Servers!

[Lightning]

I hang out on IRC alot and every 5 minutes a newbie comes in and asks Brahma to register his server.

So then the conversation goes a little deeper, and after a while we come to a standstill.
The newbie, thinks his IP is 192.168.1.2, has never heard of port forwarding in his life and has not read the server registration rules.

Now we've been helping them out. Every single time a newbie comes in, we teach them everything from scratch. But you've gt to ask yourself? Is it worth it? We have around 50 servers on the MS, out which how many are actually played on? 15.

Why do we need to continue making servers? Is it the feeling of power you get when you use admin? If so, why not go suck up to another server owner. But seriously, stop making servers.

I'm not saying that we should not allow anyone to host servers, I'm saying that we should have a controlled amount of servers. Or atleast have people who know how to host a server and will maintain it well.

I noticed a post on the forums requesting a few servers to be banned. Why? as they did not have a proper blacklist, maprot etc. THis wouldn't be happening if we didn't register every second person's server. We need to have servers we can trust.

The Devs have lives too. They will not spend every minute of their day registering servers that will be up for twenty minutes.

When I did bring this issue up with Brahma, his answer was simple. He said he had already registered so many newbie servers that he could not say no to the other newbies, as it just won't be fair. He is right, it's not okay to be partial.

Now what I belive is, if your server does not meet guidelines, does not a have a maintained blacklist and is just plain crap. It should not be up. Take it down yourself. Ask yourself, is it worth ruining gameplay just so you can have your five minutes of feeling like God?

Do you want people like newbie really running the servers?

Vote in ze poll!

EDIT: Sorry for the crappy writing.

[Alien]

[sarcasm] lol, fk'in newbies, i would ban them xD They don't know how map, vote, run servers xD, they can really destroy this game xD
[/sarcasm]

[Gibstick]

It only feels bad now because we don't have automatic registration. With this around the corner, we can distance ourselves from the noobs and let them fail with their portforwarding and stuff without remorse.

[DrauL]

I would actually be happy if the masterserver stayed with manual registration and really monitored who goe's through.
Maybe only allowing VPN's or something so the servers are not crappy-ping-hosted-at-home-for-admin.

[Unharmed]

What you're saying makes sense but the old response of locking out new users etc still stands. You can't pick and choose who gets a server and who doesn't and that's the point of a game that is free to play on and with in every way possible. If a server isn't on the masterserver, it's basically useless to most unless they have a website or clan to 'advertise' it on.

If someone has had the time to make a server or at least looked into doing it, they are the people who we need to encourage to look further and learn as much as possible.

There is a clear difference between a new player who comes on for five minutes not liking what he sees and quits never to return and someone who plays for a while, maybe isn't an expert but digs deep enough to want to try making a server.

We have around 50 servers on the MS, out which how many are actually played on? 15.

Sure there are some inactive servers that hardly ever get played on but most are active at different times depending on the timezone.

Another thing - not everyone speaks English and so might not be clear on the questions being asked in IRC.

It only feels bad now because we don't have automatic registration. With this around the corner, we can distance ourselves from the noobs and let them fail with their portforwarding and stuff without remorse.

^ Agreed. But the best way to avoid hundreds of inactive servers and allow auto registration is to build in a way to check servers. If the automatic registration system would check a servers maprot, blacklist, ping, etc and then provide feedback to the owner through the console, that would solve the majority of support questions and free up the dev's time.

[Luc@s]

I would actually be happy if the masterserver stayed with manual registration and really monitored who goe's through.
Maybe only allowing VPN's or something so the servers are not crappy-ping-hosted-at-home-for-admin.

My server is actually hosted at home and many french guys tell me they like to play on it.
It's running on a dedicated computer.

I agree with Unharmed about this.

[Zarjio]

The question here is not whether or not the server is being run from a home connection. There are plenty of servers probably running on VPS that are terrible. The issue at hand is:
1. Servers with no blacklist whatsoever, which allow cheaters to continue playing
2. Servers with no admin, which again allow cheaters to run free
3. Servers that push garbage maps
4. Servers that have WAYY too many people for the bandwidth available - which causes massive lag
5. Servers which provide no contact information whatsoever

Servers that fall into any of these five categories should probably be removed.

[Orynge]

Now we've been helping them out. Every single time a newbie comes in, we teach them everything from scratch. But you've gt to ask yourself? Is it worth it? We have around 50 servers on the MS, out which how many are actually played on? 15.

Usually, in the middle of the day in my time, about 30 servers are being used.

[Luc@s]

imo it's better to have a better black list of servers and NO white list.