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[6-19-16] Cleaning Up, Improving, Etc...

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32 minutes ago, Cypher said:

Solid. Is there anything we can do to increase ad traffic?

 

Ad based supporter giveaways.

 

ayyy lmao.

At the end of the month we make a thread and say that we're giving away X amount of supporter ranks. And the amount of supporter ranks given would be dependent on how much money we got that month. I'm thinking something along the lines of every $100 (or something like that) generated on ad revenue is 1 extra rank being given away. And perhaps doing a special giveaway of VIP everytime we hit $1000 or something like that in ad revenue. In March we would have given 5 ~ 6 donator ranks if we were doing it every $100 and depending on whether you round up or down. In the end we'd be giving up a potential of $25 ~ $30 for $576. 

 

It shouldn't take away that much from donations since ideally we'll give people a month time frame to post in the thread which SHOULD result in getting a lot of posts on that thread. With a low chance of getting the prize it won't really be a good way to get supporter so I doubt that we'll be affecting the people who really want supporter (the ones who will donate anyway). At most we'll be losing the donations of the people who kind of want to donate but don't really want to. But since we're making $100 for every $5 we lose to this, we're not going to be losing that much money.

 

It would help generate ad traffic by giving people a reason to type !ads. This is especially relevant on CSGO ZE (our most populated server) where everyone's just trying to get a reserved slot via VIP. ZE also happens to have a lot of time where nothing's happening for the zombies because they play a lot of maps with boss fights. When motd ads were first implemented I kept spamming people to type !ads to support the servers and we'd be constantly getting people doing it on boss fights. As time went on, we stopped telling people to do it and that could possibly account for the decent drop in ad revenue after March. Anyway, the giveaways should get people more interested in watching ads and should ideally not take away from supporter donations. 

 

And if we're doing a round down kind of thing, then we can also ensure that we make more money per giveaway.

 

I've been suggesting this for a long time. Any thoughts or opinions?

 

#AdBasedSupporterGiveaways


"Be good people"

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2 hours ago, Roy said:

Hello everybody, I am here to give another small update on what will be happening. Recently, we've been spending a lot of time setting up the User Management addon on Garry's Mod. We ran into a lot of conflicts, etc with this addon. However, I believe we are good to go (besides a few small things). Finally, I would like to say we have successfully moved off of SourceBans for managing Members, Supporters, and VIPs and will only be used for Server Admins+ and bans.


With that said, I am going to be listing things we need to do in the future. Things that will improve our servers, etc.

 

Server Cuts

Here is an official list of servers we are planning to cut. These will be shut down if they haven't already (we will keep backups of the files in case we want to bring them back in the future). Please keep in mind this list isn't final. However, these are the servers likely to be cut. There are many servers on the "watch-list" which means if they don't receive any attention or population, we will likely add them to the cut list. Although, we are giving these specific servers a lot of time to seek attention, etc.

 

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

  • Bunny Hop #2 (US) - Was a failure on OVH. We also cut the OVH box and not enough population.
  • Zombie Escape (EU) - Not enough population.
  • Casual Competitive (US) - Not enough population.
  • DeathRun (EU) - Not enough population.

 

Counter-Strike: Source

  • GunGame (US) - Not enough population.
  • MiniGames (US) - Not enough population.

 

Garry's Mod

  • Cinema (US) - Not enough population.
  • Extreme Football Throwdown (US) - Not enough population.
  • Bunny Hop (US) - Not enough population + broken with no manager.
  • TTT #1 (EU) - Not enough population.
  • TTT #2 (US) - Not enough population.
  • Surf Timer (US) - Not enough population + broken with no manager.

 

Team Fortress 2

  • Super Smash Fortress (US) - Not enough population.
  • Surf Timer (US) - Not enough population + Plugin never developed?

 

Rust

  • Server #1 - Not enough room on our boxes.

 

We are removing these servers because we feel it's best to focus on servers with generally more population. There are many servers that were once popular that have slowly died over the past couple years. These servers need more attention.

 

Population & MOTD Ads

As I said in the Server Cuts section, many of our servers are slowly dying. Some of them are due to mismanagement, others are due to their game mode becoming more concentrated with other game servers. Regardless, there are always areas we can improve in.

 

Why are our servers dying?

The answer depends on the server. There are servers dying due to mismanagement. This leads to bad admins being selected, etc. I'm sure most of us are aware there are Server Admins in this community who shouldn't be Server Admin.

 

With that said, at one point, we had the most populated server in a couple game modes. However, since then, we've went down due to that specific game mode becoming condensed with other game servers that are doing something better than us. In the end, we aren't doing something right. Our servers are dying while other servers are staying active. There is definitely something on our end we aren't doing right and we have to find out what that "something" is.

 

I will be working with Division Leaders and Server Managers to see what we can improve on. I will also be introducing a big feature below that would help with population, etc.

 

MOTD Ads

Many of you were probably wondering why our donations amount suddenly went from ~$390 to $900+ the other day. Well, that was from MOTD Ads. We received around ~$580 from MOTD Ads this month (generated from March, 2016). However, the money we are receiving from MOTDGD is going down. We had $576 generated in March, however, April was $491 and May was $322. We are going downhill sadly. This is due to not receiving as much ad requests as before (e.g. not as much population, etc) and the $ Per View amount is also going down most likely.

 

We are only running MOTDGD on CS:GO at the moment. Therefore, it'll be beneficial to add MOTDGD ads to Garry's Mod, etc. Although, further discussion is needed for this.

 

In-Game Store For SourceMod

 Remember when an in-game store was a big incentive for Members, Supporters, VIPs? I sure do! Sadly, we had to remove the old store due to critical issues. 

 

Anyway, we plan on using this plugin. I believe the database structure the plugin uses supports multiple servers via MySQL. The plugin is currently on CS:GO Zombie Mod (US and EU) and working fine according to @SwegBuster.

 

How will we have the store setup?

Basically, like this:

  • < Members - Gain credits but cannot access the Store.
  • Members - Gain 2 credits per minute and can access the Store.
  • Supporters+ - Gains 4 credits per minute and can access the Store + special items.
  • VIPs - Gains 6 credits per minute and can access the Store + special items.

The credits amount isn't final yet. However, there is no reason for < Members to access the Store. It is extremely easy to sign up on the forums and apply for Member. That said, this will highly encourage forum traffic and people becoming involved with the community.

 

If possible, we would like to share a global database with all other servers for store credits. Items will most likely be server-specific (unless if the plugin allows global items). To sum up, I haven't really looked into this Store plugin so far. The plugin does seem promising and after an update for CS:GO back in February that raised the precache model limit from 1024 to 4096, we can likely run this on most of our CS:GO servers!

 

More information will be released in the future!

 

Overall

Yes, a small update. I will be making individual posts in the future addressing certain topics. As of right now, GFL is looking better. We have a lot of great people helping us get back on track! The Summer of 2016 is almost officially here and as said in the past, "GFL gets better every Summer". I hope we can fully recover this Summer!

 

Thank you for reading.

I got it only working on US ZM. For some odd reason on EU isn't working. Loads all the models just won't run :(. I will work on it soon.


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Also, can we get a list of the servers that are close to being cut?

 

That way the admins/managers of that server have a bit more pressure on them to work on their server. Also, it will give the regulars of that server a bit more of an incentive to help populate the server.


"Be good people"

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54 minutes ago, Major_Push said:

Also, can we get a list of the servers that are close to being cut?

 

That way the admins/managers of that server have a bit more pressure on them to work on their server. Also, it will give the regulars of that server a bit more of an incentive to help populate the server.

None of the other servers are doing poorly enough. Everyone should be working hard either way. 

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Posted  Edited by CrusTi · Hidden
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Thanks for the update @Roy I sure things will get better. I honestly think the drama, damages, and server crashes caused to GFL cause population drop. For example, the SurfTimer Tier 1-3 use to be packed daily with players but a crash a while back causing the server to be down for 2 hours nearly killed the entire population. The SurfTimer 1-3 server is not nearly as populated as it use to so a Population squad/team would be a good Idea to get SurfTimer and other servers back in the game. 

 

Also, now that School is out for most people including me, I have had time to make some cash. I plan on donating to GFL when I can but I am very limited and I use my money wisely. In the near future I will donate what I can and continue to support GFL.

Edited by CrusTi

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32 minutes ago, CrusTi said:

Thanks for the update @Roy I sure things will get better. I honestly think the drama, damages, and server crashes caused to GFL cause population drop. For example, the SurfTimer Tier 1-3 use to be packed daily with players but a crash a while back causing the server to be down for 2 hours nearly killed the entire population. The SurfTimer 1-3 server is not nearly as populated as it use to so a Population squad/team would be a good Idea to get SurfTimer and other servers back in the game. 

 

Also, now that School is out for most people including me, I have had time to make some cash. I plan on donating to GFL when I can but I am very limited and I use my money wisely. In the near future I will donate what I can and continue to support GFL.

you wanna buy some subs?? i got some

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I'm not against these cuts.  I think it'll be good for us to concentrate our resources into the servers with more promise considering our large size.  You may call it a small update, but I think it's big, and it's a good one in my opinion.


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