Hello everyone, I have some important news to share about the future of the server.
Within the next couple of weeks, GFL Zombie Escape will begin to operate independently, and GFL as a whole will be closing due to various factors I’m not going to get into here, rather you can read GFL’s announcement here. I’m going to focus on what this means for us, what’s changing, and what’s not.
First off, we expect very little to change ingame day-to-day on the CS2 ZE server, this is a controlled shutdown, and GFL will be transferring any relevant assets to us during this process. The worst disruption is probably only going to be some downtime for maintenance when we move the gameserver onto new infrastructure.
While GFL as a whole was not profitable, we’re planning to run our operations on a single machine, and donations from ZE players have been able to cover the cost of this machine both recently, and for many years prior to CS2. We’ll be moving to a new donation system, which will finally give us support for subscriptions & alternate payment methods, this may result in increased donations. GFL is also giving us a payout from what remains of donation funds, so we’re not starting from $0. Existing donator ranks will carry over, and while I don’t want to make long-term promises about perma VIP’s, we’ll still honour those purchases for as long as possible.
The machine we’ll be using is an upgrade from what we’re currently running (from Xeon E-2388G to E-2488), which will improve server frametimes with CS2’s increased resource usage.
The forums will be going down, while our Discord has really taken over in recent years, there is still a lot of history here that will be lost, so save anything you care about. As a result, I also plan to get rid of the Member rank, it has been nothing more than a glorified tag on the CS2 server anyways, and won’t really make sense to keep around anymore.
Unfortunately, I’m also going to be shutting down our CS:GO ZE server. The thinking with CS:GO up until now has been that we would only keep it up as long as nothing broke, and that time is now coming. We cannot justify the necessary server dev/backend work to keep it functional throughout all these upcoming changes. We plan to run final CS:GO event(s) soon, so keep an eye out for those.