Suggestions for helping low-pop servers

[ClockworkCupcake]

Right now three out of four servers are low-to-no pop for most of the day. I think the trouble is compounded by the fact that when a server is up for long enough it becomes unplayable and annoying or very difficult to hop on and perform a shuttle call. There's a couple things that might help with this.

1: Toggle off random disasters under a certain player threshold
The servers are currently going upwards of 100 minutes with few to no players and nobody around to call the shuttle or handle disasters. The random events work great when there's a lot of players - when there's nobody around, it just means that if someone hops on, they've got 50-50 odds of Arrivals having no air due to meteors or having half the station solid with kudzu.

Toggle station-destroying disasters off entirely when the server is below 10-15 players or so.

2: Fix the power running out when there's nobody around.
If you join a low-pop server that's been running long and manage to get past the shuttle, the power is almost certainly out entirely to the point where it'd take ages to charge up to a workable level.
I'm less sure of how to fix this - Maybe some kind of emergency battery that kicks in if there's not enough players on? You could set the threshold lower for that, probably, it's easier to hack into the solars and get them running than it is to repair a leveled station.

[YJHGHTFH]

both of these'd be really handy

[bubs]

Both good suggestions.

[atomic1fire]

Why not just set the server to kick the solars on if there's no engineers or the crew is too small. Someone could learn the engine on a low player server without being afraid of things screwing up the power.

[Terminal Entropy]

I would love to see a message pop up on #4 (or whichever server has the most people on it) every once in awhile, that just says "Hey there's 3 other servers to play on, when you die you can switch over to those." It's getting ridiculous that #4 will have 60 people but #1-3 will be totally empty.

[KikiMofo]

Why not just set the server to kick the solars on if there's no engineers or the crew is too small. Someone could learn the engine on a low player server without being afraid of things screwing up the power.

Just have it automaticly set the SMES? Cause the solars are always on and tracking the sun now. I'd like this.

[KikiMofo]

I would love to see a message pop up on #4 (or whichever server has the most people on it) every once in awhile, that just says "Hey there's 3 other servers to play on, when you die you can switch over to those." It's getting ridiculous that #4 will have 60 people but #1-3 will be totally empty.

You mean like a Centcom announcement or something that happens at set amounts of round time?

[Clarks]

How about fixing autorestart when nobody is alive and nobody is connected. Because you know, it works in 4407.

[Zamujasa]

Could make it a thing that shows up after you died. "While you wait to be revived, borged, or for the round to end, why not try playing or experimenting on one of our other servers?"

As for power, you'd need to make sure it doesn't activate in cases where it's genuinely the crew's fault they weren't started (e.g. no living engineers, borgs, or AI).

Random events being disabled would certainly be nice, though; I've seen two Solarium rounds on low-pops obliterated due to late-round meteor showers.


I'd still like to see one of the other lowpops turned into Extended/Sandbox with respawn on, for experimenting, though.

[Terminal Entropy]

You mean like a Centcom announcement or something that happens at set amounts of round time?

Yeah, maybe just something like "Centcom would like to remind the crew of exciting new openings for crew on server ___"

Alternatively, it could be displayed in the pre- or post- round messages, and list crew numbers and link to the other servers.

[Fox McCloud]

I strongly agree with turning off meteors, black holes, and Kudzu on low pop (and blob if that's ever fixed). When you have a handful of people on, some of these events can arbitrarily end the round when there's really no other reason for it to end. Kudzu is particularly annoying because it's very very difficult for only 1-2 people to handle.

Still not sure how I feel about the power though, setting up power isn't that difficult, especially if you hotwire solarss...but at the same time too, it is quite a pain for the handful that do it every single round.

If these two things were implemented in addition to fixing the "if servers is empty after XX many minutes, it resets" it would go a long way to making it a lot more enjoyable for the people who play on low pop.


It doesn't resolve the "rampagy traitors who kill everyone during the first 10 minutes then keep the server going for 2 hours", but the other issues, above, come up way more often.

[FootChar]

I was going to make my own thread for this idea but I might as well drop it here.

Implement a server cap
Because the major problem seems really obvious. If the choice is play on a crowded server or play on an empty server people will pick the crowded server because the empty one is dull as hell. I can't blame them for that. But I would bet a lot of people in the overpopulated server wish there was a less-crowded but not nearly empty server they could join. Just none of them want to go to another server and try and populate it.

So force them. If everyone can't pile into the same server, people would likely jump into the second most-populated server and pretty soon you have 2 maybe 3 reasonably populated servers. I realize that some people would just not play SS13 if they were forced to help populate a server, but I can also tell you that's already happening anyways. I haven't played in about two weeks because every time I go to play, all the servers are overpopulated and underpopulated and I just go do something else. I doubt I'm the only one.

Also with a server cap, low pop servers would fill much, much faster as the full server would stop taking people in. It makes them that much more attractive.

[bubs]

Burn down two of the servers.

We only need 2. I told you this would happen when we added #3, but nooooo. Now we have 4 servers and 3 of them are constantly empty. Seriously, get rid of two of them, why have I suggested this 500000 times in the past and why has it not happened yet. What attachment do you have to these empty servers that provide NOTHING to anyone?

[Clarks]

People piled up on a single server even before server 3 was added, two or four makes no difference. If anything it's a bummer that both of the long running servers are empty.

[bubs]

I dont really care bout longevity or whatever, go with whatever servers run better, but it's far superior to have one server with 15 and one with 50 than three with 5 and one with 50