Medium Team Fortress 2 On Roadmap Current state of the servers

[Vael_Carnage]

In my opinion from what i have seen as a tf2 EC/Admin over the course of the past few months our servers have been dwindling in players HEAVILY even before the holidays, harvest seems to barely get 14 players on a weekend let alone the other servers have been gaining dust for weeks outside quick fills (2fort/hightower) meanwhile i see a lot of other server hoster's having massive amounts of players 16 and upwards, i think we need a way to bring people to play on our servers more outside quick fills and waiting for it to blow over, and it doesn't help that the hightower had a bad rep for a while of really toxic players playing on it and not getting punished.

Suggested Fix: i suggest we advertise the server more outside its usual space of the eGO discord server or asking people to join them after events, such as say recommending it to players looking for a server, i have brought quite a few players onto our servers and into being regulars just because they never heard of eGO before it (casual is a great way to find players, or friends) or having admins online more often so players don't feel like they are forced to join a discord server to get help with issues (something i noticed was a problem before i became an admin) as a lot of players act goody toe shoes around admins but are horrid when none are online. another good way could be telling players on active servers (like harvest which seems to be the most popular) about the other servers, most players from what i have seen ignore the chat message of "we have other servers 0 players active" but thats all i have for my thoughts here.

 

[Simon]

Are there any things you notice other servers doing well that maybe would be easy to implement and effective at retaining players? Or is this more to do with the community factor? Is it time to maybe replace one of the quieter maps with something different?

 

[Vael_Carnage]

Are there any things you notice other servers doing well that maybe would be easy to implement and effective at retaining players? Or is this more to do with the community factor? Is it time to maybe replace one of the quieter maps with something different?

Honestly i don't see too much different outside tiny plugins, and after hightower was down for the better part of half a year almost, it cut player count a lot and most players that went from hightower to harvest/2fort were usually the toxic players which in turn scared off new players to the server, the last time i saw the servers doing really really well was around summer because most schools are out, but thats not really for eGO mainly. tf2 as a whole has its player count boom around that time

 

[4g0tt3nSou1]

hightower was down for the better part of half a year almost

This, right here, was the biggest thing that has put that server in trouble. And boy oh boy, THAT was an absolutely bizarre issue that had not just TF2 leadership, but tech, and anyone else we asked (it did get to the point where we had to reach out to a few people to see if they had any idea why it kept crashing).
I am so glad that's all patched lol. It took completely wiping everything, and I mean absolutely nuking everything and rebuilding things from scratch.

The biggest problem is it's very difficult right now to add content to the servers that actually address the problem at hand.
We had RTD for a good bit that aimed to spice things up, but that plugin sparked controversy putting it mildly, although it fulfilled its goal and broke up monotony. It didn't help that it broke too, so it was removed.

Killstreaker is the new kid on the block and added a neat feature for DS's, but overall; this doesn't really add much to the replayability of the servers I suppose. It doesn't hurt anything and it's always nice to give the people who support us new toys.

I suppose the bottom line is that TF2 Leadership wants to hear from you guys, what WOULD be some neat suggestions on what we can add to the servers to spice them up, or help make it engaging for you, the players. Think I can speak for them a little bit in this regard because I still occasionally (as recently as today) was helping the folks there with the servers to help bring them up-to-date with some stuff; I digress. They just need info on what people actually want. For example, Harvest kinda is meant to be more competitive playstyle, where 2Fort is mainly just casually playing. Is that what people actually want? We have a decent amount of flexibility, so like, if you want something, Let us know!

EDIT:
I will add from a Tech Team/TF2 LE/Dev perspective, one of the challenges is that a LOT of stuff like plugins go unmaintained. This can cause a problem with adopting just any plugin, HOWEVER, If there is a call for an unmaintained plugin, we don't have a problem doing some maintenance on our own and bringing them up-to-date, and so on. We always honor the original developer's rights to their code, but like, if the plugin hasn't been maintained in two(or 5) years, and we want to use it, and it just needs updated to the newest version of SM, we don't have a problem doing that, and would revert back to the original should it be maintained again.

such as say recommending it to players looking for a server

That sounds pretty on point with what the Recruitment Coordinator's team is all about. I can't speak for them, but I'd be colored silly if they were not interested in hearing more, or possibly getting you on board if you wanted to help out in that area. Pretty sure, so long as we are abiding by the rules of others, you can feel free to put a reasonable amount of feelers out there. We don't encourage spamming, off-platform or on-platform; I know a few people have some binds for example that advert the community when/if they play other servers, of course making sure we are allowed to do so.

 

[Vael_Carnage]

This, right here, was the biggest thing that has put that server in trouble. And boy oh boy, THAT was an absolutely bizarre issue that had not just TF2 leadership, but tech, and anyone else we asked (it did get to the point where we had to reach out to a few people to see if they had any idea why it kept crashing).
I am so glad that's all patched lol. It took completely wiping everything, and I mean absolutely nuking everything and rebuilding things from scratch.

The biggest problem is it's very difficult right now to add content to the servers that actually address the problem at hand.
We had RTD for a good bit that aimed to spice things up, but that plugin sparked controversy putting it mildly, although it fulfilled its goal and broke up monotony. It didn't help that it broke too, so it was removed.

Killstreaker is the new kid on the block and added a neat feature for DS's, but overall; this doesn't really add much to the replayability of the servers I suppose. It doesn't hurt anything and it's always nice to give the people who support us new toys.

I suppose the bottom line is that TF2 Leadership wants to hear from you guys, what WOULD be some neat suggestions on what we can add to the servers to spice them up, or help make it engaging for you, the players. Think I can speak for them a little bit in this regard because I still occasionally (as recently as today) was helping the folks there with the servers to help bring them up-to-date with some stuff; I digress. They just need info on what people actually want. For example, Harvest kinda is meant to be more competitive playstyle, where 2Fort is mainly just casually playing. Is that what people actually want? We have a decent amount of flexibility, so like, if you want something, Let us know!

EDIT:
I will add from a Tech Team/TF2 LE/Dev perspective, one of the challenges is that a LOT of stuff like plugins go unmaintained. This can cause a problem with adopting just any plugin, HOWEVER, If there is a call for an unmaintained plugin, we don't have a problem doing some maintenance on our own and bringing them up-to-date, and so on. We always honor the original developer's rights to their code, but like, if the plugin hasn't been maintained in two(or 5) years, and we want to use it, and it just needs updated to the newest version of SM, we don't have a problem doing that, and would revert back to the original should it be maintained again.


That sounds pretty on point with what the Recruitment Coordinator's team is all about. I can't speak for them, but I'd be colored silly if they were not interested in hearing more, or possibly getting you on board if you wanted to help out in that area. Pretty sure, so long as we are abiding by the rules of others, you can feel free to put a reasonable amount of feelers out there. We don't encourage spamming, off-platform or on-platform; I know a few people have some binds for example that advert the community when/if they play other servers, of course making sure we are allowed to do so.

Personally from my experience on playing tf2 for as long as i have, rtd could be a good feature but you would have to remove certain things like "power play" or another one i think called "god mode" as that's why people have an issue with it usually as you can be doing amazing someone rolls powerplay and now your entire time just lost the game or you lose a massive killstreak etc, the new killstreak feature I'm not too fond of similar to the powerplay imo it discourages good gameplay as even if you get a really good godlike or something and carry your team, someone can just set their killstreak to 95 and always show up above you.

Some servers do have a shop system using a credit/points system (different to the ranking one) where you can get color trails behind you or titles, that could be a good implementation for just average players or returning regulars.

Another issue however that could be straying players away from the servers is harvest, it has a pretty bad spawn camping issue atm especially with the low population of the server one side often pushes the other into their spawn and never lets them leave.

 

[4g0tt3nSou1]

At this time, we are exploring and will continue to explore new methods of advertising our servers.

In terms of the other problems with the servers, this is something we will heavily be addressing soon, including in an upcoming meeting. I encourage everyone who might have feedback to post it here, or DM me on discord! my DMs are always open.