What's the matter with you guys?

[sahok 2 / 1,380]

Lately, 40 people have occasionally been recruited at events, what's the problem? Where has @Vanya gone? Where has @Rexy gone? After all, these guys really did good things on the server. They started a team, and people played as a team.  Why don't you invite them? Where did the people from Ges who played on the server go? Why don't you make event announcements in their group?  I can name several dozen players who have stopped playing for some time. Although some are visible on other servers. 

Why can't you make an announcement on your entire forum about the CS:S ZE event? (I'm talking about the main page)

Maybe the fools from CS:GO ZE,  learned something in this game. As far as I remember, this community started with this server. To pay tribute to this server, and to make events for the entire forum, I think it would be the right measure?  

It's a cry from the soul. There are thousands of you here, and you can really get this server back. Many players will return when there is some online on the server.

Put no-steam on, recruit some kind of mass of players, advertising in no steam in master servers, cost pennies for America. Why don't you do it?

[WarpedCakez 217 / 5,411]

First off, I don't expect anything I say here to make sense to @sahok as there is a clear language and cultural barrier between us and you. This is more for me making a public statement on the population issue since it has also been on my mind as well.

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If anyone has been following discussions about server population in the NA region, you would know that this issue has been going on for almost a decade when CSGO became popular. I'd say since around the time of the split, our ZE server has been operating at a net loss population. What does that mean? For every person that leaves the server (due to being busy IRL, getting burned out/bored, finding other games), there is not a replacement to fill that person. Since this has been happening over the course of years, it's no wonder that the NA population for not just ZE, but the entirety of CSS, has suffered. There is no solution to this.

In NA, gaming culture has evolved into following what we call "Flavor of the Month" (FOTM) games. Examples would be like Among Us, Valheim, Palworld, and the current FOTM Helldivers 2. These games get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players, and after around a month the player count drops off when the next big game launches. A game like CSS will never be a FOTM as the current CSS playerbase does not reflect the same culture as the people who follow these kinds of games.

Now that I have given some background to the problem, let's take a look at the OP and explain why we can't do anything.

I will not be harassing old players to join back. People like Vanya, Rexy, and the GES crew have all moved on in life and either play other games or don't have the energy to support this game. Asking them to join week after week is obnoxious and harmful to our good relations we have formed over the years. Not much of a surprise, but I want people who join our server to actually enjoy playing the game and interacting with each other. If anyone is not enjoying their time, then I don't want to force anyone to play.

Next to answer your question about event announcements, we post these everywhere. The events page on the forums (which also shows the event on the home page the day of the event), the discord, and both steam groups have dates, times, maps, and server IP for anyone to join. If you cannot find our events you are just not looking.

To make a point about CSGO ZE, we did try. After the CS2 launch we attempted to get our regulars on to see if we can play ZE with an orphaned playerbase, but the truth is that most of them did not care about CSS ZE. I saw this as our regulars were putting in insane 6+ hours a day trying to keep the numbers up while the CSGO ZE players would join for a map and then dip. They would also not join the server without a mini-event post after 5 days of making mini-events, which proved that the CSGO ZE player base did not want to integrate themselves with our server. It was a bit depressing to realize this truth, but the fact is that we cannot rely on a culturally different playerbase to fill our population.

Last point, we have no-steam turned on, but I refuse to advertise because I know what kind of people see these ads. It may work for a server like NiDE, but our server location is no where near Russia and would not be as appealing to join compared to closer located servers.

Look. I get the desire to have GFL be a top CSS ZE server with a healthy population again, but those days are long gone. The only thing we can do now is enjoy the players who are still sticking around and have fun. And if anyone is still reading this, we would love to have more people join for our weekly events every Saturday at 4 PM CST/CDT.

TL;DR

• Wide NA audience evolved away from games like CSS
• I will not harass players to join
• I will not advertise to shady websites
• Sorry that the server is not mega populated, I will try to find ways to make ZE enjoyable despite this population limitation