Major Update - New Year, CS:GO + More

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hi everyone,

 

I just wanted to make a major update post addressing the upcoming new year, 2019 in regards of GFL from my point-of-view. I first want to thank everyone who have positively contributed to GFL along with those who have stuck around. 

 

2018 has been a rollercoaster in regards to GFL and my personal life. For myself personally, I’ve gotten a new great job along with moving out on my own. As for GFL, we’ve had our ups and downs. However, ultimately, it was a very successful year and I really think things have been setup for 2019.

 

Before continuing, I’m not going to go over everything that is going on in GFL. I’m only going to go over the things I want to focus on myself along with my view on certain things. I am encouraging other directors, division leaders, and team leaders to make a post outlining their goals in 2019 in regards to GFL. Though, that is optional, for now. I just love writing about this stuff and letting everyone know what I’m working on, lol.

 

With that said, I believe 2019 is our year. With the recent spike in our CS:GO division, I’ve gained so much motivation for GFL and I haven’t had this much in years. While there is still a lot of work to be done (there always will be), I feel we’re in the position to make great things happen in 2019.

 

Anyways, I will begin.

 

The CS:GO Division
Unsurprisingly, the CS:GO division is the first thing I want to talk about. With the recent addition of @VirusKing, our CS:GO division is looking very promising. With CS:GO going free-to-play, the use of new hosting providers, and the enabling of weapon skins/gloves plugins, our newly released servers have been receiving a lot of population (many new players).

 

Here are GameTracker links/images of our new servers in the CS:GO division:

 

 

Our Surf Timer and Arena servers have been doing well. Although, there is still a lot of work to be done.

 

All New Global Servers
There are few things I’d like to work on for all of our new servers in CS:GO.

 

Firstly, we need to ensure everybody understands that we want a laid-back and fun/enjoyable environment on all of our servers. We will need to write proper guidelines and rules for all of our servers in the near future that obeys the laid-back environment our vision holds. More details on this will be released at a later date.

 

Secondly, we need to find ways to keep players coming back to our servers along with encouraging users to idle on our newer servers that need population. An idea for this is setting up a store plugin where users will have to work for their credits by either playing or idling. We will be discussing these ideas in the future.

 

Thirdly, we need to find a way to recruit new players from the servers into the community. We want people to sign up on our website and apply for member whenever possible (it’s easy and free). From here, they’ll be able to discover our website, Discord servers, and TeamSpeak 3 server. I’d suggest giving Members a player skin on servers like Surf Timer personally. Back in 2015, we made the store and weapon skins/gloves available for only Member+. This drove in A LOT of players onto the website. Though, I don’t think restricting the weapon skins/gloves to Member+ would be a good idea for now as we’re receiving a lot of new players who want that access once they join the server. With that said, I’d like to be training our admins to get players into the community as well by actively recruiting and advertising.

 

Finally, we will be on the search for competent staff including admins and managers for our servers. I know servers like 1v1 are severely lacking staff right now (admins). We will be finding staff members and training them to be competent.

 

Surf Timer
Our Surf Timer servers are off to a great start. However, there is still work that needs to be done. We’re currently in the works of getting a new server manager since @VirusKing and I are starting to get burnt out from handling the Surf Timer servers and the CS:GO division as a whole solely.

 

We are currently holding a vote in regards of @juky being the next Surf Timer manager. Feel free to have a look at the thread and poll here:

 

 

 

As of right now, it’s looking like Juky will be Surf Timer’s next server manager. However, the poll will stay open a little bit longer.

 

1v1
Our 1v1 servers are doing great! We’ve launched the UK server today and it’s already reaching 20+ players. So far, the only issues 1v1 is suffering from is the lack of staff members and a very odd server crash that happens very rarely. However, the server crash is a loop. There is a possibility we have fixed it, but we are not certain. The stack trace did not give us much details and when debugging the crash dump in GDB, due to missing debug symbols, I can’t gain additional information.

 

Jailbreak
Jailbreak is our highest requested server in the CS:GO division. @VirusKing will be taking lead of this project since he’s more experienced in Jailbreak than I am. This server is the next on our list to tackle down.

 

I will be sharing the Server Manager applications for Jailbreak to VirusKing. Applications are still available and can be found here. Please fill out if you’re interested.

 

Bunny Hop
Bunny Hop is the next project I will be working on when I get back home (on the 1st). I look to build the Bunny Hop game mode and release two servers for it (one in the US and one in the UK), similar to how we have Surf Timer. The servers will most likely be 100 - 128 tick.

 

Danger Zone
The Danger Zone server is currently down until I add our GSLTs to the server. I will be doing this soon after this post.

 

@TOG is still making changes to the server and doing a good job. As stated in other posts, this game mode is not a popular hit for community servers and it’s not really made for community servers, either. It’s quite buggy. I think it’d be nice if we could make changes to the game mode itself via SourceMod extensions/plugins and make it as community server-friendly as possible.

 

I think the only way to populate this server is if we make events for it. However, first, we need to ensure the server will work with many players. I’m not sure if the game mode has been tested with many players on community servers. I saw an AlliedMods post a little while ago stating their Danger Zone server couldn’t spawn 10+ players into the game. We need to ensure these bugs won’t occur.

 

Other Game Modes
After the above game modes are built and released successfully, I look to work on TTT, Zombie Mod, Zombie Hunting, Decoy Dodgeball, and other game modes. I may start building these game modes and then release them when the time is right.

 

Conclusion
Our CS:GO division has a lot of potential. While it still isn’t as big as 2014/2015, I do believe we’re on that path for the future. Especially if Valve decides to rebuild the server browser! We just have to continue building our servers up and properly training users to take them over along with leading them.

 

I’d also like for a team to go on other CS:GO servers outside of GFL and see if there’s anything they are doing that we can try and possibly do better. Basically ideas, etc.

 

CS:GO Reddit Post
As stated in other threads/posts, I’ve been wanting to make another Reddit post addressing concerns for community servers in CS:GO to Valve. You can read the first and second Reddit threads here and here.

 

With our recent discovery of the Linux limitation being lifted here, I am running out of things to address. Valve appears to be supporting community servers more which is honestly awesome.

 

There is still one big subject I plan to address and that is a new server browser. You can read the following thread for more information:

 

 

If you see any other issues regarding community servers, please let me know. I will add it into the post. If you’d like to help with writing the post or would like to spread the post around to others, please let me know as well. The more exposure to the post, the better!

 

Garry’s Mod
Our Garry’s Mod division is the next major project I plan to work on. After we get CS:GO going, if the Garry’s Mod division still needs help, I will get to work on it and push it forward.

 

The division has been mostly on a standstill as of recently and had the additions of Murder, Prop Hunt (revamped), and our newest game mode, Don’t Blink. Our servers are doing great recently as it’s holiday season. However, population will go down a bit once the holidays are over.

 

Current Servers
I haven’t dug through the current servers in our Garry’s Mod division (non-like CS:GO), but I’d like to do this at some point in the near future. I’d like to go over how the servers are doing and how we can improve.

 

Purge
Purge has been in the works for the last couple months. However, I’d like for it to start getting pushed forward faster. This is a highly requested server and used to be one of our most successful servers in Garry’s Mod. I still see a lot of potential in this server if it’s setup correctly.

 

Other Game Modes
After Purge is completed, we should look into propping up new game modes. This includes RP and non-RP game modes. Any game modes that doesn’t require high maintenance and a big admin team shouldn’t take long to prop up and release. We should also look into replicating some of the current game modes into different locations (e.g. an idea I had is once US TTT and US Prop Hunt are stable, replicate these servers to the UK). The UK location is a hot spot for new players and that has been proven with Murder.

 

Conclusion
I don’t have much to say about this division yet because I am not as actively involved. However, once I am done with CS:GO, I’d really like to get involved with Garry’s Mod because this division is major and has a lot of potential.

 

Rust
Our Rust server is slowly inclining and has been doing better over the holidays. @VirusKing is still managing this server since it’s vanilla and doesn’t require much maintenance.

 

 

I believe as long as the server is stable, the player base will continue growing. As we pull in more people from CS:GO, Garry’s Mod, and other games, we’ll gain more people interested in helping populate our Rust server.

 

Squad
Squad is a game I still feel has a lot of potential for GFL. @VirusKing offered to help in this game, but due to him being busy with other things, we’re going to hold off from that for now. Just like I said about Rust, the more people we gain from CS:GO, Garry’s Mod, and other games, the better of a chance we’ll get players interested in helping populate Squad.

 

 

Call of Duty 4
With the server switch from OVH, our Call of Duty 4 servers have been dead. This is mostly due to our servers crashing constantly with the newer version of CoDx. I will be reporting this crash to the CoD4x developers and hopefully we can get this fixed.

 

I still feel CoD 4 has a lot of potential for GFL. Especially considering we had a server that was constantly in the top 10 on GameTracker for a couple years until we had to cancel the machine a few months ago. The servers also take very little resources at high player counts which is great.

 

Rebuilding The Back-End Donation System
This has been a thing I’ve been wanting to do for a year or so now. However, I’ve been too busy to relearn the IPS 4 API and spend time rebuilding the entire donation system. I will instead try to find somebody that can do this.

 

I’d like goals implemented into the donation system so users can donate towards specific goals. For example, a goal for giveaways and so on. If this is implemented, it will open up a lot of opportunities in the future (e.g. proper giveaways, raffles, and so on).

 

Server Hardware
The next topic I want to go over is regarding our game server machine’s hardware. As of right now, our CS:GO Surf Timers are struggling at 50 players since running 50 players at 85 tick is a lot to handle for our machines. Most of our machines run with the Intel i7-4790K processor or weaker (excluding our OVH machine in Canada that runs with the Intel i7-7700K OC’ed to 4.7 GHz). We have the lowest-end machines with our new hosting providers because we wanted to try them out first. So far, both hosting providers have been great. Therefore, I look forward to upgrade our machines.

 

For our US hosting provider (GMCHosting), we have the option of going with the Intel i7-7700K which comes with 16 GBs of DDR4 RAM and 500 GBs NVMe storage for $180/m. 

 

The next option is the Intel i7-9700K which is overclocked to 5.1 GHz. This comes with 8 cores, 16 GBs of DDR4 RAM, and 500 GBs NVMe storage. This is for $260.00/m.

 

I’m not sure which machine I’m going to get. However, I’m leaning towards the Intel i7-9700K if we have enough consistent income to support such an upgrade and if our game server divisions are looking promising (which they are, right now). The Intel i7-9700K machine will be overkill but that will guarantee we have some of the best performing machines out on the market right now.

 

For our UK hosting provider (Croncos), we can request a custom build and they are generally cheaper than our US hosting provider. I will be looking at options. If it comes down to it, we can have a build similar to the US, but perhaps with more RAM (16 GBs is somewhat limiting). I will be reaching out to our hosting provider’s directly to discuss this.

 

I will go with the options that guarantee the top performance for our game servers since that’s something important to GFL as a whole. The more promising our divisions are looking, the better machines we will get. Though, that Intel i7-9700K machine is really one of the best machines we can get right now especially with it being overclocked to 5.1 GHz, lol.

 

Expanding Into New Locations

Finally, I would like to address a plan I have which is on the backburner until we stabilize our divisions in the US and UK. I haven’t thought too much of this plan. However, what I want to do is come up with a system that makes it so we can easily replicate game servers to different locations with as little overhead as possible. All servers should be the same on a technical aspect. With that said, they should have an environment similar to the servers in other locations (e.g. laid-back).

 

In order to do this, we’d have to heavily increase our internal training system so we can put people in-charge of the servers in newer locations.

 

The next location I plan to expand into is Australia. This won’t happen officially until we stabilize everything in our US and UK locations. If we can ever find a way to deal with language barriers (open to suggestions), we can also expand into places like Asia, Russia, etc. We can try games such as CS:GO, GMod, Rust, and TF2 out in these newer locations. Servers that don’t require an active admin team and high maintenance should be setup first, but as we expand, we can introduce heavier game modes into these locations.

 

Again, this plan is on the backburner and hasn’t been thought out. However, I will be trying to work on it in the next few months. I might also do some unofficial work meaning trying a server out there just to see how it goes.

 

Conclusion
I believe 2019 will be a very successful year for GFL. As long as we have time and are motivated, we’ll get work done and get far!

 

I plan to make more update posts similar to this in the future. I’ve had people tell me they miss these type of posts and I have myself. I just like writing about what I am working on, etc.

 

Google Doc

 

Thank you for reading.

[Royce 201 / 4,813]

Thanks for yet another year, couldn’t have been better. Stay strong, and here’s to another. ❤️

[King_Wailord 965 / 15,282]

Glad to see you acknowledging us jailbreak noobs 😜

 

Thanks for the update roy, csgo division is doing great so far!

Edited December 30, 2018 by King_Wailord

[Coolest Cat 1,266 / 14,449]

When Roy neglects Minecraft. Lol

 

Also, perhaps we should make some custom knife models for member+? I believe we can do that right?

 

Also, is @TOG That One Guy aka Homeless? 

[Joshy 4,333 / 43,856]

You know how some people ask if they can do something because they know it's the wrong thing to do.  You seem to do that a lot.  You already know the right answer- don't be a goofball.

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

6 minutes ago, Major_Push said:

When Roy neglects Minecraft. Lol

 

Also, perhaps we should make some custom knife models for member+? I believe we can do that right?

 

Also, is @TOG That One Guy aka Homeless? 

I'm not focusing on Minecraft myself. This post was addressing things that I am working on myself.

 

And yes, @TOG is That One Homeless Guy. Council member in 2014/2015.

 

Thanks.

[Cassie 1,225 / 22,887]

Hmm I seem to remember you joining ttt this year

[JGuary55 707 / 14,056]

I cry everytime I see you talk about CS JB 😢

[Cypher 1,187 / 11,383]

Someone should fill me in on purge when you get the chance. I'd love to see what we're working on. 

 

[Malal 145 / 0]

2 hours ago, Roy said:

and the enabling of weapon skins/gloves plugins

I haven't checked but if it's enabled on ZE you should disable it, you already get enough players as it is so it's not needed and it causes some bugs and issues with items tied to knives and sometimes pistols

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

4 minutes ago, Malal said:

I haven't checked but if it's enabled on ZE you should disable it, you already get enough players as it is so it's not needed and it causes some bugs and issues with items tied to knives and sometimes pistols

It's not. We won't be enabling this on CS:GO ZE, ever probably lol.

 

16 minutes ago, Cypher said:

Someone should fill me in on purge when you get the chance. I'd love to see what we're working on. 

 

I'll message you on Discord about it  

 

Thanks.

[AceOfSpadesMM 554 / 10,342]

Cheers to 2019. ❤️

 

GFL! 

[Ben 2,378 / 31,479]

3 hours ago, Major_Push said:

When Roy neglects Minecraft. Lol

 

I'm pretty sure that Roy doesn't know Java. Besides, if he does, then perhaps, we'd wind up getting some interesting custom plugins made.

 

The server opens on Jan. 1st, just heads up.

[NOT-LAW 183 / 4,316]

JB woooo

[Jinn 250 / 6,729]

JB!

[k2nod 198 / 6,318]

❤️

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

14 hours ago, Ben Roy said:

I'm pretty sure that Roy doesn't know Java. Besides, if he does, then perhaps, we'd wind up getting some interesting custom plugins made.

 

The server opens on Jan. 1st, just heads up.

I don't have much experience with Java

 

Thanks.

[Broskii 41 / 1,595]

Hyped for jb, thanks for a great year, and here's to more to come.

[iTaco 22 / 882]

Cheers my dude... It is an honor to be part of the community. Anytime anyone needs help never be afraid to ask. If i can help i will do my best.