[3-12-17] Major Update - Heading In The Right Direction

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hello, this is a major update for GFL. For the past two months, I’ve had no motivation to work on GFL. Recently, I’ve regained motivation to work on GFL again and I’m ready to talk about what I think we need to work on. Let’s begin!

 

Outside Advertising and Recruiting
The first topic I want to talk about is advertising and recruiting outside of GFL’s territory. As it currently stands, we are only advertising and recruiting within GFL’s territory such as our game servers and forums. While we should be advertising and recruiting in GFL’s territory, we also need to do a lot of it outside of GFL. Our player and community base is shrinking in size resulting in the process of advertising and recruiting inside of GFL becoming rather useless.

 

How Can We Advertise Outside of GFL?
First, I believe we should write up a short message explaining what GFL is and why people should join our community. In this message, we should make it clear we are always looking for people to help make the community grow. It would simply be a short message that will attract people into the community.

 

Second, we should find places where we can advertise this message without giving us a bad name. This will be simply getting our name out there. We should also be using our social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Steam to advertise GFL.

 

How Can We Recruit Outside of GFL?
I believe the best way to recruit outside of GFL is to spread the name to your friends and such. Perhaps we should have awards (e.g. badges) for players who recruit users into the community. Another idea (suggested by @CrusTi) would to have users who create an account using a referral link get VIP for one week along with the owner of the referral link. The maximum referrals for VIP would be three.

 

TeamSpeak 3 and the Website
I believe we should advertise our TeamSpeak 3 server outside of GFL a lot more. As of right now, a majority of the users who go to our TS3 server are from our game servers. Since our game servers have been dying, our TS3 population has been slowly declining. While I do believe we should advertise and encourage people to go on our TS3 server more in our game servers, we should also be trying to grab people from outside of GFL. Once these users discover our TS3 server, they may see we have game servers along with a website and go visit them. 
 
In the same vein, I believe we should do the same thing with our website. For instance, we could try expanding our general gaming discussion with specific game categories (instead of only having games we have divisions in). Basically, we should try to recruit users to our website outside of GFL.

 

Back End Help and Progress
Recently, I’ve been backed up on work with the back end of GFL. There are many projects I’ve been wanting to work on but due to not having enough time and personal issues, I haven’t been able to complete them. Ever since the series of negative events back in April of 2016, I’ve had a very hard time trusting anybody with access to the back end of GFL. As of writing this post, only Amp and I have access to the back end. However, Amp is very busy and doesn’t have much time to work on the back end.

 

With the amount of projects to work on and the fact that I will be getting busier with work, I will need help to get these things done. I am hoping I can find somebody in GFL who has the time, dedication, and experience to help complete these projects. With that said, they will obviously need to be trusted enough to be given access.

 

If I cannot find somebody inside of GFL to help with the back end, it may be worth hiring somebody to complete a couple of projects for us. However, I personally am not a fan of hiring developers to finish and complete our work.

 

Let’s talk about the progress with a couple of our current major projects.

 

[Linux] Game Server Back End For OVH Expansion
This project has been the highest priority in GFL. For a while now, we’ve been wanting to expand using OVH servers instead of NFO. The reasoning behind this has been stated multiple times in other update threads and here.

 

We had a developer working on this for a few months now, although they unfortunately did not have the time to complete it recently. This project is now stuck without a developer. We are deciding whether we should complete this project or find another solution. I believe if we were to successfully complete this project, we would benefit from it. Of course, it will take a lot of time and dedication to complete this project.

 

Geolocation on OVH IPs
This is another project we need complete if we are going to move to OVH. @Ariistuujj and I have been working on contacting the geolocation companies (such as MaxMind) to get our new OVH IPs located in Germany. However, their support is unfortunately frustrating to deal with.

 

@Ariistuujj and I will continue to try to find a solution to this problem. Hopefully it doesn’t take much longer.

 

Overall
There are many other projects that need to be done with the back end including website upgrades and more. I’m going to be focusing on finding help so that these projects can be completed quicker and without stressing myself out.

 

Division Updates
I would just like to give my personal opinions and updates on a few of our divisions.

 

Counter-Strike: Source
As of right now, I believe we have a very dedicated team to our CS:S servers. Our DLs seem highly motivated to expand into CS:S and bring even more population to our servers. While I do really like and appreciate the motivation I see, we have to remember that CS:S is sadly dying.
 
The game reaches around 10K players as a peak. Back when we started heavily expanding into CS:S (early 2012), the game had many more players. It was therefore much easier to populate the servers; there aren’t as many players nowadays and it will be extremely difficult to expand into CS:S.

 

I believe we should continue to focus on our current servers (Surf and Bunny Hop) along with adding one or two new servers to see how they go. If expanding into CS:S doesn’t work out, it is nobody’s fault. The game is nearly dead and most gaming communities would also likely fail if they tried expanding into the game.

 

To conclude, keep up the great work and hopefully it pays off, but don’t feel stressed if the expansion fails since like I said before, it’s very difficult to expand into CS:S.

 

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Our CS:GO division has been stable. However, I do believe we need to push forward and start expanding and fixing a few of our current servers.

 

Surf Timer
The first set of servers we need to revamp are our Surf Timer servers. We’ve been wanting to revamp these servers for quite some time now but due to my busy schedule, I haven’t had the time to work on the revamp and I’m not sure if I would like to be included in the revamp anymore. I believe the revamp on Surf Timer should be the highest priority in the CS:GO division when it comes to fixing servers.

 

Bunny Hop
Although we revamped our Bunny Hop servers a while ago with a new timer, the server population did not increase. I believe we need to take further steps to bring in more population. 

 

FFA DeathMatch
Initially, I did not expect FFA DM to work out due to it being very similar to Valve’s DM servers. However, the server is doing quite well. 

It fills up to around 20 - 30 players daily and I hope it keeps up. I believe there should be admins on the server trying to recruit players to our TS3 server and website (to apply for Membership). With that said, I would recommend trying an European FFA DM server in the future once we setup our OVH machine.

 

Overall, as said before, the division is stable, but we need to start expanding and fixing up servers that are suffering.

 

Garry’s Mod
As of right now, I believe our GMod division has the most potential out of all the other divisions we are in. However, I believe there are problems that have gone on for far too long without being fixed.

 

Purge
Our Purge server used to be our most populated server in GMod. We used to reach 95/95 daily back in late-2014 and 2015. This server reached #4 on GameTracker but now look at it:

 
While I’m sure there are many theories on why the server is dying, I can say the one thing that needs to be fixed, which is the server’s drained performance. The server has been suffering from constant lag spikes for the past two years and nothing has been done about it. The prop spam protection addon made by myself was removed from the server because it was “malfunctioning”. The reason it was malfunctioning was due to the server lagging itself (the addon detects whether the server is lagging or not). Back when the server was launched (summer of 2014), while the addon wasn’t perfect, it was a great addition to the server and legitimately prevented most prop spammers from successfully lagging the server. 

 

It’s time to stop beating around the bush and start fixing the actual issues with the server. I took my time to go through and find addons that are most likely causing the lag spikes, but nothing has been done about them. It isn’t my job to fix the Purge server, the division leaders and server manager should be the ones fixing it. I’m willing to help but it cannot rely on me solely due to my busy schedule and other stuff I have to do for GFL along with the fact that it simply shouldn’t be my job.

 

Zombie Survival
While I haven’t done any investigations on Zombie Survival, I’ve heard that it is suffering from constant performance issues just like Purge. I would recommend installing FProfiler and find out which Lua scripts are taking the most resources. In my opinion, each GMod server should have this installed regardless of whether the server is lagging or not.

 

This division has a lot of potential, but much more work and dedication needs to be expended. It has been nearly two years and nothing has changed. A majority of the top GMod servers aren’t suffering from performance issues because they took it upon themselves and ensured they had great server performance. It’s time we take that same approach. Once we expand into OVH, machine hardware won’t be limiting our server performance; the very poorly coded addons will and still do to this day.

 

Arma 3
I believe our Arma 3 division is going to be the next big division in GFL with the amount of potential it has. The only thing we are waiting for is the OVH machine. Arma 3 has the potential to bring in many players to our TS3 server and website along with driving in donations. Unfortunately, we are playing the waiting game with the OVH machine due to us needing a working back end.

 

I will try to get the back end problem solved as soon as possible so we can start the setup on the Arma 3 server. I have no ETA on when this will happen.

 

Call of Duty 4
I’ve been playing Call of Duty 4 quite often recently and wanted to setup a CoD 4 server on our new OVH box for some time now. However, I haven’t had the motivation to do so until now. I am looking forward to setting up a new CoD 4 server on our OVH machine soon.

 

I’ve been playing on a server recently that I really like and I am going to try contacting the owner of the community to see if they would be interested in running their CoD 4 server under GFL (we give them server manager and such). Obviously, this would need to be discussed further with the Trusted group if it were to be considered.

 

Regardless, we will be trying a CoD 4 server on our new European OVH machine. It will most likely be a Hardcore “mixed” or TDM server. I will be the leader of the division and server once it’s started up.

 

Pirates, Vikings, & Knights II
While this division is very small, I just wanted to give a small update on it since I am currently the one managing it. Our PVKII server reached #1 on GameTracker under “Half Life 2 DeathMatch”. Despite that this isn’t a big accomplishment since there aren’t many popular servers under the HL2 DM game, it at least proves our PVKII server is getting some population.

 

I am currently playing on the server often and I am going to add a few regulars on the server through Steam to talk to them about ideas, along with trying to recruit them to GFL and such. Updates to the server can be found here.

 

Mini-Divisions
A few updates ago I explained why mini-divisions will be important to GFL in the future. As of right now, I haven’t seen any progress made with mini-divisions. Initially, we were aiming to try a mini-division in Overwatch, but unfortunately that never worked out. 

 

Mini-divisions are still important for GFL to expand into and now that we have a strong team of community advisors, I believe it’s time to start expanding. Mini-divisions also fall under “Advertising/Recruiting outside of GFL” since we will be trying to grab users outside of our game servers and such. I want these divisions to be a priority to GFL.

 

H1Z1
Since Overwatch failed, I believe H1Z1 is the next game on the list. Although, from what I’ve heard, H1Z1 suffers from the same issue as Overwatch where there isn’t any clan system. Personally, I do believe we can have a successful H1Z1 mini-division, but that would take a lot of work.

 

This mini-division will be discussed.

 

RuneScape
A RuneScape division has been wanted for quite some time now in GFL. @Benroyjam and @Leks wanted to manage this division, and I believe we should give them the chance. Fortunately, it doesn’t take any resources running a mini-division. Therefore, the only thing we would lose if we were to fail with this division is time. In my opinion, it’s definitely worth at least trying.

 

Conclusion
While there are many other games we can start mini-divisions in, I just wanted to list those two games (H1Z1 and RuneScape). Our community advisors and Directorate are going to be coming together to get our mini-divisions future started. As said before, this is very important to GFL in the future. I am very excited for this!

 

European Expansion
The next thing I wanted to talk about is expanding into Europe. As of right now, our NFO machine is very underloaded and we will be getting rid of that once we completely setup our OVH machine. Once our OVH machine is set up, we will be moving the servers to that machine and start expanding into even more servers.

 

A couple years ago we started our European expansion and we did great. We had two completely full NFO machines at one point. Unfortunately, we only have one machine now which is highly underloaded. I still believe expanding into Europe is important to GFL since it fills in the inactive hours for American servers. Furthermore, TS3 is completely dead in the morning hours for Americans. If we were to expand into Europe and recruit many users to the forums and TS3, I feel our TS3 server could be a bit more active during those dead hours.

 

One division we did not expand correctly into for Europe is Garry’s Mod. Once we fix our current American servers in GMod, we should start setting up European GMod servers.

 

To conclude, expanding into Europe again should be a priority in the future once we fix our current game servers. 

 

TeamSpeak 3 Population
The next thing I want to talk about is our TS3 server’s recent population. The population has been dying off and I feel not as many users go on our TS3 server compared to a year ago. The maximum I’ve seen us hit (even on the weekend) is around 50 - 60. We used to reach around 100 - 110 users.

 

I feel one of the reasons our TS3 server isn’t as popular is because we don’t advertise it well outside of GFL and since our game servers are generally dying, not as many new users are connecting to the TS3 server. While I do believe we need to encourage players from our servers to join our TS3 server more, we also need to heavily advertise our TS3 server outside of GFL.

 

Our TS3 server is the main source of communication within GFL and therefore is very important to us. I’ve seen many gaming communities out there who are much smaller than GFL, but receive three times more population than we currently do on their TS3 server. This is likely because they advertise their TS3 server outside of their gaming community and truly make it public.

 

It’s time to make our TS3 server “truly” public and one other thing we’ll have to do with that is making sure we have an active team who will be able to kick/ban trolls since the public channels will be used often. 

 

Other Ideas
TeamSpeak 3 Bots
I believe we should set up some official TS3 bots for our server.

 

Introduction Bot
This bot would greet every user who connects to our TS3 server with a chat message with a few statistics as well. @Leks suggested this bot because it’s a good way to give important information to users who connect to our TS3 server. I would imagine users can disable this bot if they would like, but I haven’t looked into the details on the bot. With that said, the bot could also message all clients on the server when an event is going on.

 

Radio Bots
I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a few music channels with bots that run a radio. Only bots would have talk power in these channels and clients can go in there just to relax and listen to the music.

 

Financial Update
We’ve been doing very well financially for the past few months. We’ve went from almost running out of money ($200.00 as a balance at one point) in mid-2016 to over $3000.00 now!

 

Here are the latest payments for MOTDGD Ad money:

We are also working on moving to OVH which will save us a lot of money! If this keeps up, this will enable us to continue doing giveaways and such along with just improving GFL in general.

 

I would once again like to say a big thank you to all the Supporters/VIPs who have donated towards GFL. Without you, GFL would simply be dead. We will continue to do our best on building GFL up and providing a good gaming experience in our servers!

 

Personal Update
I would like to give a personal update. Spring is coming up and I will be becoming busier with my current job along with the other job I will likely be getting. However, I plan on still finding plenty of time for GFL. My goal is to “lead” everybody in the right direction in GFL. Therefore, while I may not have much time for GFL, the people who I am leading will..

 

For the past six or so months, I haven’t had much motivation for GFL. Especially in the past one -  two months, as I’ve been dealing with personal issues. However, recently, I’ve regained a lot of motivation for GFL.

I haven’t had this much motivation to work on GFL in a very long time. Since I’m starting to see how strong our higher-ups team actually is, I don’t think that motivation is going away anytime soon. 

 

Yes, I’ve overall been struggling for the past few months with GFL, but things will be getting much better unless something unexpected occurs in my life. One thing I’ve concluded about GFL is that working on it truly makes me happy.

 

TL; DR
We need to start advertising and recruiting outside of GFL’s territory. We should be mostly advertising our TeamSpeak 3 server and website. This will overall make GFL grow and can be very powerful if done correctly!

 

Recently, I’ve been backed up with back end things. The truth is, I need help with the back end and I am going to take the next few weeks looking for help (perhaps get a team of dedicated and trusted individuals to help with the back end). Once a majority of the back end projects are complete, GFL will be in great shape!

 

There are many things we need to work on within our divisions. The truth is, our divisions aren’t as popular as they once were long ago and we need to get that back. For CS:GO, focusing on revamping Surf Timer will be important. For GMod, we need to get the performance issues fixed for good. There are other divisions that also need work.

 

I explained a few months ago that mini-divisions are very important to GFL’s future. However, we still haven’t started on them. With the new team of community advisors, we need to start our mini-divisions’ future in GFL. I have high hopes that this will work out, as mini-divisions can greatly benefit the “advertising and recruiting outside of GFL” category.

 

We should also try a heavy expansion in Europe again after we successfully repair our current servers. Expanding into Europe is important for GFL because it fills in the dead hours for our American servers.

 

Our TeamSpeak 3 server’s population has been dropping recently. Since this is GFL’s main source of voice communication, I believe we need to start making it rise again. First, heavily advertising it outside of GFL’s territory will strongly help and it will make it more “public”. With that said, we should have a team ready to moderate trolls and such on our TS3 server. 

 

For the past six months or so, I’ve been struggling to find motivation for GFL due to personal issues. However, I’ve recently regained a lot of motivation to work on GFL. Although I will be busy with work and such since spring is coming, my job will be to “lead” everybody in the community and we can all work together to bring GFL truly back stronger than ever.

 

Conclusion
To conclude, there are many things that need to be worked on in GFL. It’s no joke that we appear to be a small community compared to how popular GFL was back in the summer of 2015. The truth is that GFL has been going through many tough stages within the past year. Ever since the series of negative events occurred back in mid-2016, we’ve been rebuilding. We’ve been rebuilding the back end of GFL because our divisions have only been suffering. From what I’ve seen, there haven’t been any truly new successful servers. In fact, all I’ve seen is our servers dropping in population. Some of this isn’t entirely GFL’s fault, but I still believe we can be doing much better.

 

To be honest, what brought back so much of my motivation for GFL is going on other gaming community websites to see how popular they are. To this day, I haven’t seen any other gaming communities with game servers as populated as GFL’s peak back in mid-2015. We’ve made so many big accomplishments in the past and GFL is a very “known” community. 

 

Although we’ve taken very big hits in the past year, I have no doubt that we can come back stronger than ever. Mini-divisions will be a big part of GFL’s future and there are many higher-ups very motivated to not only get GFL’s overall population back to where it was, but go beyond and make GFL a much stronger community. In the event that I build a team of trusted and dedicated individuals to help me work on the back end, we will work on repairing any servers that require technical work.

 

Overall, GFL has a lot of potential and it’s time to start pushing forward. Summer is once again approaching and we need to make it much better than last summer.

 

Google Doc

 

Thank you for reading!

[Rick 1,651 / 17,972]

Well said @Roy and hopefully this will motivate everyone to join in and help this community in climbing back up the ranks to where we were before.

[Pax 122 / 4,135]

18 minutes ago, Roy said:

Bunny Hop
Although we revamped our Bunny Hop servers a while ago with a new timer, the server population did not increase. I believe we need to take further steps to bring in more population. 

 

 

 

Well, the new timer got a lot of people back to the server and with the new timer, a lot of really good people started to play on this server, many people stopped playing after a while, because of to few maps and other issues.

 

Since I got manager I tried to add maps and new features to keep the server alive, I even set a goal of atleast 10 maps a week (which wasn't very succesfull due to having to have an internship for school and then being away one week).

 

I'll try to do even more stuff in the future.

Edited March 12, 2017 by PaxPlay

[ButterKing5000 1,429 / 16,680]

@Roy Regarding Purge, I would like to add that we having been doing some of our own work. We recently removed Cake Anti-Cheat and Pgag to check out a difference in performance and found (at least in my opinion) a very significant difference allowing the server to generally hold more players. (We had roughly 40+ players for a while yesterday.) Regarding the information you supplied us, I won't sit here and give you excuses as to why they have been put off (whether they can be considered valid or not), but I will say that I will be using this Spring Break to look into and test out anything and everything you have talked about by the end of this break. (Once I am back from  vacation on Tuesday.)

Edited March 12, 2017 by ButterKing5000

[Jacket and Ryan 85 / 4,491]

1 hour ago, Roy said:

Call of Duty 4
I’ve been playing Call of Duty 4 quite often recently and wanted to setup a CoD 4 server on our new OVH box for some time now. However, I haven’t had the motivation to do so until now. I am looking forward to setting up a new CoD 4 server on our OVH machine soon.

 

I’ve been playing on a server recently that I really like and I am going to try contacting the owner of the community to see if they would be interested in running their CoD 4 server under GFL (we give them server manager and such). Obviously, this would need to be discussed further with the Trusted group if it were to be considered.

 

Regardless, we will be trying a CoD 4 server on our new European OVH machine. It will most likely be a Hardcore “mixed” or TDM server. I will be the leader of the division and server once it’s started up.

1

 

I bought cod 4 awhile ago! gg ez

[Ben 2,378 / 31,851]

2 hours ago, Roy said:

RuneScape
A RuneScape division has been wanted for quite some time now in GFL. @Benroyjam and @Leks wanted to manage this division, and I believe we should give them the chance. Fortunately, it doesn’t take any resources running a mini-division. Therefore, the only thing we would lose if we were to fail with this division is time. In my opinion, it’s definitely worth at least trying.

HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE

 

I cannot wait for this. I'm at least motivated after reading this post. I'll keep trying to make it a thing for GFL, along with Leks. 

 

2 hours ago, Roy said:

FFA DeathMatch
Initially, I did not expect FFA DM to work out due to it being very similar to Valve’s DM servers. However, the server is doing quite well. 

It fills up to around 20 - 30 players daily and I hope it keeps up. I believe there should be admins on the server trying to recruit players to our TS3 server and website (to apply for Membership). With that said, I would recommend trying an European FFA DM server in the future once we setup our OVH machine.

I'm honestly surprised on this. As soon as the problem is fixed, we started getting regulars, which boosts up the server population almost daily. 

 

The best part about FFA DM is that they don't require those "illegal plugins" to fill and make server popular. I hope it keeps being like this too. 

[sl3yz 63 / 2,968]

3 hours ago, Roy said:

Radio Bots
I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a few music channels with bots that run a radio. Only bots would have talk power in these channels and clients can go in there just to relax and listen to the music.

 

ITS HAPPENING GUYS!!111 ITS BEEN LIKE 500 YEARS !!!!1111.

 

Sweet update @Roy

[EJ. 638 / 12,680]

Looking good! Hopefully we can increase population on our servers and bring us back up in the ranks!!

[rapperdan 2,323 / 0]

6 hours ago, Roy said:

FFA DeathMatch
Initially, I did not expect FFA DM to work out due to it being very similar to Valve’s DM servers. However, the server is doing quite well. 

It fills up to around 20 - 30 players daily and I hope it keeps up. I believe there should be admins on the server trying to recruit players to our TS3 server and website (to apply for Membership). With that said, I would recommend trying an European FFA DM server in the future once we setup our OVH machine.

 

Overall, as said before, the division is stable, but we need to start expanding and fixing up servers that are suffering.

I've been advertising outside of GFL in comp games glad it worked out

[Gone 736 / 9,093]

Leaked part of the post 

 

Planning

Topics

 

• TF2’s Mailing List Thread

• IPS 4

• SourceBans 2

• Expenses Cut

• Linux Machine removed.

• European VDS Cancelled.

• OVH Game Server Machine With EasyWI.

• New Servers (No extra information).

• Donations, etc.

• Who Setup.Sh Is (A.K.A. Amp)

• Games & Game Servers

• My Future With GFL V2

• TeamSpeak 3 Channel Structure, Permissions, Etc

•  

 

* Of course, as usual, anything above this line will not be included in the actual post.


The Post

Edited March 12, 2017 by Johaw

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

3 hours ago, Johaw said:

Leaked part of the post 

  Reveal hidden contents

Planning

Topics

 

• TF2’s Mailing List Thread

• IPS 4

• SourceBans 2

• Expenses Cut

• Linux Machine removed.

• European VDS Cancelled.

• OVH Game Server Machine With EasyWI.

• New Servers (No extra information).

• Donations, etc.

• Who Setup.Sh Is (A.K.A. Amp)

• Games & Game Servers

• My Future With GFL V2

• TeamSpeak 3 Channel Structure, Permissions, Etc

•  

 

* Of course, as usual, anything above this line will not be included in the actual post.


The Post

That was from the update back in May, 2016. Noob

 

Thanks.

[Gone 736 / 9,093]

14 minutes ago, Roy said:

That was from the update back in May, 2016. Noob

 

Thanks.

How could ya, you gave me the wrong info

Edited March 13, 2017 by Johaw

[Pax 122 / 4,135]

On 13.3.2017 at 4:14 AM, Roy said:

That was from the update back in May, 2016. Noob

 

Thanks.

 

 

still waiting for sourcebans2 tho

[Joshy 4,363 / 44,907]

On 3/13/2017 at 3:14 AM, Roy said:

That was from the update back in May, 2016. Noob

 

Thanks.

 

It's interesting that you are able to reflect on past updates.

 

So: Is this new "right direction" thread in the same direction as the old thread?  I think it would be a good idea to ponder on that, evaluate what happened, and understand where we could have improved, mitigated, or even taken advantage of the situations that led us to this "right direction" thread whether it be the same direction or not.  This advise I am giving is nothing new as I've said the same about your Reddit posts regarding Valve's (lack of) support on community servers.  Judging from the front-loading in this announcement, which I'm very suspicious of...  I've said more than enough.  I think it's great to tell people what they want to hear, but telling them what they want to hear should be followed by making it effective; otherwise: I don't think you should be saying these things.

 

...  recent events and decisions, general trends...  I'm a very skeptical person.