- Joined
- Oct 26, 2013
- Messages
- 2,078
Total. Including all of the Valve Official maps, as well as the slew of Community Maps out there.
Wait, hold on. Why are we basing the health of our servers on their ranks? The only thing ranks tell us is the effectiveness of our fills and the popularity that pubs give us. In my opinion, if we can not only pay for a server but also prove that it is integral to our community, both inside and outside of eGO, then that server should live, regardless of rank.
To be completely honest with you, I feel the urgency of rankings was introduced because the rankings were easily accessible data someone used to help convince people to support our servers. The problem with that strategy is that the rankings are not easily defined. There's a difference between someone's game_me total points and his or her ranking, the difference being that rankings are compared with other people-- it's completely possible that your ranks are dropping because other people are just getting better than you. Some people can say "What's the point? You're still losing ranks," to which I say that if your skill is sufficient to an arbitrary standard, your rank shouldn't matter in the first place.
I hope you understand where I'm going with this. Rankings are not rigid, and even though popularity is a hard statistic to measure, that is far more reliable than ranking alone.
I dunno. I'm rambling in the wee hours of the morning, aren't I?
To be completely honest with you, I feel the urgency of rankings was introduced because the rankings were easily accessible data someone used to help convince people to support our servers. The problem with that strategy is that the rankings are not easily defined. There's a difference between someone's game_me total points and his or her ranking, the difference being that rankings are compared with other people-- it's completely possible that your ranks are dropping because other people are just getting better than you. Some people can say "What's the point? You're still losing ranks," to which I say that if your skill is sufficient to an arbitrary standard, your rank shouldn't matter in the first place.
I hope you understand where I'm going with this. Rankings are not rigid, and even though popularity is a hard statistic to measure, that is far more reliable than ranking alone.
I dunno. I'm rambling in the wee hours of the morning, aren't I?
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2012
- Messages
- 1,814
What's the point of paying for a server if nobody plays on it?
It's just something used as reference.
If it were not for Egypt's fan base and absolute love from members and regulars alike, I guarantee it'd have been removed a while ago.
That's why it's important to save it - because now that isn't enough, apparently - servers are being lost left and right.
But Egypt's rankings have been going up by a lot, which I'm sure you've noticed, which basically says that it can survive on its own for a few hours without a fill having to reboot it because it emptied out.
And no one wants to pay for an empty server, even one that almost everyone in the community loves, which is what makes things difficult (which is good, lol)
If it were not for Egypt's fan base and absolute love from members and regulars alike, I guarantee it'd have been removed a while ago.
That's why it's important to save it - because now that isn't enough, apparently - servers are being lost left and right.
But Egypt's rankings have been going up by a lot, which I'm sure you've noticed, which basically says that it can survive on its own for a few hours without a fill having to reboot it because it emptied out.
And no one wants to pay for an empty server, even one that almost everyone in the community loves, which is what makes things difficult (which is good, lol)
Fun,
Whether we like it or not, that rank helps us determine how frequently a server will fill. I do understand that if our rankings drop, it could mean other servers are doing way better as supposed that ours is doing awful. But if we let Egypt's rank number drop, it'll get to the point of Valve Maps. On most days, Valve Maps would not have any people. When it did, it would stay full at most an hour. We had some regulars and had some members who love rotation servers, myself included. But even those who love the server so much wouldn't stay on an empty server for long.
Imagine being a regular of server X. Server X's rank has dropped to the point that it is usually empty all day and the evening. If you don't see it being filled with more than 8 people at a time, wouldn't you go to another server that hosts the same map? And this way, we lose regulars of our servers.
I have seen many popular servers removed, including my favorite server. Always they had dropped to a point where they would only fill up once or twice a week. The rest of the time, they stayed empty. Popularity may be a better statistic, but trying to say "this empty server is one of our most popular server" is not convincing. I'm not saying Egypt is at that point, but we can't let it go there.
I agree with Kazoo's sentiment that this is a proactive initiative and should be treated as such. Egypt has seen decent increases over the last week -- a good sign. Even myself as a frequenter of Harvest and Hightower (I prefer smaller maps) -- I make my appearances on Egypt 1-2x a week.
Are you implying that services like QuickPlay depend on server ranks to choose the best server for someone to join? Because if it actually is, then congratulations, you've just deemed my argument null and void.
Apparently, that hasn't been a high honor...
I was just trying to make the point that we can't depend on a single statistic to generate ideas of the server as a whole, and I'm sure at least to an extent you'd agree with that. But, I'm not saying there isn't any substance to ranks either, heck, you've proven me wrong right here anyways.
I guess what I'm trying to do is give you all a gentle reminder that, though server ranks are convenient and are reliable only in a relative sense to other neighboring servers, the server ranks are also convenient and are reliable only in a relative sense to other neighboring servers.
Pretty sure it does. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Actually, no. How I think it works is that quickplay looks at recent activity in a server and dictates the flow of people into that server accordingly. Gametracker ranks are a direct reflection of that.
So even though it's basically backwards, it's fair to say quickplay decides where it sends who based on ranks.
