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willywilson

Ideas to help pop the server

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Posted  Edited by willywilson

I think it's fair to say that the server isn't as alive as we'd all like it to be, and while things have been tried to help the population, nosteam, .com merge, etc. it doesn't seem to be helping out massively. Now while the majority of the playerbase these days are in college or have jobs and don't have the time to be spending all day on a ze server of a dying game, trying to help it pop, BUT there are a lot of people that come on during events, or friday - sunday when they have a little bit more freetime, and to beat hard maps they can't beat on other servers (ridorana comes to mind). My idea for population would be to capitalize on those people who come on to beat hard maps, and KEEP THEM on the server. I feel like people right now can join for the last level of a map without having played it, leave, and come back when there's a map on they like, we saw this yesterday with tyranny, server went from 36 to 64, ridorana, server went again from 30s to 64, and mako to a certain degree from 18 to 30s. My idea to incentivize people to stay the whole map is to give special perks to those who have beaten previous levels, things like zombie immunity if you've beaten every other level of a map (reserved as a top tier perk, want to make it hard to get, I don't know shit about running a server so I have no clue if this is possible) or giving out things like double money earned from shooting zombies if you've beaten a certain number of previous rounds, similar to a leveling system like on many maps, but instead server wise. Or if a map is a singular level, or we're just playing a specific level, we could do it by concurrent playtime or rounds played on the map. This would give incentives for people to join and play maps for longer instead of only joining for the last level.

 

I don't know how we could get more people to come on for more casual maps, but maybe we could incentivize  staying for a longer time somehow, or let people opt into being a zombie at the beginning of a round in order to keep people playing more. 

 

I'd love to hear ideas from anyone else, or any criticism of these would go a long way, I feel like trying something is better than doing nothing.

Edited by willywilson

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Unfortunatetly, the reason it pumped up the population, it's because players tend to join for the last level of the hard map try to beat and leave right after. That's something we can't really do much about, regulars on css are usually admins, or players who used to play there for years.

 

So if the "hardcore players" leave after a map is played, you might ask aswell. Why don't we go to another tryhard map? Some players need to chill off so its one of the reasons we don't go full tryhard on the server. From what I've heard, server's who used to run a FF Marathon are dead.

 

Now about chill maps, the current map rotation of the most played chill maps:

  • ze_random_v9, v10fix, _escape_b7
  • ze_space_race_v1_1
  • ze_icecap_escape_v3
  • ze_mountain_escape_zy
  • ze_Paranoid_Rezurrection
  • ze_PotC_v3_4fix
  • ze_ffvii_mako_reactor_v5_3
  • ze_rooftop_escape_v2

While make is a FF map, is a good map to pump up the server with 20 players, so it's better to play mako when we have +15 players on the server, but some players, including admins, need to compromise if they want to collaborate with the server population.

 

This is an issue I used to deal on Syndicate Gamers back then, server population.

 

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Posted  Edited by Console

First of all, I really appreciate your input in helping out the server. I think it's very important like you said to keep the map fags on the server after their favorite maps. However, I hope we agree that regulars deserve more reward for keeping the server alive by playing all maps than some map fags that barely play maps other than those they like. Server gets filled on events because we have rewards for winners as the motivation for people to join. I can confidently say that GFL has one of the best player bases and it's important to keep it this way. 
(gonna put more when my brain is not short circuiting anymore)

Edited by Console

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I am almost 100% sure that my words won't come out the way I intend for them to, so if I bring up a certain group of people in this post please don't think that I'm trying to demean you in any way, shape, or form.

 

Also, there's a good chance of this having some grammatical errors, so don't go too hard on me.

 

Endorsement:

  • I would like for either this website or the (main) GFL Steam group to advertise for the events that go on in the server. We had a great spike in players soon after we merged, and I would somewhat attribute this to the hype and awareness that was brought on by this website making an announcement of the return of CS:S ZE which has ended up having nearly 8,500 views. 
  • I guess when it comes to the website, I would like to see events announced in a place closer to the front page, instead of having to travel the website from the forums section to the division's section, to the Counter-Strike: Source section, to the Zombie Escape section, to the events section. 
  • Now when it comes to the GFL group, the GFL group that has nearly 200,000 members in it, I believe that if an announcement was made for an event just like we do, we would see a lot more people show up for an event since almost 200,000 people are seeing it instead of nearly 300 people.

Incentives:

  • VIP Rewards are obviously one of the biggest reasons as to why events bring in more people than your average day of ZE because they give people a reason to be on the server. I imagine that if we shifted our focus towards trying to make our players greatest purpose to be on the server into them wanting to get better, we would see a greater spike in player numbers.
  • People wanting to learn smaller core mechanics of ZE like bhopping, strafe running, and surfing helps them strive into becoming regulars of the server who will almost always have an enjoyable time because of them being more experienced as to how this game mode truly functions as a whole. 
  • I suppose that if we were to focus more on rewarding players, instead of trying to help them become better at the game, we should make obtaining VIP rewards easier. With the merge, "VIP" is now $8 instead of €3, with that said I am confident in saying that there is now an even greater motivation to win events.

Communication:

  • I don't think our admin team gets enough credit for all that they've done so far this year. The merge has been a big part in this community's timeline, and I think that all the steps set in place have been successful overall. But, I believe that even some of them would agree that active communication hasn't necessarily been a big thing after the merge.
  • I know that many staff members are currently dealing with more important matters outside of GFL such as school and work, but I think even a simple "Hey, here is what we're currently thinking about implementing..." would be a huge step into the right direction.
  • I'm not saying that weekly blog posts should be made on the forums, I think that if the team were to tell us what is going on at the moment, or what they're thinking about adding/changing to the server would leave to better feedback in order to avoid the problem of one or more community members being upset at the team because of there not being any communication with the server.

Miscellaneous Ideas:

  • I was thinking about maybe having a round that would change the standard "meta" of ZE. 
    • For example, one round we can have the option to either turn on a mode where for one round, the entire CT team can only use the same weapon or weapon set for the entire round against the zombies. I don't see this being implemented on extreme maps, but I imagine that this would offer a change in the normal cycle of rounds on any given map where it's usually "TMP or P90, Dualies, and an HE grenade".
  • A greater variation in the normal map pool.
    • I haven't thought up of a good way of implementing this, but I think like most of us, we would like to more maps played in any given week instead of the normal 40 or so maps that are played all the time.

 

As I stated in the beginning, I really, really hope that all of my ideas come out in the most positive of ways.

 

I think that this community will forever be a tight-knit one, and I hope that all of you are as excited as I am as to see what next year will bring us.

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The responses that you'll be reading in this post are all personal thoughts from me that I might as well put up in here.

 

On 11/26/2018 at 10:40 PM, Odyssey said:
  • I suppose that if we were to focus more on rewarding players, instead of trying to help them become better at the game, we should make obtaining VIP rewards easier. With the merge, "VIP" is now $8 instead of €3, with that said I am confident in saying that there is now an even greater motivation to win events.

 

Sadly, as we have mentioned several times, the reason we have made it much harder to win V.I.P. at events is because this V.I.P. is global meaning if you win V.I.P. for one week from one of our events then you can go and use this V.I.P. anywhere in this community (or so we've been told).

 

The whole purpose of events is that every week we get a shot at something unique to play or something that we normally wouldn't be doing in a normal day of the week, and V.I.P. then just comes as a bonus on top of that.

 

On 11/26/2018 at 10:40 PM, Odyssey said:

I think that if the team were to tell us what is going on at the moment, or what they're thinking about adding/changing to the server would leave to better feedback in order to avoid the problem of one or more community members being upset at the team because of there not being any communication with the server.

 

We pretty much let everyone know when any change is done and as soon as we're all in agreement, we write our responses along with why changes have been made and so on.

 

Recently we had the bamboozle with events, however, prior to this we secretly increased knockback for zm's just a little bit since we did receive a couple complains that while our server settings are some of the most balanced, they can be really one-sided to zombies when the server's running low on population.

 

Can't and won't speak up for the entire admin team for this one but I personally believe we (admins) shouldn't be sharing everything unless we are sure of doing such radical changes.

 

As an example, in our last meeting we were thinking about reducing prices for rebuys so players that do use them have a wider chance at using them, but because we have the knockback increase going on too we didn't want to make the server settings too easy now (like a certain server that now is an exact copycat) so we decided to hold back onto that change until we feel it's necessary to properly add.

 

My point is, while we're happy to communicate things with you guys there are some things (and a very tiny amount of things at that) that we think we probably shouldn't share right away, but rather try it out and see how it works and then ask for opinions.

 

On 11/26/2018 at 10:40 PM, Odyssey said:

A greater variation in the normal map pool.

  • I haven't thought up of a good way of implementing this, but I think like most of us, we would like to more maps played in any given week instead of the normal 40 or so maps that are played all the time.

 

Even with Extended Nomlist Friday being a thing, pretty much the same maps are played and nominated every Friday when we have people.

If you go to the thread with all the maps in our server in this subforum you will see that pretty much only different map versions or maps that are too old, messy and buggy to be played are missing in our nomlist every other day that isn't Friday, pretty much the only limit I recall we have is how a couple maps out there have a playernumber requirement to be nominated. (Which sucks but hey)

 

Mapfags are also part of our playerbase.

 

Unfortunately, limiting them would also mean limiting our entire playerbase in general since even if it's just for one map, they still add up to population (even if it's just an inflation in population).

 

We as admins have tried our best to balance both grounds for chill, tryhard and mapfag maps in our nomlist and in our server, adding map cooldowns for FF maps, Rooftop maps, etc.

 

We have funmode, pumped up airacceleration, extreme failnades, the items plug-in and all that gig for chill maps, and for harder maps these settings slowly start deteriorating as they would ruin the experience of these harder maps, I honestly don't know how else can we balance out and encourage more maps to be played. If the day-to-day server playerbase doesn't wanna play these other underplayed maps what can we as admins do? 

 

Call me mapfag all you want, if I'm in the server I try to get different maps going for chill (non autism) and tryhard even if my weekly routine consists of Meatropolis and Isengard/Ridorana, at times I'll feel like having the server play maps that usually no one in any server ever plays.

 

I strongly and deeply appreciate your inputs (not just as part of the admin team but personally, since it goes to show that you guys care for our server as much as we do as admins and players), but there isn't really a whole lot we can do if we don't have many other players giving their own input (with valid points, rather than some random one-day rant they had), or helping the server just by even populating it.

 

I am aware it's not an easy task since I spent hours sitting on a dead server slowly trying to gather players (back before university kicked in) but if players don't wanna join and help us out then what else are we to do?

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You should focus on the endorsement part of odyssey's post, you can get more people playing if the server is visible. Things as easy as announcing events and stuff on the gfl steam group (if they will let you do that) has a lot of potential to bring in players. Isn't that the point of being a part of a community any way? 

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We always announce our events on the Steam group, however I feel like abusing the announcements too much may also work against us.

 

A brief turn-back to pF and how they were spamming their Steam announcements daily (in span of 2-4 hours every day) made several people (myself included) turn off notifications for that group or leave it overall, I'm pretty sure people would start doing that too if we were to get any close to that level of "spam" with the group, so we mostly limit ourselves to events or new map tests.

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True but the point still stands, the server needs to be visible to potential players. Maybe trying to get new people to play, rather than fighting over the small pool of players on ze right now, would be a more effective strategy than adding a bunch of bells and whistles onto a server that nobody knows exists. Doing this would not only help gfl, but all other ze servers as well, maybe someone at unlose might want to help out. 

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On 11/29/2018 at 6:10 PM, sweet said:

You should focus on the endorsement part of odyssey's post, you can get more people playing if the server is visible. Things as easy as announcing events and stuff on the gfl steam group (if they will let you do that) has a lot of potential to bring in players. Isn't that the point of being a part of a community any way? 

 

During the steam sale, the event was advertised on the main gfl discord announcements. I'm not sure if we actually got any new players due to that announcement. In my opinion, population during events has never been a problem as the server always fills. The main problem is population during every other day. 

 

20 hours ago, sweet said:

True but the point still stands, the server needs to be visible to potential players. Maybe trying to get new people to play, rather than fighting over the small pool of players on ze right now, would be a more effective strategy than adding a bunch of bells and whistles onto a server that nobody knows exists. Doing this would not only help gfl, but all other ze servers as well, maybe someone at unlose might want to help out. 

 

Getting new players would always be nice but not a lot of people want to invest $10 into a 10+ year old game where the server is dead pretty much 5 days every week. In my eyes, the only way to attract new players is to advertise during steam sales (As I said above, might not actually work). 

 

I hope the community realizes that we're not fighting with Unloze over players and driving out Unloze isn't the intention of the admin team. Unloze starts to die when NA peak hours begin so there shouldn't be any "competition" interference between servers. Theoretically, players will join GFL once these peak hours begin and any players leftover from Unloze can join as well. However, that usually never happens except during events. 

 

Gonna go on a bit of a tangent here. In my opinion, the main reason that we can't retain regulars is that we're never able to "kickstart" the server once NA peak hours begin. I know a lot of players are really busy whether is be with school or work and only have an hour or two to play everyday. If these players see the server at 5-10 players, they'll probably not join and spend their free time doing something else. In addition, I'm going to be honest, but a portion of the ze community is filled with mapfags and no one wants to play Mako, Cosmo, Wester with a low population count. Basically, the server won't populate unless there is some people willing to "kickstart" the serer. This leads into my next point.

 

The admins are doing everything they can do to "kickstart" the server and some of them are becoming burned out. I can't speak for others but I feel my efforts start to become pointless and feel some frustration. As you may have noticed, Juky and Red (not an admin but a cool dude) have both been on hiatuses from being burned out from playing everyday trying to "kickstart" even when the server doesn't fill. 

 

Currently behind the scenes, I'm pushing for the idea of adding a couple of MG maps to the server that'll only be enabled under a certain play count. In my eyes, it'll not solve our problem with "kickstarting," but it'll at least push us in the right direction and maybe attract some newer players who want to play MG.

 

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To help with kickstarting the sever maybe we could make an unofficial kickstarting map list with good maps to get players on. Too many times on these low pop servers we just are not picking the right maps or nominating anything at all which leads to 0 increase in players. Never hurts to educate players on how to pick good maps (and maybe admins as well :lenny:)

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Maybe somebody could make a tutorial on ZE and put it on the rotating tutorial text, last night I saw somebody ask how do you play this game, and "whats happening?" But it was paranoid and nobody really wanted to explain it to him. Because when i first joined ze nobody sent me a tutorial i had to figure it out through painful trial and error.

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On 12/4/2018 at 6:41 AM, The Q-man said:

Unloze starts to die when NA peak hours begin

that doesnt always happen however and there will be times when its 4am in europe and unloze has around 40 and gfl has 5 or less

 

On 12/4/2018 at 6:41 AM, The Q-man said:

but a portion of the ze community is filled with mapfags and no one wants to play Mako, Cosmo, Wester with a low population count

are you saying that people dont want to play mako/cosmo/wester or that people only want to play those tryhard maps but the rest dont want to play it with a low population? if the latter i agree

 

 

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Quote

that doesnt always happen however and there will be times when its 4am in europe and unloze has around 40 and gfl has 5 or l ess

 

EU is about 6-8 hours ahead of NA. Unloze begins to slow down at around 5 pm NA or around EU midnight.

 

Quote

are you saying that people dont want to play mako/cosmo/wester or that people only want to play those tryhard maps but the rest dont want to play it with a low population? if the latter i agree

 

I'm saying that a good portion of the community are "mapfags." Even though we go to maps such as wester/cosmo/mako, these players won't want to join because they don't want to play these maps with a low population.

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2 hours ago, Malal said:

that doesnt always happen however and there will be times when its 4am in europe and unloze has around 40 and gfl has 5 or less


I'm from Unloze and that barely happen tbh...
Most of the time Unloze die around 00:30 - 1:00 GMT+0
Sometimes earlier depending on how exhausting people are and which map are active.

It can "maybe" happen during week-end if we tryhard something during a long time
Otherwise during the week Unloze die around the hour I said.

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47 minutes ago, ZeGaWa said:

I'm from Unloze and that barely happen tbh...

from what ive seen its been happening a few times

it was on the weekend however

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5 minutes ago, Malal said:

it was on the weekend however

 

54 minutes ago, ZeGaWa said:

It can "maybe" happen during week-end if we tryhard something during a long time
Otherwise during the week Unloze die around the hour I said.


And also you said 4am...
Dude I don't think you know what 4am GMT+0 mean for EU on Unloze
For GMT+1 (which is the majority of our playerbase) it's 5am which is very late, even for a week-end.
Our server is dead around before 2am even during the week-end
And even if it's not "dead" having 40ppl at 4am GMT+0 never happened tbh...
I'm looking the server stats each mornings so I know what I'm saying.

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20 hours ago, ZeGaWa said:

Dude I don't think you know what 4am GMT+0 mean for EU on Unloze

4am server time which is gmt+1

 

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On 12/6/2018 at 8:09 AM, Malal said:

4am server time which is gmt+1

It won't change the fact that at this hour the server is empty already
And that it never happened to get 40 players at this hour.

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