![=[Ga]= AutoDMC](https://gravatar.com/avatar/12a9fc53f7faa5623bdd75f9aec2029ad6f6c6571bc1bd1d6ba045600ac8689d?s=96){kind=avatar}
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2008
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Turbine lovers! Today is a day to rejoice! In this post, I'm going to talk about...
So skip to the section most interesting to you... but first...
Turbine Lovers are Awesome!
I shall sum up with two screenshots:
I told JohnT that if they made a Turbine 24/7, that I wouldn't rest until it was #1 in eGO and #1 in the world. Whoo hoo!
Now, I'm sure that 2FORT IR fans will make sure this victory lasts only as long as it must
But it's still an important achievement. Many didn't believe that a 24/7 Turbine could last; and worse, they even had EVIDENCE. But I'll address that in the next section.
But real thanks go out to all you other Turbine fans, both eGO members and not, who have filled the server and made it ROCK. I don't have enough words to express how happy I am today, and regular members of this forum realize just how momentus that must be! HAHA
So thank you Turbine Lovers. This moment is OURS.
What I think makes Turbine work
...and how this can be implemented on other servers
When Turbine 24/7 was tried originally about a year ago, it was semi popular (I mean, it wasn't no Lazytown, but it wasn't a Convoy either), but it just failed to fill. Many believed that it was a shortcoming of the Map or the community and that it should go. We Turbine Lovers knew this couldn't be true, but the stats didn't lie: Turbine just wouldn't fill.
When this server started up again, Use My Teleporter (a true Turbine Partisain) started a convo with me, talking about the shortcomings of the server. With the default respawn times, teams were horribly punished for being spawn controlled or having too many impulsive people. A grinning heavy-dual-medic guarding your spawn door meant even opening the doors triggered respawn times that could last a half minute. A half minute, for reference, is how long it takes a Scout to snag your intel and cap it on Turbine, for those unlucky enought to have not played enough yet.
The solution was to tweak the respawn parameter so that respawns were quicker without necessarily being instant; in other words, being spawn controlled didn't mean instadeath. You didn't have to just sit there in spawn for a minute and a half building an uber; you could harass the spawn controllers and maybe even allow a spy to sneak by without suffering five minutes of respawn time.
I believe this is why Turbine can hold an audience now, when it couldn't before. Even with competition from other Turbine servers, ours punishes teams less for playing a quick, hectic game, which is what Turbine is all about: Chaos.
So, for other servers out there: could respawn times be tweaked? Cap times? Speed of the cart? Just because the map developer thought the times were perfect doesn't mean that they are.
Before you spam Gardengrove with demands to adjust parameters, talk with the players on the map. Talk amongst yourselves. We changed one parameter on the Turbine server down 4 notches and a server that couldn't hold a population is almost always full. Think about it.
Turbine strategy
Turbine's number one! Time to go play some Counterstrike, right? NOPE!
I won't sleep until eGO Turbine is #1 in the world, and that means we still have a bit of work. Please turn your attention to this graph:
We are suffering the same malady we continue to suffer: population starts to drift about 2AM Central, falls apart around 4AM, and doesn't pick up until 8-10AM, giving us 4-6 hours of not becoming #1. Here's the SourceOp.com server we want to beat:
The key is to get rid of that middle-of-the-graph bump. That bump takes place on servers as the sun travels over Eastern Europe and Asia, with the midnight line moving over the Pacific Ocean and Japan. That's the challenge right there. How to fix that?
If you see on the original Turbine graph, the server bottoms out around 3-4 players. Turbine (in my experience) is only starts being fun around 6 players, and doesn't actually get great until 12 players. But the server only has 3-4.
Seeders can help, but even more important are players who are actually playing during that time. Nobody wants to join an empty server and hope that it fills around them unless they really want to play some Turbine. That's why we need some Turbine Lovers in the Old Country to see if they can grab that bottoming out of the graph and pull it up.
Strategy for Other Servers
It's at this point that many people start thinking "Dear gourd! You're in first place! For the first time in forever as server has actually passed 2FORT IR! Aren't you happy yet?! What about other servers?!?"
Yes! I'm very happy! But my goal is Number 1, and for that, vigilance on Turbine is important. But once you have your bases covered, it's time to look out for those around us. eGO Wins when Turbine is #1, but eGO wins even more when the top 12 slots belong to eGO.
So, in addition to thinking about the game parameters of the maps, to see if perhaps a tweak might make the games even more awesome on those servers, here's what we Turbine Lovers, and eGO Lovers in General, can do to make our servers rock the charts:
Furnace, Lazytown, and Gravel Pit need our help. It's not necessarily that these maps aren't fun, it's just an extension of the "nobody wants to be the guy playing Ignus Solus" law. All three servers have GINORMOUS dead spots. I could drive TEXAS through those chart dips. Seeding can help, but playing is even more important! If you are waiting in line for a "more popular" server, even a non eGO server, go ahead and start in Furnace, Lazytown, or Gravel Pit first. Even if you're only playing 10 minutes before the autojoin abducts you to where you originally set out to play, that's 10 extra minutes of awesome for those servers. Sometimes all it takes for server populations to go from 10 players to 12 players for the other 20 players needed to fill the server to find it
All servers can use seeders. If there's already a few seeders on the servers you might usually seed, find another server to seed. There should only be 2-3 seeders on a server, or else Pubs start griping about AFK's. A computer usually only uses around a penny of power during the time used for seeding. Even if you can only spare a night or two during the week, it adds up. Worried about using your graphics card while not actually playing? If you're running Vista even running the screensaver uses every part of your graphics card. Vista's unified driver always uses graphics acceleration, so if you're going to burn those transistors anyway, might as well seed, right? Finally, you could always install TF2 on another older computer in the house (Sister's, Mothers, etc), and seed on those computers. Who cares about those integrated graphics? And it's not like you need to see what's going in in the Spectator room, eh?
Now is the time to fill the servers, now is the time to invite pubs, now is the time to get regulars! School's almost back in, which means those caffeine powered kids that fill Blackmesa until OhBrightThirty through the night won't be free to have silly hours. Populations will drop across all servers, in all clans, in all games. It happens at the end of every summer. How can this death by a thousand summer homework assignments be prevented? MAKE REGULARS. Even if players don't join eGO, many will bookmark our servers if they love them. And then when they have that hour to spare during the week, they'll pick eGO BlackMesa over another server out there, because they love our server. While other servers are trying to get people to join when time is tight, we'll be able to welcome in the regulars who found us during the summer. So make sure when you see people having fun that you invite them to steamfriends, or remind them to mark our servers as favorites. Every regular now is an empty slot filled in December, or February.
TL;DR
Turbine is doing GREAT, but we sill have that dead spot during the wee morning hours. Many servers need help, so when waiting on your favorite server to open a slot, play a few minutes of Gravel Pit. Find friends in eGO, and invite them to play with you on your favorite server; 12 players might attract the extra 20 needed to fill even better than 10 players would. Think about your map's gamemode; are the spawn times too long, or the capture point times too fast? Finally, make friends and get some regs in our servers. Ever regular picked up now is a slot full during the doldrums.
Thank you to all the Turbine Lovers that made this post possible.
- How awesome all you Turbine lovers are
- What I think makes Turbine work, and how this can be implemented on other servers
- Turbine strategy
- Strategy for other servers
So skip to the section most interesting to you... but first...
Turbine Lovers are Awesome!
I shall sum up with two screenshots:
I told JohnT that if they made a Turbine 24/7, that I wouldn't rest until it was #1 in eGO and #1 in the world. Whoo hoo!
Now, I'm sure that 2FORT IR fans will make sure this victory lasts only as long as it must
But it's still an important achievement. Many didn't believe that a 24/7 Turbine could last; and worse, they even had EVIDENCE. But I'll address that in the next section.But real thanks go out to all you other Turbine fans, both eGO members and not, who have filled the server and made it ROCK. I don't have enough words to express how happy I am today, and regular members of this forum realize just how momentus that must be! HAHA
So thank you Turbine Lovers. This moment is OURS.
What I think makes Turbine work
...and how this can be implemented on other servers
When Turbine 24/7 was tried originally about a year ago, it was semi popular (I mean, it wasn't no Lazytown, but it wasn't a Convoy either), but it just failed to fill. Many believed that it was a shortcoming of the Map or the community and that it should go. We Turbine Lovers knew this couldn't be true, but the stats didn't lie: Turbine just wouldn't fill.
When this server started up again, Use My Teleporter (a true Turbine Partisain) started a convo with me, talking about the shortcomings of the server. With the default respawn times, teams were horribly punished for being spawn controlled or having too many impulsive people. A grinning heavy-dual-medic guarding your spawn door meant even opening the doors triggered respawn times that could last a half minute. A half minute, for reference, is how long it takes a Scout to snag your intel and cap it on Turbine, for those unlucky enought to have not played enough yet.
The solution was to tweak the respawn parameter so that respawns were quicker without necessarily being instant; in other words, being spawn controlled didn't mean instadeath. You didn't have to just sit there in spawn for a minute and a half building an uber; you could harass the spawn controllers and maybe even allow a spy to sneak by without suffering five minutes of respawn time.
I believe this is why Turbine can hold an audience now, when it couldn't before. Even with competition from other Turbine servers, ours punishes teams less for playing a quick, hectic game, which is what Turbine is all about: Chaos.
So, for other servers out there: could respawn times be tweaked? Cap times? Speed of the cart? Just because the map developer thought the times were perfect doesn't mean that they are.
Before you spam Gardengrove with demands to adjust parameters, talk with the players on the map. Talk amongst yourselves. We changed one parameter on the Turbine server down 4 notches and a server that couldn't hold a population is almost always full. Think about it.
Turbine strategy
Turbine's number one! Time to go play some Counterstrike, right? NOPE!
I won't sleep until eGO Turbine is #1 in the world, and that means we still have a bit of work. Please turn your attention to this graph:
We are suffering the same malady we continue to suffer: population starts to drift about 2AM Central, falls apart around 4AM, and doesn't pick up until 8-10AM, giving us 4-6 hours of not becoming #1. Here's the SourceOp.com server we want to beat:
The key is to get rid of that middle-of-the-graph bump. That bump takes place on servers as the sun travels over Eastern Europe and Asia, with the midnight line moving over the Pacific Ocean and Japan. That's the challenge right there. How to fix that?
If you see on the original Turbine graph, the server bottoms out around 3-4 players. Turbine (in my experience) is only starts being fun around 6 players, and doesn't actually get great until 12 players. But the server only has 3-4.
Seeders can help, but even more important are players who are actually playing during that time. Nobody wants to join an empty server and hope that it fills around them unless they really want to play some Turbine. That's why we need some Turbine Lovers in the Old Country to see if they can grab that bottoming out of the graph and pull it up.
Strategy for Other Servers
It's at this point that many people start thinking "Dear gourd! You're in first place! For the first time in forever as server has actually passed 2FORT IR! Aren't you happy yet?! What about other servers?!?"
Yes! I'm very happy! But my goal is Number 1, and for that, vigilance on Turbine is important. But once you have your bases covered, it's time to look out for those around us. eGO Wins when Turbine is #1, but eGO wins even more when the top 12 slots belong to eGO.
So, in addition to thinking about the game parameters of the maps, to see if perhaps a tweak might make the games even more awesome on those servers, here's what we Turbine Lovers, and eGO Lovers in General, can do to make our servers rock the charts:
Furnace, Lazytown, and Gravel Pit need our help. It's not necessarily that these maps aren't fun, it's just an extension of the "nobody wants to be the guy playing Ignus Solus" law. All three servers have GINORMOUS dead spots. I could drive TEXAS through those chart dips. Seeding can help, but playing is even more important! If you are waiting in line for a "more popular" server, even a non eGO server, go ahead and start in Furnace, Lazytown, or Gravel Pit first. Even if you're only playing 10 minutes before the autojoin abducts you to where you originally set out to play, that's 10 extra minutes of awesome for those servers. Sometimes all it takes for server populations to go from 10 players to 12 players for the other 20 players needed to fill the server to find it
All servers can use seeders. If there's already a few seeders on the servers you might usually seed, find another server to seed. There should only be 2-3 seeders on a server, or else Pubs start griping about AFK's. A computer usually only uses around a penny of power during the time used for seeding. Even if you can only spare a night or two during the week, it adds up. Worried about using your graphics card while not actually playing? If you're running Vista even running the screensaver uses every part of your graphics card. Vista's unified driver always uses graphics acceleration, so if you're going to burn those transistors anyway, might as well seed, right? Finally, you could always install TF2 on another older computer in the house (Sister's, Mothers, etc), and seed on those computers. Who cares about those integrated graphics? And it's not like you need to see what's going in in the Spectator room, eh?
Now is the time to fill the servers, now is the time to invite pubs, now is the time to get regulars! School's almost back in, which means those caffeine powered kids that fill Blackmesa until OhBrightThirty through the night won't be free to have silly hours. Populations will drop across all servers, in all clans, in all games. It happens at the end of every summer. How can this death by a thousand summer homework assignments be prevented? MAKE REGULARS. Even if players don't join eGO, many will bookmark our servers if they love them. And then when they have that hour to spare during the week, they'll pick eGO BlackMesa over another server out there, because they love our server. While other servers are trying to get people to join when time is tight, we'll be able to welcome in the regulars who found us during the summer. So make sure when you see people having fun that you invite them to steamfriends, or remind them to mark our servers as favorites. Every regular now is an empty slot filled in December, or February.
TL;DR
Turbine is doing GREAT, but we sill have that dead spot during the wee morning hours. Many servers need help, so when waiting on your favorite server to open a slot, play a few minutes of Gravel Pit. Find friends in eGO, and invite them to play with you on your favorite server; 12 players might attract the extra 20 needed to fill even better than 10 players would. Think about your map's gamemode; are the spawn times too long, or the capture point times too fast? Finally, make friends and get some regs in our servers. Ever regular picked up now is a slot full during the doldrums.
Thank you to all the Turbine Lovers that made this post possible.
I love, love, love Turbine. It's my home away from home. Nice post, AutoDMC!
