Upcoming server changes and rollouts

Reechard

Server Admin
VF4-S (Server Operator)
Minecraft Operator
Staff Member
Minecraft Admin
Hi Folks!

I wanted to throw up a general announcement with our current plans. During our transition to our new gameserver, you will start to notice we are longer maintaining a heavy focus on TF2 servers, and even less so on trying to maintain quickplay compatible servers.

Many of you know the struggle we've had trying to maintain a quickplay presence in hopes of having quickplay people come in and join the community. This worked rather well when quickplay was new, getting a new member every week or so out of it, but as our quickplay traffic dwindled, so did the amount of new folks we got out of it. Valve has made several changes over the past couple of years that have made it extremely difficult for us to even maintain quickplay connectivity, and in the process we've compromised quite a few of our better donator perks to maintain compatibility.

Having said that, the latest patch update has made it so QuickPlay players no longer receive HTML MOTDs at *all*. While this is great for the average Joe-Quickplay, as the thousands of scam quickplay servers that skim quickplay traffic in order to spam ads at people will no longer work, what Valve has done with this change is fix a problem with a sledgehammer. They've made it so that even quickplay servers with tasteful HTML MOTDs advertising the community that funds the server will no longer be viewable. All quickplay players will see a basic text MOTD, essentially removing the last tiny bit of way to individualize a community-run quickplay server.

We've combined this with evidence presented by another server admin at another community that Valve put up SEVEN HUNDRED halloween event quickplay servers. SEVEN HUNDRED on the new map. This was a bit of a middle-finger at us as far as we were concerned...

ANYHOO! Because we're no longer relying on donations to keep gameservers running, we're going to mothball some of the older TF2 servers, leaving Dustbowl, Payload, the UGC Map Of The Week, and a couple of mod servers up (comp servers aside, those will be around regardless). With these going down, you'll see other games popping up. We've already put up

  • Day of Defeat (source)
  • Unreal Tournament
  • Unreal Tournament 2004
  • Slender Fortress
You'll see other games pop up over the next few weeks. The general feeling towards these is that if you think "I haven't played game X in a while", we'll have a server up for it and you can bring your friends and come play on it.

Let us know what you think!
 
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I should add that those 700 valve servers (+ another 125 or so that were running a cycle of halloween maps and just happened to be on hightower_event) weren't an insignificant chunk, they had half as many servers as all other communities combined.

Those valve servers did not go live until day 2 of the event, which explains why the 18 servers I put up were full instantly the first day and remained that way for 24 hours, but have been rather lackluster since then. The HLDS mailing list was littered with people experiencing the same problem of full servers to zero traffic.
 
DoD or DoD:S? Askign because I only have Source. Also, what game modes on 2k4? (I LOVE 2k4 even if I have not played in a long time and prefer CTF and/or the Invasion RPG mod).
 
DoD or DoD:S? Askign because I only have Source. Also, what game modes on 2k4? (I LOVE 2k4 even if I have not played in a long time and prefer CTF and/or the Invasion RPG mod).
Source :)
 
I wasn't going to mod the ut2k4 server, just leave it stock. For right now the only gamemode it is set up for is straight-up deathmatch, as I don't expect more then 3-4 people on at a time, so we're going to K.I.S.S. We can of course change it up with some CTF or Onslaught if we get a big group that wants to play.
 

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