MG Suggestions

[whimsy]

Since I'm getting bored of hopping to communities that I don't enjoy playing with I've decided to try to put in a bit of effort to improve MG.

 

Here are some thing's that I think should be changed/added/modified.

 

The nomination menu is useless, we have way too many maps in the first place. Most of which the majority of a population would not enjoy playing.

 

Therefore the changes I suggest are as follows-

*Revert back to the old nomination list with no categories.

 

Take out these maps with your discretion. They are all either irrelevant for a good population or they are broken/flat out trash.

(also servers that are always full such as SNG don't have maps like these, and neither did we when we always had the server full.)

 

Again this is just a suggestion, wouldn't hurt to try and then add them back again later if needed.

 

*50arenas

*crashbandicoot

*Creative Multigames

*dreamy mariogames

*football

*jump for gun

*kirby's brawl

*koga73 multigames

*minecraft multigames

*devine is french

*nature multigames

*neox multigames

*quepinator

*potatogames

*robs multigames

*raphi multigames

*scari multigames

*turvassa multigames

*tomgreens allinone

*twisted theme multigames

*weaponcase arena

*blahhhh

*dolls

*All three of the rats maps

*breakceiling

*16 battles

*bogan

*frightnight

*gravity castle

*bhop battle zig

*kirby tower

*speedrace

*Either summer tower or skytower, no need for both

*surf warzone

*zuhhh

 

This one might be a little upsetting to the people who've been playing mg since source.

*Scrap courses altogether/ at least get rid of all the ones that aren't popular on other servers.

( Going off of experience, the main two that stay relevant on other servers are acrophobia and cyber course.

In my opinion just scrap them all, it's a waste of everyone's time to play them and risk losing population)

 

 

 

 

Following those changes I believe some other things concerning maps should be dealt with.

Not sure how possible/realistic these implementations are to the AO's/TA's.

If this is impossible correlating with the above mentioned suggestion ( removing the categories in the nomination list. ) then scrap that idea.

* Extend the timer for the "recently played" feature for maps that you guys always say kills the population.

( Deathmatch maps that make the newer population leave.)

Not by too much because it's already pretty long.

*Shorten the timer for the "recently played" feature for maps that are popular

( swag, yolo, awp minigames, awp submarine, etc)

Again not sure how challenging it might be for the TA's to select which map's "recently played" timer get extended/shortened.

 

 

 

 

 

Also not too sure exactly how simple this one would be to implement.

*Add an auto plant plugin or something similar to shorten rounds/stop people from delaying which causes people to get bored and leave.

 

 

Lastly, not sure how helpful this suggestion will be.

* increase the population count, it's currently too low at 23.

If this is to help with stablization then I guess this wouldn't be approved.

It should be increased to 32 like the majority of MG servers.

This should be done simply because the more players on will make more people want to join. If the server manages to cap at 23, that's actually not that many players

and this can lead to the server dying rather fast, without having a high enough population to keep people joining to fill the slots when people do leave.

 

I had some other thoughts that I've forgotten while typing this out, however things that should be noted are -

 

-Autohop vote is kinda pointless, maps where this may be wanted get played rarely. Also the vote usually doesn't go in favor of turning off auto. It's

bad enough we had to give into autobhop but we have it now so going back to the EZ bhop plugin is pointless.

 

-The two skins that are actually in the shop are bland and might as well be added to the subscriber models, all the cool skins are already for subscribers+ and you don't even have to buy them from the shop which also takes away some of the incentive of gaining credits.

 

-Some common knowledge is that the only time the server gets close to being full is when you guys throw a successful event, which isn't often. The community should probably put in more effort to replicate these successes or find another way to bring players from other servers to mg even for a little bit, so we can gain new members.(The majority of players will only join an mg server with a decent population in the first place.)

 

With that last note, I know my activity pretty much disappeared. I know the community has shifted towards ttt, and jb. However, these are just suggestions that I'd personally like to see attempted, before I put in my time trying to get a stable population. I know SG has the numbers to get MG populated again, and I've had two owners of other communities recognize the amount of MG I play and request that I help populate their servers for them. My heart is with this community even though I haven't been around. I'd really like to try and revive this server rather than waste my time doing it for other communities I've barely played with. Whether or not anyone agrees with my suggestions, the server is pretty much dead and not trying at least some of these just shows the hope that you guys have for MG in the future.

 

Thanks.

 

Edits/add-ons--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

*Highly consider adding an ingame stats plugin, the majority of other servers have it and even the people who aren't the greatest seem to enjoy trying to reach a higher rank. We've settled with having to use gameme's website to track stats, nobody will go out of their way to check that stuff.(This adds incentive, I know plenty of people who play just to try to reach number 1 on every server they can.)

 

*Possibly add a bit more airacceleration, this one I dont care much for.

 

*Don't know if we still have a RollTheDice plugin but if so, that sort of thing is pointless.

 

*We should not expect people who play on our servers to want to be involved in the community, therefore going along with adding in game

stats, we should add a menu for time played, etc

 

[Valk]

Since I'm getting bored of hopping to communities that I don't enjoy playing with I've decided to try to put in a bit of effort to improve MG.

 

Here are some thing's that I think should be changed/added/modified.

 

The nomination menu is useless, we have way too many maps in the first place. Most of which the majority of a population would not enjoy playing.

 

Therefore the changes I suggest are as follows-

*Revert back to the old nomination list with no categories.

I'm going to keep in the way it is because of how some of the game modes work.

 

Take out these maps with your discretion. They are all either irrelevant for a good population or they are broken/flat out trash.

(also servers that are always full such as SNG don't have maps like these, and neither did we when we always had the server full.)

 

Again this is just a suggestion, wouldn't hurt to try and then add them back again later if needed.

 

*50arenas

yes

*crashbandicoot

yes

*mariogames

yes

*football

no, for @Labarr

*jump for gun

yes

*kirby's brawl

no

*koga73 multigames

no, too new

*minecraft multigames

yes

*devine is french

yes

*nature multigames

yes

*neox multigames

yes

*quepinator

no

*potatogames

no, too new

*robs multigames

yes

*raphi multigames

no

*scari multigames

yes

*turvassa multigames

*tomgreens allinone

yes

*twisted theme multigames

no

*weaponcase arena

no

*blahhhh

no, Nipper maps are the best

*dolls

no

*All three of the rats maps

no

*breakceiling

yes

*16 battles

yes

*bogan

no

*frightnight

no

*gravity castle

yes

*bhop battle zig

yes

*kirby tower

yes

*speedrace

yes, even tho I spent 3 hours on it one night

*Either summer tower or skytower, no need for both

no, If I removed both of these might as well remove super tower

*surf warzone

yes

*zuhhh

no, Nipper maps are the best

 

This one might be a little upsetting to the people who've been playing mg since source.

*Scrap courses altogether/ at least get rid of all the ones that aren't popular on other servers.

( Going off of experience, the main two that stay relevant on other servers are acrophobia and cyber course.

In my opinion just scrap them all, it's a waste of everyone's time to play them and risk losing population)

 

I have plans for this. TBA

 

 

Following those changes I believe some other things concerning maps should be dealt with.

Not sure how possible/realistic these implementations are to the AO's/TA's.

If this is impossible correlating with the above mentioned suggestion ( removing the categories in the nomination list. ) then scrap that idea.

* Extend the timer for the "recently played" feature for maps that you guys always say kills the population.

( Deathmatch maps that make the newer population leave.)

Not by too much because it's already pretty long.

*Shorten the timer for the "recently played" feature for maps that are popular

( swag, yolo, awp minigames, awp submarine, etc)

Again not sure how challenging it might be for the TA's to select which map's "recently played" timer get extended/shortened.

 

I don't think this is possible with the current system we have, but I can decrease the recently played timer.

 

 

 

Also not too sure exactly how simple this one would be to implement.

*Add an auto plant plugin or something similar to shorten rounds/stop people from delaying which causes people to get bored and leave.

We have a no delaying rule for a reason. If people are delaying on purposely get an admin.

 

Lastly, not sure how helpful this suggestion will be.

* increase the population count, it's currently too low at 23.

If this is to help with stablization then I guess this wouldn't be approved.

It should be increased to 32 like the majority of MG servers.

It was decreased to 24 because it never got over that amount and it became to troublesome for some people to play over that amount.

I will have a talk with other regs and AO's/BD's about this.

 

This should be done simply because the more players on will make more people want to join. If the server manages to cap at 23, that's actually not that many players

and this can lead to the server dying rather fast, without having a high enough population to keep people joining to fill the slots when people do leave.

 

I had some other thoughts that I've forgotten while typing this out, however things that should be noted are -

 

-Autohop vote is kinda pointless, maps where this may be wanted get played rarely. Also the vote usually doesn't go in favor of turning off auto. It's

bad enough we had to give into autobhop but we have it now so going back to the EZ bhop plugin is pointless.

 

I'll look into what regs think about this.

 

-The two skins that are actually in the shop are bland and might as well be added to the subscriber models, all the cool skins are already for subscribers+ and you don't even have to buy them from the shop which also takes away some of the incentive of gaining credits.

 

It's like this for a bunch of our servers that use skin chooser instead of the store. I'll see what I change with skins.

 

-Some common knowledge is that the only time the server gets close to being full is when you guys throw a successful event, which isn't often. The community should probably put in more effort to replicate these successes or find another way to bring players from other servers to mg even for a little bit, so we can gain new members.(The majority of players will only join an mg server with a decent population in the first place.)

 

I have a couple events that I want to do, but I haven't had time.

 

With that last note, I know my activity pretty much disappeared. I know the community has shifted towards ttt, and jb. However, these are just suggestions that I'd personally like to see attempted, before I put in my time trying to get a stable population. I know SG has the numbers to get MG populated again, and I've had two owners of other communities recognize the amount of MG I play and request that I help populate their servers for them. My heart is with this community even though I haven't been around. I'd really like to try and revive this server rather than waste my time doing it for other communities I've barely played with. Whether or not anyone agrees with my suggestions, the server is pretty much dead and not trying at least some of these just shows the hope that you guys have for MG in the future.

I very much appreciate your post here. Trust me I really want to bring this server back to it's former glory. If you are anyone else have ideas for the server, please let me know. I'll try to make some changes / events hopefully within the next couple weeks. #TeamMG

 

Thanks.

 

^

[All Ts]

Noticed our MG servers "dynamic", changing between all these different gamemodes ends up not being a backup more for low population more than it is a server killer. Just because the majority of the server votes something doesn't always mean they're A. Going to enjoy it and B. That the minority is going to enjoy it. I'd love for MG to have a similar feel to CS:S, now it feels like we just add as many maps as possible. I'm all for cutting out the fat, getting down to the bread and butter of MG aswell. I've had multiple scenarios where we'll pick a "mode" that I thought was gonna be good such as Multigames or Deathmatch, only for the majority to pick a garbage map- then the rest of the people leave. We should step in and take a look at what's on the server to prevent scenarios like this. I don't mean remove everything new, I mean remove maps that aren't fun for people. The mindset that just cause some people find a map fun that we should add it, and keep it added is sometimes very misplaced. A map that objectively has bad gameplay, that gets voted accidentally or not is likely going to NOT be enjoyed. We have kept plenty of maps on servers because "if people don't like it, they don't have to vote for it". That logic is incredibly harmful, people should always be voting for a map they're likely to enjoy, even if it's a blind vote.

 

Something you realize looking at our Prison Break compared to competition is that the map rotation is very, very different. We have different rules and such that allow us to let very few deathgame free maps (2-3) make up the majority of the playtime. The issue comes in that with MG we don't have that same "difference".

 

I'd personally be for removing autohop because I think it simply ruins maps, but the thing is that if other popular servers are using it- it could really hurt our server to remove it. The difficulty and fun of maps is severely lessened when you put Autohop into the mix.

 

The course maps are good for the events, but I've seen the server get switched to course only to have people leave the server- especially since a lot of the course maps are just flat out bad. I fall somewhere in the middle on that.

 

The slot size confuses me to be honest cause we have servers that are exponentially smaller with higher slot count.

 

Will try to post later, am not really awake yet.

[Exk]

Some things I noticed from being on the server time to time:

 

A lot of the random people who join want to vote for course / prophunt (assumably cause they don't know what it's like). Ridding ourselves of the cluster votes or removing these options would help a lot since they are generally population killers. Course is fun for a max of 10 mins. Once people beat the course, or think they can't do it, it creates a riff between them and those who are still doing it / want to do it. Havent experienced prophunt outside of an event yet so I have no comment, but the gameplay itself feels like it'd be stale if it's not a bunch of friends laughing/messing with each other.

 

Autohop is becoming less popular already. I've seen a lot of people complain about it but the vote usually swings one way (particularly cause the general tendency to just spam 1 anyways during votes). I sometimes forget and hit 1 too. There are a few maps that benefit from autohop, but a lot of maps become rather annoying to play (goldeneye being the easiest to recall off the top of my head) with autohop. It'd be cool if we could just enable it for certain maps (like maybe bhop battles or velocity tower). Another compromise could be slightly higher air accel implemented. I remember some people complaining about it prior to autohop implemention.

 

Doesn't JB have some way of connecting !rank to the gameme stats? Something like that would be nice for MG. Currently the only ingame "rank" is !couples which requires you to first establish your placement with another player and requires someone to inform you of it. I might be blind, but I don't recall ever seeing it mentioned in the random popup messages.

 

I personally love MG. I joined this community through TTT but in my 1.6 child days it was MG, surf, and assassination. Whenever I see the server populate past 6 people, I try to hop on and I hope to populate it. We get random upswings here and there, but there's no consistent population still. I can probably count the MG regs with my fingers. LF> TeamMG to be a thing.

[sean]

I'm for removing auto bhop, most of the time it's just a delay tool for the final people in the round. I know the whole argument about it evening the playing field between people who know how to bhop vs the players who don't is still there but I think it causes more harm than good to keep it on.

[whimsy]

I agree with some of the input you guys are giving but my suggestion was to remove the autohop vote and keep autohop in general. Yes, most of us hate it but...guess what? Our community right now isn't what we are trying to appeal to. The server is dead as is. There is no point in keeping things how they used to be in the past for the sake of the older players in our community. Every other MG server has autohop, and it's kind of an unavoidable thing. My suggestion was to scrap the vote so that it will always stay on auto. The airaccel on our server is already so low that it makes advanced strafing very difficult to pull off without stopping yourself from turning too fast. Other things that could counter the autohop issue would be just to add a decay rate for jumps.

 

 

 

The autoplant suggestion holds the purpose of stopping the rounds from being delayed by people bhopping on maps that have an objective.

 

 

 

 

@LampShade

I get that some of those maps seem important to keep, and you're an AO so you do you...but deathmatch maps are already looked down upon when it comes to keeping a population. So maps like rats and the extra tower maps should really be removed regardless, they are irrelevant. Supertower is a popular deathmatch map, whereas there is no need to have both summer tower and skytower. Not only are those two maps pretty awful in general, they are nothing like supertower at all. That is why I suggested to at least keep one and scrap the other because there is no point in having two maps that the majority of people will not want to play. I've only seen those two maps get played very very rarely on other servers. This is from all the experience I have from playing on pretty much every popular MG server there is.

[All Ts]

Took me a few days, I'm awake.

 

Will try to post later, am not really awake yet.

 

I think this thread has a lot of potential to get good changes, so I'm gonna try my best to explain some things I said better aswell as share opinions on the things I did not.

 

@LampShade

I get that some of those maps seem important to keep, and you're an AO so you do you...but deathmatch maps are already looked down upon when it comes to keeping a population. So maps like rats and the extra tower maps should really be removed regardless, they are irrelevant. Supertower is a popular deathmatch map, whereas there is no need to have both summer tower and skytower. Not only are those two maps pretty awful in general, they are nothing like supertower at all. That is why I suggested to at least keep one and scrap the other because there is no point in having two maps that the majority of people will not want to play. I've only seen those two maps get played very very rarely on other servers. This is from all the experience I have from playing on pretty much every popular MG server there is.

 

I completely agree with this and it was exactly what I was trying to get at when I said this.

 

Just because the majority of the server votes something doesn't always mean they're A. Going to enjoy it and B. That the minority is going to enjoy it. I'd love for MG to have a similar feel to CS:S, now it feels like we just add as many maps as possible. I'm all for cutting out the fat, getting down to the bread and butter of MG aswell.

 

To elaborate a bit.

 

Our MG server has way too many maps on it that function decently so end up staying on the server. For other servers like TTT, JB, ZE we tend to pick at little things about maps hyper-objectively and remove what is unnecessary or simply bad for population. Awhile back on JB we pretty much stealthily cut out a bunch of maps, noone cared, noone noticed, but it made the server do visibly better not hitting those "bumps". In this situation I think maybe we make some kind of event where instead of testing a lot of maps, we go through the old ones objectively- where people like @whimsy would be able to make a proper case for why he doesn't want a map. Sometimes playing the map itself and not enjoying isn't going to be reason enough to remove it, sometimes maps just arent popular and don't resonate- you have to pick a group of select good ones.

 

---

 

I'll elaborate on this part aswell.

 

A map that objectively has bad gameplay, that gets voted accidentally or not is likely going to NOT be enjoyed. We have kept plenty of maps on servers because "if people don't like it, they don't have to vote for it". That logic is incredibly harmful, people should always be voting for a map they're likely to enjoy, even if it's a blind vote.

 

 

The current CS:GO community has a pretty big lacking of MG servers with a solid community as I discussed with @Wawa a few weeks back. I hope we pursue many of these changes because trying to carve out our own too unique path has been tried and failed for way too long. Sacrificing a few things for the greater good, even if just experimentally is worth the effort of gaining another major server (especially if its something as basic as maps). There are currently no "major" MG servers within the United States so to say, and even looking at the MG servers that do well out of the States- they don't do that well either. Though they don't do that well, there is enough of a playerbase out there to build a foundation and we certainly have enough people at SG to give it that initial boost.

 

Maps are the core of a server, especially MG- if we fuck up maps its gonna very hard to recover from there no matter how much cool shit we have. One of those "cool things" (!ws !knife plugin) doesn't really cost much of anything to have, but we have had a stance where we want to follow the server guidelines so we pay for that. It's pretty much as simple as buying new server tokens (which are pretty fuckin cheap for 1 server), and running a plugin on the server that automatically restarts it once every 3 days every time it is banned. I've personally never suggested this, but its definitely on of the things that pulls kids into servers.

 

People tend to enjoy familiarity, they come on a server with an idea of what they want to play, so when we have 65% of the time our maps in the "other category", I view that as a bad thing. If you don't believe me I'm willing to bet you almost any amount of money that popular servers tend to lean towards lower percentages within the "other category". Other than the reason I've already stated this is also due to repeating regulars picking the same maps, on SG this is however difficult to do as explained in my previous post. To pick up on that last thought I think us having so many different options and categories is a bad thing. Not to get nerdy but people generally hate having many options, which it's choice overload- not due to familiarity but more to do with regret.

 

---

 

The other suggestions about a stats plugin, auto-plant, adding skins to store aswell as skinchooser, and increasing slots are in my opinion pretty low-risk high-reward changes that should absolutely be done. Stats plugin is pretty obvious, it's one of the things that makes our other servers so loved and popular. Increasing Surf's slots to 40 as dumb as I thought it might be actually ended up working partially, for MG it makes sense especially when the server hits peak. We need to get the highest amount of people stuffed in there as possible to bring the shitty average up. @LampShade, your response to the auto-plant suggestion does not make full sense- you need to reread that as it could shorten rounds or at the very least consider adding a fastplant plugin. Just because we have admins doesn't mean we shouldn't add things to give more automation or lighten the load for them, especially with the lack of staffing we currently have.