The current state of surf timer servers.

[Berg 44 / 2,990]

As many of you know the state of the surf timer servers haven’t been worse than what they currently are. We have gone from 4 out of 6 completely full servers to 6 near empty servers. This is a sad development to see, and I think it’s time to talk about the issues that the servers have and what can be done to fix it.

The main issue is the lack of active players and admins. The current situation has resulting in casual playing players leaving as well as admins. If I were to look at the current admin/operator list, I would only be able to name a handful of the staff members who have been active on the servers in the last week. This including a manager. Now I’m aware that a new manager has been picked but has yet to receive any form of training. The lack of priority to get a new functioning manager going is a careless act, considering the servers have been in a need for a new manager for almost 3 months now.
What worse is that none of the higher ups that are meant to train him know much about cksurf and definitely not surf timer as a whole. They could only teach the new manager general server sided things and he'd have to figure out how to deal with the timer and stuff like zoning himself. Also the people that were meant to train him are careless individuals who have shown signs of negligence to train managers before, and should not have been assigned to the task.

I think it would make more sense to get an experienced surf timer manager on the task of training the new ones. Since I’m aware that the former surf manager and division leader Frenzy had made it clear to the higher ups that he happily would do so I went ahead and contacted Frenzy. He confirmed this and has agreed upon training Neo to become the new manager of surf timer if it gets approved. 

@Roy @Cypher @floopyhiggle @Kim @Shuruia @Infantry @Neo @FrenZy

Edited September 3, 2016 by Berg

[kneegerrlover123 389 / 8,946]

Sadly,it's not only the surf's server issue,ZM is dying here too.

The reason behind the servers dying is mostly either staff abuse or just simply school.

[Addy 1,648 / 18,732]

It could have to do with the fact that a lot of other Surf servers break Valve's Community guidelines and use plugins that they aren't supposed to, but receive no punishment. Now, I'm not sure what the situation is about the manager and/or staff for the server, but if I had to bet, the banned plugins have a lot to do with it. 

 

It could also simply be because school is starting, about the inactive admins. 

[Alucard33rd 1,175 / 15,145]

We can blame the state of surf how we want but part of the problem is we have a busy Manager who hardly has time to ever  get on or add on to surf. The community has been asking for new surf maps for months now. Most left because nothing new was being added. Yes, also because of !ws, !knife, etc. Although Kalz could have been a really good manager if trained to the fullest, I agree with the points stated in the post.

Edited September 3, 2016 by CrusTi

[Ben 2,378 / 31,903]

The main issue of players not coming on this server is because lack of communications between Valve and community and their guidelines. There are still other servers that run "forbidden plugins," there are some servers that disabled "report a server" option(I've seen some of them), some of them run ads every minute.

 

Although, I agree that this state of our surf timer servers is terribly bad due to lack of work on the server(from what I am reading) and other stuff.

[FrenZy 614 / 8,849]

Putting so much of blame on the fact that we stopped running plugins that enabled players to use !ws and similar entities is honestly kind of pathetic. Sure there's a lot of Surf Timer servers currently doing well that are running them, but the quality of their servers are shit and pretty much only have a bunch of useless cucks playing on them.

 

The vast majority of the players we have lost have switched over to other communities with straight up superior servers and better management of both the community aspect and the servers themselves. I could name a handful, but I'll avoid doing so since it could be considered advertising. Virtually all of them have never even used the plugins we're blaming for losing population and are still doing leaps and bounds better.

 

@Fainted did a good job making a lot of changes to our timer to try to give us a chance against these giants that are our competitors. ckSurf is difficult to work with however and just not a good timer all things considered. Any schmuck that wants to have a server can easily have it up and running with that timer with very little effort.

 

My point: GFL Surf Timer and Bhop servers cannot compete with the competition with the tools the servers currently have. I've tried to argue this point for many months before I even quit, and during an extended amount of time I considered hiring someone myself to make us a timer that could compete. This was before we even started the major downfall, and I knew it would happen eventually. You can just call me mystic Nick, 'cause I predict dese tings. This is the only thing I can really see saving the servers in the long run.

 

I find it strange how it's been several months since I stepped down and I've not been consulted once by higher ups with the huge decline in population of the servers. I offered my help when I quit, particularly issues regarding Surf Timer. It to me just shows utter carelessness.

 

GFL is a shadow of it's former self, it is both sad and pathetic.

 

Best regards

The best damn Surf Timer manager this community ever had.

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

1 hour ago, Berg said:

As many of you know the state of the surf timer servers haven’t been worse than what they currently are. We have gone from 4 out of 6 completely full servers to 6 near empty servers. This is a sad development to see, and I think it’s time to talk about the issues that the servers have and what can be done to fix it.

The main issue is the lack of active players and admins. The current situation has resulting in casual playing players leaving as well as admins. If I were to look at the current admin/operator list, I would only be able to name a handful of the staff members who have been active on the servers in the last week. This including a manager. Now I’m aware that a new manager has been picked but has yet to receive any form of training. The lack of priority to get a new functioning manager going is a careless act, considering the servers have been in a need for a new manager for almost 3 months now.
What worse is that none of the higher ups that are meant to train him know much about cksurf and definitely not surf timer as a whole. They could only teach the new manager general server sided things and he'd have to figure out how to deal with the timer and stuff like zoning himself. Also the people that were meant to train him are careless individuals who have shown signs of negligence to train managers before, and should not have been assigned to the task.

I think it would make more sense to get an experienced surf timer manager on the task of training the new ones. Since I’m aware that the former surf manager and division leader Frenzy had made it clear to the higher ups that he happily would do so I went ahead and contacted Frenzy. He confirmed this and has agreed upon training Neo to become the new manager of surf timer if it gets approved. 

@Roy @Cypher @floopyhiggle @Kim @Shuruia @Infantry @Neo @FrenZy

Yes, sadly, GFL's Surf Timer servers have been dying for a long time now. There are many reasons they are dying (I will list below).

 

Once I train @Neo, I believe we should remove inactive admins. That said, yes, I do agree that the servers have went too long without a manager. I've been very busy recently which is why I haven't had the time to train Neo. I would definitely prefer if somebody else trained Neo as well since I haven't had the time.

 

Assuming that "none of the higher ups know much about ckSurf" is ridiculous. With me being a "higher-up", I have experience in managing our Surf Timer servers when we had ZipCore's timer along with ckSurf. That said, I would definitely agree I don't play our Surf Timer servers much. However, there really isn't much to "learn". You don't have to be a "Surf Timer pro" to manage a successful Surf Timer server (creating zones, etc is easy).

 

As said in this thread already, one major issue is Valve's carelessness for community servers. A majority of the top Surf Timer servers in the United States have "!knife", etc in their host name indicating they are running plugins against Valve's server guidelines. The second issue is the fact that many more Surf Timer servers have opened in the past couple years. Back when we had the #1 Surf Timer servers, there weren't as many Surf Timer servers around as today. The third issue is our timer being outdated and not unique along with other general problems (e.g. inactive admins, bugged times, etc).

 

You can deny the first two issues all you want, but I'm confident that those two issues have affected us the most. The third issue has had a big effect on us for the past three months and our servers have suffered. The truth is, our Surf Timer servers haven't been fully "populated" in over a year.

 

Overall, I definitely agree there are issues with our Surf Timer servers and I wish I had the time to fix them. I will be talking to Neo, Dano, BoD team, etc about focusing on Surf Timer and the fact that these issues need to be resolved. However, even with those issues resolved, our servers will still likely not compete with the top servers due to the first two issues. I've also been doing my absolute best to communicate with Valve about getting the first two issues resolved (e.g. start properly eliminating the cheating servers and give non-empty servers an advantage over empty servers). However, sadly, Valve still hasn't communicated about the issues.

 

Thanks.

[SwegBuster 879 / 15,758]

I am willing to train @Neo some basics of management. But as you said yourself not all the higher ups know how to work with surf, but like Neo. I am willing to learn for the cause.

[FrenZy 614 / 8,849]

6 hours ago, Roy said:

Assuming that "none of the higher ups know much about ckSurf" is ridiculous. With me being a "higher-up", I have experience in managing our Surf Timer servers when we had ZipCore's timer along with ckSurf. That said, I would definitely agree I don't play our Surf Timer servers much. However, there really isn't much to "learn". You don't have to be a "Surf Timer pro" to manage a successful Surf Timer server (creating zones, etc is easy).

 

As said in this thread already, one major issue is Valve's carelessness for community servers. A majority of the top Surf Timer servers in the United States have "!knife", etc in their host name indicating they are running plugins against Valve's server guidelines. The second issue is the fact that many more Surf Timer servers have opened in the past couple years. Back when we had the #1 Surf Timer servers, there weren't as many Surf Timer servers around as today. The third issue is our timer being outdated and not unique along with other general problems (e.g. inactive admins, bugged times, etc).

Even if Valve stomped on the servers that use !knife and similar features their players wouldn't flock to GFL. Currently, GFL is just a touch better than the shitty servers that use those plugins, while communities that have their own timer are leaps and bounds ahead of us with features such as !style, stage records and global world record announcements. (These are just a few examples.) @Fainted and I implemented a prestrafe plugin, which is definitely a good feat we have on the other hand in comparison, though it's not enough. 

 

This attitude that you do not have to be a "Surf Timer pro" to manage a successful surf server is exactly the kind of attitude that will get GFL nowhere near out of this bottomless pit it has fallen into. It may have been true in 2014, for the exact reasons you mentioned, it just isn't true anymore. People want quality, our regulars that we lost saw how good some of the other communities timers were in comparison and they began leaving. It's like beating a dead horse using this timer if nothing is being done to improve it. Why not take some initiative and put developers to work on it at the very least, to get some of the features I mentioned put in?  Managing a Surf Timer server is NOT just about adding maps and zoning them properly.

 

You pointed out how you thought our servers hadn't been "full" for over a year. There were many times in late 2015 and early 2016 where the servers flourished. US 1-3 was regularly in the top 10, EU 1-2 and 1-3 were doing better than ever and both almost reached top 10 many times. 1-4 EU (That was then 1-6) Actually had a moment of success as well, going from rank 2500+ to top 100~ within two weeks of time.

[Cypher 1,187 / 11,383]

Don't tag me in this lol, I have absolutely nothing to do with surf timer.

[Deltaz 6 / 2,145]

On 2016-09-03 at 11:25 PM, Roy said:

[...]

You don't have to be a "Surf Timer pro" to manage a successful Surf Timer server (creating zones, etc is easy).

[...]

That seems like a stretch of the word successful to me. You can't just half-ass the server and expect people to stay on it. The server seems to have aimed for beginner surfers, with the removal of tier 5+ maps and other "annoying" maps, and lack of zones on hard bonuses. Which might have seemed like a good idea (jk), but there is no incentive for surfers to stay once they reach a certain skill level, so they switch community. This isn't the only reason gfl surf timer is dying, but it sure helped to get rid of regulars.

[Fainted 11 / 2,181]

Berg brought this to my attention the other day, and since I'm not really interested in anything to do with csgo, I thought I'd release my code for the timer here. Codebase can be found at the end of this post. Use with caution though.

 

 

This is an unfinished build, some features are far from done in this build, while others are near completion.

 

 

Things this build includes:

Custom sounds for PB, SR, and Bonus SR. Custom SR and BSR sounds are broadcast to all players on the server. Can be accessed through the vip menu. - 100% Done, though with some bugs.

 

Cross-Server record announcements, SR and BSR messages are broadcast to other select servers using sockets. Does not currently use any sound. - 80% Done, possible infinite loop needs fixing.

 

 

Some work done on achievements, silent mode, and a level system. All of this was in very early development, so it needs substantial work to get to its intended state.

 

 

Finally, I will once again advise caution when using this build, make sure it is thoroughly tested, especially if you plan to use the cross server announcements. The announcements work in series, which means that the origin server contacts the next server in line, which contacts the next and so on. I believe the infinite loop of messages occurs when the chain of servers is disrupted, although I can’t remember the circumstances, but it was close to working optimally.

 

 

Custom sounds need to be added as .mp3 files in the sounds folder, and has to be added to a soundlist.txt file located in the data folder. Consult the code if you have some problems.

The only known bug with the sound system so far is that some players might not be able to hear specific sounds, this appears to be completely random. One sound could work fine for one player, but not for another. This is not a downloading issue with the sounds. I never managed to figure out what caused this issue, hence why it was never released. I do believe most sounds would work for the vast majority of players though.

 

Code might be a little messy in some places, I never bothered to clean it up before I stopped working on it.

 

 

I have only listed the features that were not present on the live servers during my stay at GFL. Prestrafe, strafestats etc. are still in this build.

 

 

 

Feel free to contact me on steam or discord(Fainted#6390) if you have any questions.

gfltimer.zip

Edited November 2, 2016 by Fainted