2019 Summary -- The Situation

[Vanya 533 / 9,067]

Hello everyone.

 

I'm making this post here to keep you guys updated on what has been going on behind the scenes with the Admin team, just recently we held a brief admin meeting and while these things were already posted over at our Discord server, I want to make it more general by expanding these ideas in this post here.

 

You are more than free to add to your ideas or yes/no at them, without further ado:

 

The General Stuff:

• Rexy and Luigi have stepped down from regular admin position, and Backy has stepped down from Server Manager and has resigned from admin responsibilities in general
• Lev has been promoted to Head Admin, this is something we should have done a long while ago since he has always been committed to help the server whenever he's able to (he will now be helping us out with handing VIP rewards)
• Soft Serve will be handling internal server stuff and he'll keep doing his mapping business (he's Server Manager now basically, but he won't be handling the responsibilities that Backy would have handled with me)
• Event Manager role removed, this so that every admin can freely execute event commands if the actual event managers cannot attend the event
• As for myself, I will keep doing event stuff and talking to others if needed but still staying as Server Manager for the time being.
• Possibility for "mini-events" in the middle of the week, possibly Wednesdays

 

The Server Stuff:

• Open spots for anyone who wants to try Admin, Dev Admin and/or Head Admin (since most staff is burnt out at this point and if the interest for applying is serious and not a meme)
• This is one I'd like people to give their opinion on! 
  • Vote at the start of most maps to enable "Easy settings" (this reduces nade knockback, caps bhop speed, increases general knockback)
  • As we have it planned (and as has been discussed a bit on our Discord server, the idea of this plugin is to be fully opt in at the start of a map, with an opt-out function as well in case players want to turn it off eventually AND the chance that an admin can bring up the vote if they think it's necessary)
• Reduce all Extreme maps maximum player limit to 20, remove this limit from Easy to Hard maps
• Reconsider which maps go in the Extreme maplist category to fit the above idea (this should mean mostly no restrictions if anyone wants to play X map)
  • When we say "Extreme maps" we mean those in this list, which contains every map on our ZE server.
• Knockback has been slightly increased to appeal to people trying to play maps with low population.
• Work with the shotgun knockback to try and make it a more feasible weapon (but still keeping it away from knife-like knockback)

 

To TL;DR this post:

• The admins that have stepped down from their "admin duty" have chosen to do so due to their very own life responsibilities, it's pretty apparent nowadays but the reason we're opening admin spots is because parallel to that, most of our current admin staff (Admins, Dev Admins and Head Admins) is burnt out. As much as it hurts to say it that's unfortunately the truth, and we're looking for people who'd be willing to help us out and "unload some weight" from some of the staff of our team.
• The idea for the mini events came to me by someone in the server. Every Wednesday/Thursday we choose one hard map and we play it late during the evening, playing this mini-event wouldn't offer VIP as rewards but choosing which map to be played during the mini-event could be discussed over at our Discord server or perhaps in the server, just to help get a little kick going on.
• General server settings have been nerfed down a bit, our settings are some of the (if not, the) hardest out there compared to other Source ZE servers, so we will be nerfing down some of them to help with the low population.
• Since we've noticed our original Steam group still has a lot more people than our current one we will be announcing event stuff on both Steam groups for the people who (most likely) haven't noticed the new group and haven't joined it either.

 

Despite the above mentioned of most admin staff feeling burnt out, we (all admin team) would still like to add that we're trying whatever's within our reach to keep the server going whenever possible, which is why both the meeting and these ideas have surfaced up from our side. These here are our ideas to help expand the server's life at least a little bit. This isn't the first time GFL's Source ZE has died, in the past the community also saw a massive population drop and it managed to come back up and running up until when we started having a drop ourselves. Saying the game is losing numbers is fair, but saying ZE in Source is dead isn't since, although rarely, we're still getting new players.

 

If there are any points / ideas you wish to discuss feel free to add them to this thread and we'll respond to them.

 

(Also no nominaton thread this week since I'd like this thread to get a little bit more attention beforehand, this week we'll take a nomination from our Nomination Megathread, so if you wanted to nominate something this week you can do so there and I'll add it to the proper votes)

Edited August 5, 2019 by Vanya

[_William_ 36 / 1,309]

Lol I remember trying to push for the mini events idea in december and you guys told me that it "might ruin the sanctity of your current events" as if people would stop showing up to your main events just because there is a server population above 0 on any other day of the week. And somebody went on about how GFL pioneered every ze idea ever and this wouldn't work.

I even tried organising my own mini events at GFL (with success in terms of player population) but after receiving too much backlash from the players and admins I gave up. 

Glad it's finally being tried from the admin team. 

[Vanya 533 / 9,067]

On 8/10/2019 at 8:27 AM, _William_ said:

Lol I remember trying to push for the mini events idea in december and you guys told me that it "might ruin the sanctity of your current events" as if people would stop showing up to your main events just because there is a server population above 0 on any other day of the week. And somebody went on about how GFL pioneered every ze idea ever and this wouldn't work.

I even tried organising my own mini events at GFL (with success in terms of player population) but after receiving too much backlash from the players and admins I gave up. 

Glad it's finally being tried from the admin team. 

 

At the time we really didn't want to push for the "spam event announcements every day" idea since that could potentially lead to more people just ignoring them in general.

 

Mini events don't seem to be that uncommon among other communities around anyway so at this point I guess it's safe to push for this idea, after all there's not much more that can be lost. (Two pings a week shouldn't really bug anyone to be honest.)

[Vanya 533 / 9,067]

Here's a small update on what we've been up to and what has been done / will be done:

• Midweek mini-events will start happening this week. (thanks to @willywilson , @Lv100Crobat and all our other admins willing to help out with these)
  • They will be happening on Wednesdays and/or Thursdays, the maps that are chosen to play can be discussed over at our Discord server
  • Times at which the mini events could happen is past 5pm GMT-5 (so basically, anytime after event time), the announcements for when mini-events start will be done at our Steam group and also our Discord server.
• @Nano has rejoined the Admin team
  • (He will also be helping us with the "Easy settings" vote thing that was mentioned in the original post)
• The nomination list has been extended, only certain maps (to give examples, maps like Santassination and Frostdrake) still require a minimum number of players to be nominated, although this limit is still very low (these maps for example need 20 players)

Edited August 26, 2019 by Vanya