Maybe I'm now just an oldhead saying this but sometimes change and conform to make a specific group happy isn't what is best for the overall community.

[oSen]

On 1/17/2023 at 9:29 PM, Cept For Her said:

Theres a lot that can be done for the server given someone has the drive and dedication to making it as successful as it can be, but it mostly stems from having a better system than the rest of the servers out there, which is something i believe our weapon allocator does well in separating us from the competition.

 

Couldn't agree with this more. Retakes servers are essentially homogeneous aside from their plugin so whoever has the best looking plugin / system on each server basically takes the cake. While retakes most likely won't bring regulars into the community as a whole, it is definitely a server with the potential to grow a player base within SG as we have seen in the past where there's been a small competitive group of people within the community. I think SG can still benefit from having the server given someone competent is given the opportunity to manage it, it's just a matter of figuring out how to retain players that join.

 

On 1/17/2023 at 11:30 PM, Caido said:

But even with retakes it seems to be a more niche clientele that wants to practice specifics within their completive gameplay. Looking through CSGO and other servers, for the most part the mode seems to be very unpopulated all around.

I think that while it is niche, our server still has potential to do well given the resources it has. Competitive CS will be around for a lot longer and as long as people are still participating in competitive games, I think retakes / warmup servers will continue to be around and have the ability to succeed.