Server verification

[stevethepocket]

This may be part of the reason that Valve got in the habit of buying and adding their favorite customs as official maps in the first place; that's the only way the majority of players are going to bother playing them.

Customs seem to do pretty well on servers meant for people to add to their favorites and then regularly play on — ones associated with clans or outside communities, for example, including those geared towards "casual" players. Since it usually just involves a one-time download and then an update every few months. I was in a group once that had a custom in its rotation that had been created by a friend of the admin and wasn't even available as a public download anywhere. The guy had clearly put a lot of work into it, and it probably could have been a popular map if he hadn't been so shy about it.

[Trotim]

Quote:

Originally Posted by theharribokid

as an example of this yesterday we played barnblitz and the server filled, then badwater, then I set the next map to strata, we went from full to 5 vs 5.

Random players dont stay for custom maps

To be fair the map is TC (that nobody really likes or knows) and doesn't have a beta-level of detailing (that tends to make people stay much longer and at least try it out).

I agree with steve though, back when I played like two years ago I frequented a German server that had most official maps as well as warpath and I think later swiftwater. Never noticed unusual player drops there

[grazr]

Well it's the TF2maps server, this has never been a problem before. We play custom maps, our rotation should be featured custom maps so that it represented our community. We make gameday announcements and players come to play custom maps. The only real problem is if the map is huge data wise and takes ages to download. I know the average TF2 player has the patience of a gnat, and that's not something we have control over.

I don't know what people did after i set the custom rotation several months ago, but i do know that when i set a proper custom rotation of our featured maps on the server its population hovered between 8 and 16 players on afternoons/evenings with no events. Instead of sitting there empty, on dustbowl indefinately.

[Fr0Z3n]

Quote:

Originally Posted by grazr

Well it's the TF2maps server, this has never been a problem before. We play custom maps, our rotation should be featured custom maps so that it represented our community. We make gameday announcements and players come to play custom maps. The only real problem is if the map is huge data wise and takes ages to download. I know the average TF2 player has the patience of a gnat, and that's not something we have control over.

I don't know what people did after i set the custom rotation several months ago, but i do know that when i set a proper custom rotation of our featured maps on the server its population hovered between 8 and 16 players on afternoons/evenings with no events. Instead of sitting there empty, on dustbowl indefinately.

See, I didn't see that. I know that we got a lot of people after the payload contest went out, but then it died down.

I'm for making our server stock, then start injecting good custom maps into the rotation. Perhaps our motd should also include something about custom maps.

[grazr]

Sure, there were times we didn't even make event announcements for impromptu's and instead had to kick public players to get all our regs in. Our server was seeing 5+ hours of constant use after events.