Rudd wrote:while I support server operators grouping together to seed central servers rather than seed every single clan server out there, they do try hard to regulate and populate their servers...making it kinda rude to sabotage their efforts.
Providing people with information is not sabotaging anyones efforts. Its just providing people with information.
In other games with server licence requirements, an admin doing this would have their licence revoked.
Trooper909 wrote:I thought he went on to a server with 10 seeders and said hai guys why don't we all move to a populated server.
It wasn't even 10. It was 3. I joined, making it 4.
I didn't just look at the servers, go "this one has more people, I'll go tell the guys in the near-empty server". I had actually sat in the server I was banned from for about 40 minutes, waiting for a decent amount of players. I went and explored some of the map I'd never seen before as they were areas around flags that rarely came into play. I tested out the deviation and practiced throwing grenades. I drove around aimlessly in a truck for a while. Whilst in the server, 2 or 3 people came and went, but none actually stayed. I even went and got something to eat. Eventually I gave up and decided I would try to find another server. There was another server with more people, but it was playing a map I didn't like.
Upon joining the server I was banned from, I think I said "Hey guys there's 7 people on [other server] if you're interested." That was it. I was intending to stay on the current server regardless of how many players came/went, because I wanted to play that map and I didn't like what the other server was running.
The admin replied "stfu you *cursewords here*"
I said: "That's a little extreme."
Then I was banned.
I've been playing online games for 15 years. Never in my experience have server administrators objected to people suggesting players move to other servers in the interest of a good game. Infact some admins I know encourage it. Most face a fixed price whether someone's playing on their server or not.
What we have here is server administrators who can't accept that we have far more servers than we need, for a game with a small population. There's a point where these people need to accept that in the interest of the games community as a whole, they need to put their clan-tags and own self-interest aside and jump on another clans server in the interest of a good game.
If a new player came along today, brought up the server browser, and saw what I saw tonight, (a bunch of empty servers, and a handful with 3-10 players in them) they'd probably go "game is dead", close the game, and probably never run it again.
We want this community to grow (I'd assume). Not shrink. I personally play from Australia, and rarely do we get more than about 50 players on the two Australian servers combined (both run by the awesome guys at BigD Gaming). I would love to see the community in Australia to grow to the point where both those servers were packed during prime-time. Growing a community sometimes means sacrificing somethings, namely the control you gain when you host and play on your own server.
I'm not going to bother appealing my ban. The server administrators know who I am and why I was banned. I checked their server rules, and there is no rule against providing information on the status of other servers. In otherwords, I wasn't hacking, I was swearing excessively, I wasn't team-killing, I wasn't wasting assets or stealing assets, and I wasn't breaking any written rule on their server, and I was still banned.
If they chose to lift my ban of their own accord, then I probably will play on their server, and even seed it with them when I can. I won't provide information on other servers whilst in the game out of courtesy to them, even though I believe this isn't beneficial for the games community as a whole.
