Community Meeting - June 18th @ 5 PM EDT

[Darnias]

I will come just because of you Black Rain. Please be present.

Edit: I am late

[All Ts]

CS:GO's dead/dying guys!: 

 

Checkout this knew game its popping off!: 

 

Obviously joking but the whole "CS:GO is dead" argument feels like the biggest cope in the universe. It's entirely true that some of the communities that existed before have shrunk down some from around 2015 to now, but if hosting servers still is the idea idk. A lot of the communities were pretty mismanaged and I say that having been one of the most connected people during the stage where we were trying to exist in the little ecosystem NA based communities had. There will be always be new communities and certainly are if you look. Then there's the few that you recognize. The meta itself changes such as Minigames being something with dying interest, which is sad IMO but it was always kind of niche. Then there are more movement servers and so on which have risen in popularity. There isn't any tangible evidence ever given for this argument despite it being wrongly stated over & over again.

 

CS:GO doesn't lack for interest or potential. I clicked through the meeting and heard someone say that you aren't going to get old SG players to play CS:GO. Old SG players, people who liked CS:GO get rank, completely discontinued playing the game less & less from CA up the rank (even some when they managed a CS:GO server) but never used their power to bring about any viable alternative community server option that was successful (some despite promising they would). When it was just a few people doing it, it was chill but eventually JB, TTT, ZE all died from mismanagement not from a lack of interest. The interest in these servers has barely changed albeit maybe TTT which was sorta niche to begin with.

 

All of this to say, SG feels like it spiritually left CS:GO a long time ago. It would be better for SG to try something else if that's what the majority here wants but I don't think the argument that the game is dying is very objective or honest whatsoever. I also think that something that is being overlooked is that CS:GO usually had something in it for everyone, and that just as you aren't going to get old SG players to come play a game that had all kinds of flavors because they don't dig the overall game anymore I don't really think you'll have the greatest time getting them to play something entirely niche either. They're prolly gone albeit some Discord or Forum lurking. I also think that the servers at SG were a huge draw, and that the community is gonna need to chill itself out a lot if it's trying to expand from that because it can be incredibly toxic & unwelcoming for new people. Managing JB there were always a dozen little kids being bullied by someone for trying to exist and if they ever tried to defend themselves they'd manage to get themselves in trouble or bring about more flame. A lot just didn't get involved with TeamSpeak, the forums, and so on to save themselves the trouble. 

[BoM]

15 hours ago, All Ts said:

Le CSGO talk

You're missing a lot of factors here way unrelated to the community in terms of games that have come out drawing people away from CS:GO, especially on the non-competitive side. Hang around here and interact with the groups of active people and you'll see a lot of them just prefer spending their time "around" but playing other games.

15 hours ago, All Ts said:

 

I also think that the servers at SG were a huge draw, and that the community is gonna need to chill itself out a lot if it's trying to expand from that because it can be incredibly toxic & unwelcoming for new people. Managing JB there were always a dozen little kids being bullied by someone for trying to exist and if they ever tried to defend themselves they'd manage to get themselves in trouble or bring about more flame. A lot just didn't get involved with TeamSpeak, the forums, and so on to save themselves the trouble. 

This is actually very insightful, sort of had an 'aha moment' when reading this. Correlating the root of the toxicity to the culture created by the servers is quite something and I see this as something we can build an actionable solution from.

[LargeAll]

On 6/19/2022 at 8:33 PM, All Ts said:

JB, TTT, ZE all died from mismanagement not from a lack of interest

I feel like I'm constantly repeating myself over and over again but, NA community servers are dead. Mismanagement is not the core reason for TTT to die and I can fucking assure you it is definitely not the reason ZE is dead. What you fail to realise that the people playing CS GO community servers at the moment are not NA players and are mostly asian/eastern-european. Don't believe me? Just check gametracker and look.

We're the 2nd most active CS GO NA TTT server in the world! Why? Because NA is dead.

 

We're also the 2nd most active CS GO NA ZE server in the world. Why that too? Because NA is dead, and this is where I find the "mismanaged" logic wrong. Were you even there when the SG-Cascade split happened? Were you even there during the last days of ZE? Why do people so confidently come in with the answer on why ZE is dead, "mismanagement" when they weren't participating in or even witnessing the death of ZE. What did Paralyzed, Leon, or Manic do to kill ZE? What did they mismanage? Because they did everything they could to revive ZE and it failed not because they were doing anything wrong but because they couldn't do anything in the first place. ALL NA ZE SERVERS tried and failed, Cascade, SCA, sG, S-G, and finally us, SG, but we're different because we're "mismanaged"?

 

NA is dead and saying otherwise is just delusional, and stop saying ZE is mismanaged when it clearly wasn't. I know I'm getting a harp on something that may seem so little but if people keep name dropping ZE to prove their point at least get something right instead of continuing your anti-management wank.

[All Ts]

2 hours ago, LargeAll said:

I feel like I'm constantly repeating myself over and over again but, NA community servers are dead. Mismanagement is not the core reason for TTT to die and I can fucking assure you it is definitely not the reason ZE is dead. What you fail to realise that the people playing CS GO community servers at the moment are not NA players and are mostly asian/eastern-european. Don't believe me? Just check gametracker and look.

We're the 2nd most active CS GO NA TTT server in the world! Why? Because NA is dead.

 

We're also the 2nd most active CS GO NA ZE server in the world. Why that too? Because NA is dead, and this is where I find the "mismanaged" logic wrong. Were you even there when the SG-Cascade split happened? Were you even there during the last days of ZE? Why do people so confidently come in with the answer on why ZE is dead, "mismanagement" when they weren't participating in or even witnessing the death of ZE. What did Paralyzed, Leon, or Manic do to kill ZE? What did they mismanage? Because they did everything they could to revive ZE and it failed not because they were doing anything wrong but because they couldn't do anything in the first place. ALL NA ZE SERVERS tried and failed, Cascade, SCA, sG, S-G, and finally us, SG, but we're different because we're "mismanaged"?

 

NA is dead and saying otherwise is just delusional, and stop saying ZE is mismanaged when it clearly wasn't. I know I'm getting a harp on something that may seem so little but if people keep name dropping ZE to prove their point at least get something right instead of continuing your anti-management wank.

Haha what? 

 

These are very cherrypicked points and you're completely taking what I said out of the context skipping completely past things I explained in my post. Secondly, super over aggressive and accusatory for what? No one is impressed, calm down bro. I'm not going to get into an argument with you about these things at risk of completely derailing this thread but there was definitely points where people above AT+ did NOT act in the best interest of the overall ZE community here at SG & I believe it failed where it otherwise could have succeeded. If this is some kind of foreign idea to you that is in no way humanly possible idk what to tell you dude. People aren't infallible and most creative ventures fail. 

 

If you want to cope about it & rage by saying I'm anti-management that's good for you dog, I don't care- It is what it is.  I've been accused of much worse. It's an unpaid role most often filled by people until 25, you can't expect to get the all-star squad year after year that keeps shit rolling perfectly for a fucking decade. In terms of how long communities have lasted, SG's been around pretty damn long & has outlived many others. At times some of the staff did a kickass job & others did not for all of the common human reasons that any other thing earthly creation would fail. I have given a ton of praise to good iterations of managers & been by there side to support them and this community by putting hundreds if not prolly thousands of hours to help literally do the work myself. I also encouraged us to try to venture from but not abandon CS:GO to diversify in the event that things got rocky. Supported and played on more than many ventures like Garry's Mod and Rust who's community server numbers have been pretty sound & are still pretty good. I have more than enough experience to make these judgements, and if you disagree that's fine but I have reasons & credibility behind what I'm saying. I am literally one of the people who used to harp on the idea that even if a server has failed on other games that it's better to be objective about why it failed than to just say "haha unlucky" and move on forever. There was always past managers coming out of the woodwork with 1800-excuses getting all worked up and offended about it too, it was insane.

 

I will say these things now, and keep it short and this is NOT TO THROW SHADE AT THE MANAGERS OR HIGHER-UPS but because you're making it out like I am just saying something with no evidence or benefit of hindsight. TTT I expressed concerns over it being on a downturn and things that should change & none of those things were done up until recently where the server sits pretty much dead. JB has had almost no major changes to it in a long time, events have been the same rotation since 2018 where the management team I was on left it & the major systems we added around the same time are also pretty much exactly the same. The drama IMO that put the nail in the coffin for ZE at the end could have been handled more mature from everyone involved. There are hella more reasons how these 3 got the way they are, but this is the best way I can sum it up. If you wanna get in deep with me about I'm more than willing to discuss it off of this thread (Junkie#9287).

 

I will earmark this post by also pointing out that the servers you're mentioning (TTT, ZE) were pretty niche to begin with and existed under a pretty few number of servers that were NA based. CS:GO had a shifting popularity & has had a growing popularity of other servers for awhile. Despite that, the main servers that competed alongside us in these 3 categories such as eGo or GFL are still very much alive, holding the highest ranks in CS:GO. It's a bit hard to believe that SG couldn't find some 128 people to fill 3 servers & that the fault lays entirely on NA CS:GO lol. SG could be where eGo is right now, it's not a crazy idea or argument for me to make. There exists a timeline where that reasonably happened. Are there servers that existed alongside us- that sold admin, had shoddy ownership or who's servers were nearly not objectively fun that died? Yeah. I used to go on the other Jailbreak servers and wonder how in the flying fuck they had any players when you get gunned down 5 seconds after cells open & sit afk for 10 minutes waiting for the round to end. I used to wonder the same about the micspam on SG's JB & when we had control of the server we worked to fix that. None of this is any surprise in my opinion- It's harder to run ZE, TTT, JB than to throw a Bhop or Surf server together & call it a day. This isn't some new fangled idea that the preference and populace of the game had shifted alongside that. You could go back & find threads or one-off pushes to these other servers based on this idea that actually showed promise & probably could of succeeded in a broader scope... other times the servers failed based on human error. Again, sometimes things get in the way even if someone has the best intentions and things don't workout.

 

You're hard pressed on one sentence I wrote and ignored the rest of my post where I added much greater context to the situation, that much is obvious to me. 

 

Quote

All of this to say, SG feels like it spiritually left CS:GO a long time ago. It would be better for SG to try something else if that's what the majority here wants but I don't think the argument that the game is dying is very objective or honest whatsoever. I also think that something that is being overlooked is that CS:GO usually had something in it for everyone, and that just as you aren't going to get old SG players to come play a game that had all kinds of flavors because they don't dig the overall game anymore I don't really think you'll have the greatest time getting them to play something entirely niche either. They're prolly gone albeit some Discord or Forum lurking. I also think that the servers at SG were a huge draw, and that the community is gonna need to chill itself out a lot if it's trying to expand from that because it can be incredibly toxic & unwelcoming for new people. Managing JB there were always a dozen little kids being bullied by someone for trying to exist and if they ever tried to defend themselves they'd manage to get themselves in trouble or bring about more flame. A lot just didn't get involved with TeamSpeak, the forums, and so on to save themselves the trouble. 

Explained my feelings about the current situation & a pretty constructive way to move on. The reason for moving on in my opinion though, should be out of the overall interest at the community. Making this move on the false pretense that SG can't get any of the servers on NA CS:GO working or shift servers with the meta of the game & not acknowledge how the community got here could set it up for failure in the future. Wherever it goes I hope there's passion in that area, because I have yet to really see people who were super passionate about a project produce something fun at this community & have it just sit at bottom of the barrel in terms of players.

 

I log in like once a month or few months. Don't bother responding to me with anymore soap box bullshit if you're expecting a response, find sm1 else to do that shit with cause on god I know you wouldn't approach someone privately & act like this. It has to be fosho or to blow off steam. 

 

 

 

 

[jazzy]

>Consolidate to 1 dedi

 

Not to jump in here off an 8 year perm with little to no understanding of the last 3 years except word of mouth from random members on VC but why don't you guys just drop the dedi's and use high quality VPS providers line Linode, Lightsail, or even OVH (looks like your dedis are on OVH today anyway)? One VPS for one instance, delete the ones that die, create new ones to try new things. 

I mean shit you could even look at cloud-provider burstable instances so you accrue CPU credits for the downtime for use on burst levels later. I'd be curious to see what monitoring tools you're using and seeing how each of your ds instances are doing perf wise on idle & on max possible activity, bandwidth requirements, etc. Create an environment in the cloud where you scale up/scale down based on events. Automate server creation (guessing you guys already have scripts or use public/open source ones for spinning up dedi instances of various gameservers). Honestly I think I had said this 10+ years ago but SG should've just outright bought hardware and colo'd it somewhere and stuck with it. But now that seems like a foregone conclusion to do your own HW because cloud providers are undercutting eachother on the daily and it is way more economical to go that route.

 

TTT -

I feel like the csgo version is not great (2hrs played) and the gmod version is OK but there's a lot more gmod TTT servers and that's more competition. TBH I feel like it would be cool to just try and be the first ones on s&ndbox's implementation and ride that wave. I'm definitely going to play s&ndbox TTT when it drops. CSGO TTT seems REALLY foreign to me coming from gmod's version.

 

Discord -

I hope you guys continue to grow this. My feeling from participating in other communities that are as old as SG is this:
SG has history and has a lot of people coming back, they pop into the discord and they chill. They play games with fellow old/new members and create new cliches/groups/times. They invite their friends and a community is built that is somewhat "decentralized." I really think communities like SG should emphasize how great discord is and really function within that scope. It feels like the younger gen doesn't like forums as much. Player servers are on the downturn and that's really just how it is, it's not an SG specific thing. There are many games that require communities and those can still be drivers for SG to keep memberships up but honestly I think across the board just pulling back "permanent" server presence and riding with the wave that is flavor of the month gaming is probably safer

I think discord is great here but you guys could clean up some channels a little bit. I think there is too much usage of categories so it makes the UI looks cluttered for new users, presentation is really important and when you have 5-6 dead channels it looks really awkward when you can consolidate them down.

My 2c is for the text channels:

-----normal shit------
#general

#random

#politics/news

#oc (covers food, art, yada yada)

#aww (cute things, animals)

-----games-------

#games

#specific-game-that-is-popular-1

#specific-game-that-is-popular-2

#specific-game-that-is-popular-3

#specific-game-that-is-popular-4

 

Really just what I want to push is scrolling thru this all the time to see who's in VC's below isn't great (also because they're off center)

 

edit: also fully aware I deserve shit for coming back for less than 1 month and saying a bunch of stuff about do X Y. I'm not trying to ride anyone's dick I just wanted to give my experiences in the last few years still being terminally online and how that is maybe relevant to you guys. I really don't want to come in here and sound like I know best. I just want to give my perspective and I hope you guys won't totally roll me over the coals for that. Thanks!

 

[Black Rain]

On 6/18/2022 at 7:08 PM, TheZZL said:

New Admin Application System

• Switching to server specific admins to encourage players to apply from servers outside the big ones or from our Movement servers

Gonna scratch this plan and stick to what we currently have. It didn't really seem to resonate with people and it's not going to make a difference for the time-being.