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View Full Version : How do we convince YOU to play the server again?



Bdcoll
18 Mar 2015, 02:13pm
Oh god. Its Bdcoll again, causing havoc and asking questions.

So, looking around at SG recently, and it seems were sort of stuck in a rut. We've got ZE living again which is great, but MG is back to its dead/dying state, DarkRP is being DarkRP, Prison Break is still in its non-functional stage, and TTT is dead unless it randomly populates. All of this despite our efforts to get the servers going again, be it with the big MG relaunch, or Wickeds $100 giveaway.

Now I know a lot of people on the forums either dont play as much as they used to, or dont play at all anymore on the servers. Some of you have good reasons (Work, School etc.), but I just wanted to ask what it was thats keeping others from playing again? Is it a lack of new maps, lack of features on the servers, lack of events etc?

We do have the store coming back (Eventually) and the raffle system as well (Eventually), but other than that, is their anything else that would tempt you back to playing?

Prez
18 Mar 2015, 02:15pm
A bunch of us CAs (Bd included!) are going to be planning some events for minigames and the other servers for the coming weeks. If you have special ideas for server-specific events we'd love to hear em :D


EDIT: If you have suggestions, send 'em to me, @Vick (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=13376), @Bdcoll (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=13829), @Gunner412 (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=938), @Nuclear Onion (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=14524), and the other CAs!

Elemental
18 Mar 2015, 02:31pm
A bunch of us CAs (Bd included!) are going to be planning some events for minigames and the other servers for the coming weeks. If you have special ideas for server-specific events we'd love to hear em :D


EDIT: If you have suggestions, send 'em to me, @Vick (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=13376), @Bdcoll (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=13829), @Gunner412 (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=938), @Nuclear Onion (http://www.steamgamers.com/forum/member.php?u=14524), and the other CAs!

Epic zombie/monster invasion event in DarkRP =D

Zaraki
18 Mar 2015, 02:48pm
For me, it's time related.
I prefer playing on my console (PS4,PS3,WiiU) because I always have somebody to play online/offline with :)

Nothing that can be done actually, not that anybody would care xd


My one point is: We're all divided in small groups, now more than ever.

Prez
18 Mar 2015, 02:51pm
For me, it's time related.
I prefer playing on my console (PS4,PS3,WiiU) because I always have somebody to play online/offline with :)

Nothing that can be done actually, not that anybody would care xd


My one point is: We're all divided in small groups, now more than ever.


Alright, well we obviously can't help with the first point if you'd rather play those games, your call :P. How do you suggest we fix the issue you see with small groups?

BoM
18 Mar 2015, 02:58pm
My one point is: We're all divided in small groups, now more than ever.

I don't think thats accurate, if anything its the complete opposite. I see a lot more unity and combining of groups lately. Especially with functioning/popular servers I see a lot more interaction and connections being made.

with you being around so little maybe you just haven't seen that yet...

Itch
18 Mar 2015, 03:25pm
This seems to be a cyclical problem. One server gets the focus (or a majority of it) people have fun and the server rises to the top, unfortunate side effect is that other servers start to decline or die.

ZE seems to be going extremely well at the moment and I have played more on that server in the last few months than I had on all SG servers combined in the past year. That being said personally I go through phases where I prefer to play one game or mod over another. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy MG, just not playing on it much now because I am enjoying ZE.

What needs to happen is that we need to pick one and only one additional server (other than the working server: in this case ZE) to promote and run events, raffles, etc. on.

Example: ZE is going well, so keep promoting it, and try not to peel it's player base off.
Pick 1 additional server: I'd recommend MG. Promote MG, events, invite friends, etc.
Watch ZE closely to make sure you're not pulling the regs off of ZE to bring MG up.

I used to jump into the less populated servers and push building player base, until it had a decent amount of players then jump back to the already popular server that I was enjoying and wanted to play on at the time. There's nothing wrong with that, it just becomes a fine line between promoting the new (or less popular) server, and trying not to reduce the popularity of the other server at the same time.

If you try to resurrect more than one server, you'll fail. If you spread your efforts across MG, PB, TTT, Etc. One and only one might succeed, but you'll probably see significant decline in ZE and all but the one succeeding server.

Paralyzed
18 Mar 2015, 03:53pm
As for TTT; I have no clue. Seeing the lack of responses my thread has received... I take it as people have either lost their interest or simply don't care what's going to happen to it. That's just an assumption though, don't pin me down on that one. I also would like to know what possibly needs to change to bring back people's interest in the servers we currently have.

ZE is fully functional and has it's own player base now. In the past when we promoted new servers (Itch mentioned something like this as well in the above post) it dragged most of the players away from the server they were in to help fill up the other that everyone else is doing also, causing some instability (population wise) to the other servers. For example, the multi-gamemodes server; was great fun and all but it dragged away most of the TTT player base and that's exactly when the majority of the people (not everyone) stopped playing there and hasn't grown much in population again ever since.

While it's a great thing having 20 of our community members fill up one server in the hope more people will join, it'd be even better if these 20 were spread out over the rest of the servers and not primarily focus on one server only, because it usually creates a chain reaction whereas your friends will start joining you as well and in the end all of the other servers (aside from ZE, as it has it's own player base) will be emptied out except for the one that everyone is trying to populate at the time. Of course, it's not going to populate by itself so we do need some help from our community members in order to fill it up, but we shouldn't just tunnel vision on the population of one server only as it will have an impact on the rest of the servers as well, as you can tell.

BoM
18 Mar 2015, 04:01pm
This seems to be a cyclical problem. One server gets the focus (or a majority of it) people have fun and the server rises to the top, unfortunate side effect is that other servers start to decline or die.

ZE seems to be going extremely well at the moment and I have played more on that server in the last few months than I had on all SG servers combined in the past year. That being said personally I go through phases where I prefer to play one game or mod over another. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy MG, just not playing on it much now because I am enjoying ZE.

What needs to happen is that we need to pick one and only one additional server (other than the working server: in this case ZE) to promote and run events, raffles, etc. on.

Example: ZE is going well, so keep promoting it, and try not to peel it's player base off.
Pick 1 additional server: I'd recommend MG. Promote MG, events, invite friends, etc.
Watch ZE closely to make sure you're not pulling the regs off of ZE to bring MG up.

I used to jump into the less populated servers and push building player base, until it had a decent amount of players then jump back to the already popular server that I was enjoying and wanted to play on at the time. There's nothing wrong with that, it just becomes a fine line between promoting the new (or less popular) server, and trying not to reduce the popularity of the other server at the same time.

If you try to resurrect more than one server, you'll fail. If you spread your efforts across MG, PB, TTT, Etc. One and only one might succeed, but you'll probably see significant decline in ZE and all but the one succeeding server.

Its not resurrecting, its just populating. I'd like to point out a few things. We can split our staff and focus on multiple servers without splitting populations. Most of the servers have separate populations. A majority of ZE people are randoms, which is great, but also means there are a lot of SG people left to populate other servers. Your theory only applies if we all suddenly only decide to focus on one server that isn't populated at all. Even if we did do that [which won't happen], ZE wouldn't show a steady decline, because as I said it maintains its own population of randoms. Let me explain:

Yesterday we had almost all over servers populated with people at some point, not a lot, but 10+ in each server, which is progress.

Prior to TTT being down a lot, it maintained a strong and steady population that did not conflict with ZE or other pops.

DarkRP is at least 15+ a day after school [lots of kids], and is full every day during prime time hours.

PB for only being up a few days [and still some tweaking to do] had 16 people yesterday without any events or "stealing" from ZE. That's really good if you know anything about the beginning of a server.

ZE does damn well on its own, we all know that.

That leaves MG, which is being worked on population wise, and won't suddenly kill all our other servers / population by being populated itself.

I'm not sure were people are getting this false sense of idk our servers failing? We just transitioned to CS:GO on a lot of these servers, some more recently than others. I can tell you however, that population wise and progress wise we are on the upward swing, not down. This thread seems unneeded to me, but I guess its one way to go about things...

BDs/AOs/TAs/CAs and even a lot of SAs are dedicating themselves to different servers to try and make them all better, and just like we can afford the manpower to split our team up like this, SG has a maintained population to fill these 5 servers.

The only thing that has killed most of these servers is them being down/redone or crashing. All of these things are either fixed, being fixed, or being looked into.

Best bet at helping SG and helping the servers? Go play in them.

ExRev
18 Mar 2015, 04:43pm
Bdcoll - Pay me money.

Honestly I know the biggest thing for me is having just bought a new console I've been way more absorbed into that than anything else when I get the chance at night to play.

Dirk
18 Mar 2015, 06:14pm
Thing is we used to have a lot of people who only played one server. It seems like the remaining SG regulars are people who came in on one server or another and are sticking around SG in general. The trouble is we need more people who like to play on a single server again, preferably new people, so they don't jump ship for another server just because more people they know are elsewhere. As it is, people seem reluctant to join something like TTT when the majority of the forum regs are in ZE. If that keeps going on this will keep being a problem.

BoM
18 Mar 2015, 06:19pm
Thing is we used to have a lot of people who only played one server. It seems like the remaining SG regulars are people who came in on one server or another and are sticking around SG in general. The trouble is we need more people who like to play on a single server again, preferably new people, so they don't jump ship for another server just because more people they know are elsewhere. As it is, people seem reluctant to join something like TTT when the majority of the forum regs are in ZE. If that keeps going on this will keep being a problem.

well obviously when the servers are down or being redone people are less inclined to be as active in SG. Most of the forum regs are in ZE because ZE is our biggest server, but that doesn't mean there aren't SG regs who are waiting to be more active when other servers get more popular. I saw it yesterday with PB, invited people who haven't played PB since ~2013 CSS PB days, and lone behold they joined the server.

Edit: Fuck this whole thread, bitches don't know bout SG

http://puu.sh/gG8mS/be4ef6b27a.png

SilentGuns
18 Mar 2015, 06:39pm
After 7 years on SG servers, I have to say that I am bored of it all (well, almost). No amount of new maps can make me play any more ZE.

DarkRP does still have something to offer but outside of that I have nothing to do that will entertain me. It is a server where you can pretend to be a homeless anal predator who uses his custom built truck to kidnap people and the next day you can be a NKVD officer who takes hobos to his cellar to un-alive them. More servers that offer such freedom would be great.

Zaraki
18 Mar 2015, 06:40pm
I don't think thats accurate, if anything its the complete opposite. I see a lot more unity and combining of groups lately. Especially with functioning/popular servers I see a lot more interaction and connections being made.

with you being around so little maybe you just haven't seen that yet...

I'm actually thinking you're right.
I don't know what's going on these days :/

Our main group of players from 5 years ago was around 16-21 years old, with exceptions ofcourse.
We are getting old people :')

vorter
18 Mar 2015, 06:45pm
For one, I would push advertising our other servers on ZE more. ZE brings in a lot of randoms that see our ZE server on gametracker or whatever who might not have a "home" server/community.

Then I'd also push becoming an SG Mem on all servers and especially ZE because we could basically reel them in to keep playing on our servers and also get more traffic on the forums (all I see is green and blue 90% of the time) and less lurkers. Plus every player that wears the SG Mem/Reg tag would basically be advertising whatever match/server they go on.

I thought about giving Mems/Regs an incentive in game (a skin or chat command idk) but I realized it'd be a pain to have to add all those new guys to sourcebans/plugins. Processing all those Mem/Reg applications would probably make me wan't to kill myself too.
So it has it's benefits and negatives. We get more server traffic through "advertising" our servers and Reg/Mem, plus forum traffic which has its own +/- too.

The applications/setting Mems/Regs up would be a strain on the slaves CAs/AOs/BDs, but at least the SAs can reap more kills get some more action and experience especially considering that many of the to-be-revived/renovated servers (Jailbreak, TTT, RP, etc) require more admin supervision than ZE.

ExRev
18 Mar 2015, 06:49pm
Give me PB or give me PB. Death seemed like too easy of a choice for some of you, couldn't risk that shit.

vorter
18 Mar 2015, 07:05pm
Give me PB or give me PB. Death seemed like too easy of a choice for some of you, couldn't risk that shit.

Yeah no forreal PB was always full (might have been able to raise the 24 player cap). That was the server I played 80% of the time back then.
I like the progress so far and would probably be on it 80% of the time were it to become polished and decently populated. PB needs more admin supervision than say ZE because of instead of bans being 99% mic spam and racism, you got people not only spamming/whatever, but you have freekillers/CTswhobreaktheir500rules/do T's even have rules? Luckily me and many SAs and staff I know love PB so there should be an admin on the server most of the time which was true on JB a few years back with some admins playing for many hours on end (Scoutkllr/Korean/Eskhomo/Korean/Exrev/Moo/SG/Deafy/etc).

BlackWhite
18 Mar 2015, 10:11pm
i just need people in jb and ttt then i am happy =D

Wawa
19 Mar 2015, 12:02am
I still think a deathmatch server is a great idea, despite my understanding of why the higher-ups would be hesitant to start up a new server before the current ones are all equally as popular as ZE.

The beauty of deathmatch is that it DOES NOT need to be populated with x amount of people for it to be fun, which is the case for almost every server we have. 10 bots would be enough to get me to join and stay active on the server alone, and as more people join, bots would dwindle until there is at least 10 players connected. It is one of those servers that will take time to get popular, but it won't nearly be the struggle that MG is currently experiencing because a) see point above about not having x amount of people to be fun and b) there is a greater relevance and appeal in DM to the huge, overall CS:GO competitive/casual scene, and c) players like to use/show off their weapon skins in casual play (sounds ridiculous, but it's true).

Maybe I'm preaching to nobody, but maybe I'm not. All I know is that I'm pretty burnt out on ZE/MG right now, and casual/competitive play has never in my 13 years of playing Counter-Strike gotten boring, and probably never will. Any new server that aligns with casual/competitive play will get my full support and play time.

Zaraki
19 Mar 2015, 04:16am
Exrev made a deal with the Devil here.
If he's not online on PB for atleast 15 hours a week, he'll be demoted. If he can play for 15 hours a week for 5 weeks in a row, he will get a 1-year subscribtion to Pornhub Premium.

That's taking care of things.


BOOM!

Elemental
19 Mar 2015, 05:53am
Exrev made a deal with the Devil here.
If he's not online on PB for atleast 15 hours a week, he'll be demoted. If he can play for 15 hours a week for 5 weeks in a row, he will get a 1-year subscribtion to Pornhub Premium.

That's taking care of things.


BOOM!

Demoted from RS?
GG

Itch
19 Mar 2015, 10:02am
Its not resurrecting, its just populating. I'd like to point out a few things. We can split our staff and focus on multiple servers without splitting populations. Most of the servers have separate populations. A majority of ZE people are randoms, which is great, but also means there are a lot of SG people left to populate other servers. Your theory only applies if we all suddenly only decide to focus on one server that isn't populated at all. Even if we did do that [which won't happen], ZE wouldn't show a steady decline, because as I said it maintains its own population of randoms. Let me explain:

Yesterday we had almost all over servers populated with people at some point, not a lot, but 10+ in each server, which is progress.

Prior to TTT being down a lot, it maintained a strong and steady population that did not conflict with ZE or other pops.

DarkRP is at least 15+ a day after school [lots of kids], and is full every day during prime time hours.

PB for only being up a few days [and still some tweaking to do] had 16 people yesterday without any events or "stealing" from ZE. That's really good if you know anything about the beginning of a server.

ZE does damn well on its own, we all know that.

I'm not arguing that ZE does well on it's own. And I'm also not saying we can't afford the manpower for other servers. What I am saying is that historically when SG pushes hard to populate one server other servers suffer. If that isn't currently the case that's GRRREAT!

I can't/won't speak about TTT, because I've yet to join and not have my eardrums broken so I stay away from TTT.


That leaves MG, which is being worked on population wise, and won't suddenly kill all our other servers / population by being populated itself.

I'm not sure were people are getting this false sense of idk our servers failing? We just transitioned to CS:GO on a lot of these servers, some more recently than others. I can tell you however, that population wise and progress wise we are on the upward swing, not down. This thread seems unneeded to me, but I guess its one way to go about things...

BDs/AOs/TAs/CAs and even a lot of SAs are dedicating themselves to different servers to try and make them all better, and just like we can afford the manpower to split our team up like this, SG has a maintained population to fill these 5 servers.

The only thing that has killed most of these servers is them being down/redone or crashing. All of these things are either fixed, being fixed, or being looked into.

Best bet at helping SG and helping the servers? Go play in them.

I'll be honest I haven't looked closely at the population of the other servers... On the occasions I have glanced at MG it's been pretty low. That being said maybe I read more into this thread than I should have. I know the only servers I play on are SG servers (other than the rare GG server, and only because we don't have one)

Every day I go to www.top100clans.com and vote from at least 5 unique computers with unique IP's, sometimes up to a dozen computers. We are sitting at 12th place and over 100 of the votes for SG came from me. If 1/2 of our active members voted once a week we'd be in the top 5.

If there is any way other than what I am already doing to promote SG I will.

Zaraki
19 Mar 2015, 10:33am
Demoted from RS?
GG

SG N00b

Game Freak
19 Mar 2015, 12:16pm
Let's see, i had a group of friends. They all got banned. Found another group of friends, some also got banned. Yeah i'm not trying again.

Jazz
19 Mar 2015, 03:08pm
How do we get people to play, or come back to play? Think about what made you stay here. I strongly suggest you guys to read this aswell:

When in-game try to use your mic to communicate, about anything. Tactics about how to win the map/game usually makes newer players understand the task at hand. It's always fun when you know what you're doing in-game. That is what made me stay, back in '08 with Z3r0 M4ni4c and the guys, they really did a good job at welcoming and showing people how to play the game mod. Also how cool some people were, the friendship and skills they had amazed me and I knew that the server was unique. I strived to become one of them, one of the leaders of the server. I'm not going to lie but some of those guys back then made the gameplay (ZE) feel like it was real life. How? Well everyone was scared as shit by zombies and the tactics they had were off the books, every round they really wanted as many people as possible to survive. Not to mention GrimExistence's alpha voice made everyone obey him lol.

Of course the cooler guys had their [SG] or SG.Reg tags on back then, and the server had an automized advertisement to join the forums, so I knew if I wanted to become one of them, I had to join. I remember though I got banned back then for wearing the wrong tag, I wore the admin tag^^ but hey, I was 13 back then! Got quickly unbanned buy the one and only LitKey who understood the situation, and he taught me all about the community and I really felt welcomed at that point. After all this I was like damn, this is good shit.

Moreover, how about having member of the month award? It will definitely make members want to strive for something. I.e. a reg wins member of the month because he was very active/friendly etc. Also top 20 players of server x this month/year.

BlackWhite
19 Mar 2015, 03:39pm
Moreover, how about having member of the month award? It will definitely make members want to strive for something. I.e. a reg wins member of the month because he was very active/friendly etc. Also top 20 players of server x this month/year.

i second this

Punky
19 Mar 2015, 04:01pm
Advertise on our servers to apply for member to wear a cool tag #<<SG.Mem>> never forget. (gives some advertisement on other servers beyond SG)



Moreover, how about having member of the month award? It will definitely make members want to strive for something. I.e. a reg wins member of the month because he was very active/friendly etc. Also top 20 players of server x this month/year.

Totally agree.

phantom153
19 Mar 2015, 09:44pm
give an incentive for signing up on forum. I've played alot on an MG server on gmod and one of the things ive noticed is that the new player base will join and just get killed by the regulars that have the map memorized and not want to stay. nothing that can really be done about this jsut an observation.