Infrastructure Upgrades!

[VintagePC]

Hi folks,

I'm pleased to announce that over the coming days we are going to begin upgrading some of our infrastructure to increase both our capacity and server performance.

I will do my best to keep interruptions to services to a minimum, but please accept my apologies in advance as some may be necessary while we work to migrate things over.

Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions!

 

[VintagePC]

The infrastructure migration is complete!

For now we have only moved over our existing servers (and bumped the player count on US Standard to 30, as an experiment) and any services
that were present on the US VPS.

You should notice improved performance on these servers, especially with higher player counts or large maps with many entities or a lot of projectiles.

We are looking at adding additional offerings in the near future (*cough cough* competitive *cough* pesonal servers *cough*) but for now we'll let things settle in in order to iron out any issues that might crop up, and do some further cleanup and infrastructure work to ensure we have a good foundation to build on.

Our supporter progress bar and goals have been updated to reflect the new monthly income requirements to support all of our regular expenditures. Our next goal is $200/mo in order to allow us to set up an EU dedicated server for our players across the ocean!

Stay tuned - and thank you all for your continued support!

 

[Tinkinator]

It's a shame donations have went down recently, I think they will pick up when the next TF2 Classic update comes out. I don't know a great deal about advertising; that being said, perhaps try looking to TF2C Discord to ask for donations? There's nothing on there to make people aware of VaultF4 and how it is funded by us the players.

 

[VintagePC]

Yes, we can hope - we definitely saw a surge in players when the last update released. In terms of advertising we are still trying to find the balance between making this known without being too "naggy" or persistent about it; to that extent it is featured in our MOTD and regular in-game messages in text chat. We are also continuing to work on perks to make being a donor more appealing, as we realize the current offerings are somewhat limited. This is also a tricky balance as we are deliberately avoiding perks that give donors any sort of actual in-game advantage.

You raise a good point though, a number of our staff hang out in the TF2C discord and subreddit, so it might be good to make a more general "who are we" type post to spread the word rather than a direct solicitation for donations.

 

[MoiraPrime]

Be aware the donation bar resets April 1st, and slowly goes up across the month as people's subscriptions renew.

 

[VintagePC]

Oh, yes - good point! (We do that because I prefer to track actual "received" donations rather than what we expect to receive - folks can cancel their recurring donations at any point and I think it would look weirder to have the bar arbitrarily drop during the month than have it start at zero on the first and only increase from there)