Suggestions for helping low-pop servers

[bubs]

"oh man, so many empty servers, I don't know which one to pick."

This is once again not even close to any point I've made. Clarks how do you be so smug and so wrong ALL the time? Either way if you take that tone with me again I'll have to come to grips with having banned the most annoying person who never plays from the forum. Please don't put me through that. I couldn't bear it.


edit: Fox, I can see your point, and it is possible that it could go either way. There are a couple of facts though. We aren't trying to ENCOURAGE people to just go into an empty server to science or roleplay in a dark room or whatever, we want the people playing together as a community. If one person stays in a room for a week figuring out how to make a really nasty flamethrower, then joins the servers and blasts the shuttle with it, that week of work results in just one person having any fun.

I am much more of the opinion that science should be done naturally, in a location that isn't safe and is gonna get you murdered. Either way, my point is that we have no desire to cater to people who want to see the servers empty, and that while we may not be able to corral people into joining the two servers equally, a server with ~15 people is far, far more likely to get new players than one with 5.

[Clarks]

[...]I don't see how it having more people than what I said proves what I said wrong??? Or even is a basis for you to disagree? Perhaps you have a tumor.

[...] Either way if you take that tone with me again I'll have to come to grips with having banned the most annoying person who never plays from the forum.[...]

Hey chumpo, you need to get a grip with how you talk to people. What's that, you don't like the taste of sass when it's fed back to you?


Now, I'm going to try and explain the same thing really simply for you people.

1) People moved to one server before 3 and 4 existed. So the problem is not having too many servers.

2) Rounds with 1-5 players are just nerds testing stuff. When only two servers existed, we did it on server one that was empty in the morning US time. They are not interested in playing a round, so don't count them in your hypothetical low player number.

3) Which servers are you shutting down? Who's personally going to ask a host to shut down their free server just because a bunch of dorks think (incorrectly) that they are preventing a second server to become viable?
Hey bubs, are you the one who's going to tell rick, or tobba or pantaloons?

4) Will you stop asking for better servers? They are given for free, donations often don't even cover half of their cost. Rick has been hosting for like six years without suddenly taking everything down.
The servers aren't going to get upgrades just because you think you need a better place to play your dumb spacemen game for free.

[bubs]

What's that, you don't like the taste of sass when it's fed back to you?

not from you. never from you. you're a smu[REDACTED]


Just because the server only has 15 people with 5 of them hiding in a dark room doing nothing, doesn't mean it's not more attractive for a new player to join than one with just 5.

I will ABSOLUTELY tell any of them to shut the server down if we don't need it. What's the problem? I don't have any ill will towards any of them but I firmly believe having this many servers is proving to be a detriment to the community, not a benefit, and I don't mind of someone has any kind of arbitrarily hurt feelings over not hosting a server anymore, that' too fucking bad I guess.

Since you don't agree with any of the perfectly good reasons anyone has given for taking servers down, how about you give me a good reason to keep them up?




edit: Who asked for better servers?

[lifehole]

[...]I don't see how it having more people than what I said proves what I said wrong??? Or even is a basis for you to disagree? Perhaps you have a tumor.

[...] Either way if you take that tone with me again I'll have to come to grips with having banned the most annoying person who never plays from the forum.[...]

Hey chumpo, you need to get a grip with how you talk to people. What's that, you don't like the taste of sass when it's fed back to you?


Now, I'm going to try and explain the same thing really simply for you people.

1) People moved to one server before 3 and 4 existed. So the problem is not having too many servers.

2) Rounds with 1-5 players are just nerds testing stuff. When only two servers existed, we did it on server one that was empty in the morning US time. They are not interested in playing a round, so don't count them in your hypothetical low player number.

3) Which servers are you shutting down? Who's personally going to ask a host to shut down their free server just because a bunch of dorks think (incorrectly) that they are preventing a second server to become viable?
Hey bubs, are you the one who's going to tell rick, or tobba or pantaloons?

4) Will you stop asking for better servers? They are given for free, donations often don't even cover half of their cost. Rick has been hosting for like six years without suddenly taking everything down.
The servers aren't going to get upgrades just because you think you need a better place to play your dumb spacemen game for free.

1: People had a majority in one server, but there was enough in the other for it to be playable.

2: Yes, the morning time this is what happened on the "good enough to be playable" server and I enjoyed that downtime.

3: Server I'd shut down is just one of the 3 non eu ones. Guessing they're probably all run on the same hardware, anyways.

4: I'm only asking for better servers because that's exactly what we already have. You're making it out to be like I'm just some complainer with no merit or reason to complain. I'm not even complaining, just pointing pointing out things. (like the hypotheticals of what I would do to clarify and outline alternatives in the point of an argument I was making.) eu4 is better (if only slightly, it can still be laggy sometimes) and if we could have another server like that it'd be nice.

[FootChar]

Well if a server cap is such a big hitler no one wants, I got other hard-to-implement ideas.

I think the real issue here is populating a server is a boring pain in the ass. There is nothing wrong with the other servers. It's mostly people aren't motivated to populate a server unless other people are motivated to help populate a server. Because most of us are individualistic uncoordinated space assholes, that rarely happens. Therefore if you want a server to be populated, you have to do it all at once.

Server Switch Poll
The basic idea is that someone (probably an admin) calls a poll in the middle of a round or during setup. The polls asks "Would you play on X server if Y amount of people were playing?" eg. LLJK1 with 20 people. If atleast 20 people respond Yes, the first 20 people who responded are redirected from their current server to the poll's suggested server. This would be very, very handy to coordinate an overcrowded server to spread out without much actual coordination needed. The poll would probably be most effective if called during setup or a long round with the majority of the station dead. The major problem with this idea is I don't even know if it's possible to redirect people with BYOND. If not, you could do the same thing without the automatic redirect and hope that the people who responded yes actually meant yes.

[Weavel]

What about simple annoucements mid-game?

______________________________________________________

GALACTIC SYSTEM UPDATE:

Job Seekers Be Aware:
Mono Science Dock 210000 is currently seeking able people to add to their current 28 members of staff. Apply today!
______________________________________________________

[Erev]

Four servers does seem like a bit much considering the population. What I might suggest would be having one EU server and one NA server running as normal and the third server running extended/gimmicks/rp/testing. The current mode of server #3 could be based upon a vote of players currently in the lobby as the round starts.

[FootChar]

What about simple annoucements mid-game?

______________________________________________________

GALACTIC SYSTEM UPDATE:

Job Seekers Be Aware:
Mono Science Dock 210000 is currently seeking able people to add to their current 28 members of staff. Apply today!
______________________________________________________

Teehee 28. If the other servers had 28 people this wouldn't be an issue.

Yeah, its definitely easier not to implement a new polling thing. But in terms of getting people to actually go to other servers, I'd wager this way would be much more clean and effective. I've seen admins comment "Why are there so many people on this server" and I'm fairly certain people have coordinated to populate a server before. It's just easier to have one simple button form the group and whisk them away automatically, with no commitments if the poll fails. People will drag their feet otherwise, wondering if other people will actually follow them to the new server of if they're setting themselves up for a boring dead round.

[lifehole]

How about instead of notifications, there is an ingame notification about the other server starting a new round.

It's on the IRC, and it would encourage dead players to go to another server.

[bubs]

dang lifehole that's a really good idea

[emarl]

I've always thought an in game auxiliary shuttle or quantum teleporter to transport to other servers would work, provided it filters out traitors/syndicates and people carrying horrible diseases or chems.

[Zamujasa]

You'd have to limit it to only allowing you to join if you haven't already joined that game with your BYOND key yet (including observation), because otherwise you could observe/get murdered by a traitor on server A, go to server B and take the quantum shuttle to A and welp, now you know who the traitor is to murder/revenge on.

It would be an interesting idea, though, cross-server botany shipments or meteor-shower refugees

[mozi]

How about instead of notifications, there is an ingame notification about the other server starting a new round.

It's on the IRC, and it would encourage dead players to go to another server.

[pizzatiger]

The way i see it you should keep server 3 and 4 because those servers are the ones with the least lag for the major playerbase.


Then the admins can pick either server 1 or 2 and make it private for testing new code and stuff.This way they can invite people to try out new code from a non-coder point of view without ruining gameplay on the regular servers. They use the last server as a private server that an admin can set up when both the main servers are down and the coding server is too unstable for regular gameplay.

[bubs]

The way i see it you should keep server 3 and 4 because those servers are the ones with the least lag for the major playerbase.

1) I'm not SURE about this, but I think the majority of our players are still in NA (3 and 4 are the EU servers). I assume it's pretty close, either way I'm not sure.

2) Ping has very little impact on the lag in these servers. The overall lagginess of the game will barely be impacted by your own ping, it's just ~byond~. I heard it from a scientist.

3) #4 only seems like it runs faster because its hacked up to have a faster tickrate. Once you get like 60 people in there its not any better. (it may actually be on better hardware or something, idk)