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Posted

I know the servers cost money, and I totally respect that and try to help out where I can in that regard. I know plenty of other members try to pitch in when they can as well, Joe.

A lot of us know that running this place can be a second-time job as well, and you KNOW I can appreciate that. But saying that donations is the reason that someone can't upload a few maps to the server just seems like a cop-out to alot of us.

But ok, when I'm on jay2 and people are asking where the Christmas maps are, I'll say "sorry kids....you didn't donate enough"

  • Like 2
Posted

The point is that it's not about uploading a few maps to a server. It's about finding maps, testing them, making sure they work, making sure they don't conflict with server settings, making sure they work with bots and have waypoints, uploading them, monitoring the server for crashes during the next hours and fixing and providing support once they don't work mysteriously.

 

Keeping our private lives in mind, we could probably invest some hours in doing that. The problem is that there is far more to do than just changing maps. One example out of dozens of tasks at the moment is to restart CoD4 Killbox every few hours and at the same time trying to find a way to secure it in order to prevent people using exploits.

 

The costs of running this community aren't covered by the $4,600, it's actually more, but they do help and make it easier to keep up all that. It's easy to spend $20 on Steam and download CoD4 or download ET for free within a few minutes nowadays, but unfortunately it's not exactly that easy behind the scenes. You start ET, click on a link and start playing on one of our servers. It's also easy to report crashes and let us know about bugs. But it's certainly not easy and eats up a lot of time to maintain all of our servers. Unlike other clans we do not host on overloaded cheap Game Server Provider's servers, but we do run our own machines, high quality servers with professional-grade components in professional data centers all over the world, which allow you to play a few hours on your favorite server with your friends after a long and exhausting day. Whenever a server crashes, restarting it is not done with two clicks. Whenever you find a bug, it's not easily fixed with two clicks. This requires quite often several hours of research, mostly just to find out that it can't be fixed at all. Thus it can take longer than 10 minutes to restart a server or fix a bug. At the same time we are trying to prevent DDoS attacks on several of our servers for weeks now. (Which have resulted in / could result in several hundreds or even thousands of dollars of penalty because our servers are attacking other servers and wasting a lot of freaking expensive bandwidth.)

 

We are thankful for every donation and it's great that you take care of server administration, struggle with bans and handle trolls, but 2012 will come in about two weeks and we are more than $2,000 short on this year's bills. And that's a fact.

 

Look, we could just introduce a monthly membership fee. That would cover our costs easily but wouldn't make you happy I guess. We could insist on donations and require them them join the clan, but we don't do that because we totally understand that some people might not be able to donate at all. We could also threaten to shut down all servers if we don't reach our target amount. But that's not how =F|A= works. We encourage you to donate, we do not require you to donate, our work does not depend on donations and we are not going to shut down the servers if you don't donate or if we don't reach our target. It would simply be a tiny amount of people being left with huge bills for servers running games they don't play because after doing all the administrative work, there is no time left to play.

 

I hope you see that it's not just us being lazy and not wanting to change the maps.

  • Like 4
Posted

Come on man, how many times have the founders/leaders/staff/whomever had to make up yearly $ because the donations dont cover. Cant blame them if things dont happen as fast or even happen sometimes. I can see that they are over worked and under appreciated cut em some slack.

I'd donate if I received more than my $197 a month and a lot of people are in the same boat, I get alot of enjoyment here. Im not gonna get upset because real life comes first for Our Leaders. BTW bandwidth costs money IE it cost money plus their time to upload maps.

 

EDIT: Ya what he said ;)

Posted

The last thing I would say is that any of you guys are lazy. Of course everyone appreciates all the work that goes into the servers. Like I said, I imagine running all of this must seem like a second job.

I guess I did not know how much time goes into uploading a map to the server, in addition to monitoring issues with it.

Posted (edited)

The last thing I would say is that any of you guys are lazy. Of course everyone appreciates all the work that goes into the servers. Like I said, I imagine running all of this must seem like a second job.

I guess I did not know how much time goes into uploading a map to the server, in addition to monitoring issues with it.

have you actually seen an objective.cfg before? if not let me explain, cause it's not just uploading a pkfile into the root server's etmain folder.

 

set d1 "set g_gametype 2 ; map oasis ; set nextmap vstr d2"

set d2 "set g_gametype 2 ; map battery ; set nextmap vstr d3"

set d3 "set g_gametype 2 ; map goldrush ; set nextmap vstr d4"

set d4 "set g_gametype 2 ; map radar ; set nextmap vstr d5"

set d5 "set g_gametype 2 ; map railgun ; set nextmap vstr d6"

set d6 "set g_gametype 2 ; map fueldump ; set nextmap vstr d1"

vstr d1

 

that's an example of the cfg, now imagine FA2's obj.cfg, they would need to add all of this, and in some cases if they want to make a "neat" map cycle, so people can have less things to cry about, admins would need to remake the whole thing and start from scratch. and if you make one mistake, and you exec this cfg, you could either have very bad server crashes, or the map not being on the server at all, cfgs in et are case sensitive, which is a b*** to deal with when you want something like maps, or server settings correctly working

Edited by cTRL-EquaniMity
Posted

Nah, never seen that before. You know I don't know jack about the coding that goes into the maps.

So I guess I learned something today.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

how about Transmitter?

 

Yeah that map just rocks, I get to use my needle more :P

  • 5 weeks later...
Posted

This server needs new maps! The people are getting bored! I'm there daily, and a day doesnt pass where people don't b*** about the same ole maps. We gotta revamp the rotation here doods!

Posted

nice bump bacon :P

 

simple adding to the map rotation would help in the least bit...

 

i'm actually not bored of minas tirith or the others in rotation, because simply i don't care fully about the map that's playing...

 

but i can say that the chatter is out there for new maps (my two cents again-- add to the rotation is all i'm suggesting)

 

i know real life comes first, and other things second...

and i, like bacon also prefer some variety at least (like holiday-themed maps and stuff)

but i also do acknowledge the issues and probably, the dismal job of running servers and maintaining them.

 

Seeing as how the mechanics of putting a new map are (believe me i know, i sometimes start my own stuff for massacring bots and it's a tedious thing to set waypoints and working out the configuration files lol):

 

i'm willing to wait for new maps, but like how bacon and the other regulars are in the server and according to these replies here, it kind of shows that they are getting exhausted lol

 

whenever (or however actually) you guys can, please do add to the rotation, least so we can have same maps plus the new ones.

about the donations, id gladly donate some cash but seeing as i haven't actually had spare cash to spend--(life lol); i cant.

 

so yeah... that's my take on it, seeing as i'm considered a regular on jay2 i felt like i should put my two cents.

(i feel like i'm kinda late seeing as this topic is a month old... -.- )

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