bleh

[sour skittles]

so is the payload server usually empty during this hour?

sometimes it sucks to live on an island haha, the time difference is irritating and the latency gap.

 

[Dave]

The server used to get traffic 24/7 for a month until recently. We don't know what happened, but we believe it's a problem on Valve's end. There's a number of problems we've discovered recently that may be part of the problem, such as:

• Quickplay sending individual players to the server while it was empty. The players then blacklist the server and we lose reputation score
• Lack of overseas connections. Maybe valve added quickplay servers overseas and it's drawing players to those servers. These players helped keep the server full during early morning hours.
• Bad games around 1 am. Recently I've been seeing some really bad games around 1 am. It's like some players are zombies.

The server activity is very similar to when we first opened the server. It took about 10 days until traffic ramped up. Hopefully this is a similar case, and it'll fix itself within a few days.

Regardless of the problems, we're ramping up our efforts and have been focusing on the community aspect. We'll be specifically trying to attract more regulars around the late night / early morning time bracket.

I've begun creating steam group events to coordinate gatherings. Keep an eye out for those.

[Hadden]

Also, like any empty server, people will populate it IF they see others in there.  A lot of the regulars have it on their favourites.  For example, if I have the day off and it's 9am and want to play, I will go into it and be the only guy, wait about 10-20 mins and a few more come, then some more, etc.  By 10am server is at full capacity and stays that way till late at night.

But as Dave said, quick play is really bringing it down.

[Plasma]

No, it's not supposed to be empty. At all.
We don't know what happened. And why it happened so suddenly.

Could it be the F2P wave is over? I don't really buy it. There are less players obviously, but we used to get connections from overseas, now we barely get any (except after a server update). I'm not sure Quickplay is actually enabled, even though all our settings are set properly. This is very strange, and very frustrating, and Valve is not helping.

Yes, players won't join an empty server, which is why Lotus and others, use fake player counts plugin. I hate those, so I don't want to do that. Unfortunately, we're back to where we started, and we have to seed the servers when empty. I can do that from 10am to 6pm, but one seeder isn't enough.

[sour skittles]

yeah.  I actually have been playing on Lotus server, only to find out that they were using bots.  I like how you guys don't use the bots just to fill up the server so players can join in. 

hopefully the quickplay is fixed soon, so international players can join in like they did few weeks ago.