Drop in players

I'm looking at game tracker, and there has definitely been a decline in the average number of players over the past month. Every day this week we've been running almost 0 population until 5pm EDT or so. This is really starting to make me wonder what is wrong.

1. Server stability: When the server crashes once, most people come back, but when it's repeated over and over they say F it. the server crashed 3 times on Monday night in the span of about 3 hours. I heard more people talking about crashes on Tuesday and Wednesday night, though I can't confirm it. This could be leading to a severe lack of faith in this server amongst regulars.

2. Maps: we tried working on this last night, though we didn't get anything done. Ck says he has decided to deep six half the maps, though I/we have no clue which maps these are. If we get rid of half of the maps, what are we gonna replace them with? Like i said in my "srsly" topic, we need some maps with variety of play style. Viva brought this up last night, using another method, but once again, I think we need maps that encourage teamwork, not hide and seek. Put some escape maps in too. People regularly request Jurassic Park and other escape maps. We're losing out on competition with other servers if we don't offer a variety of maps.

Those are the only 2 things I can think of. Maybe admin abuse...but i don't think that's been such a huge problem lately.

You are missing the third, very important element.

If the server crashes someone needs to let me know immediately.

Why don't you put some maps which are running maps which is like running through a map either in boats or on the foot to get to a radio to call a heli or boats or even both to take them to an island which launches a nuke at the island i ahev played on maps like those a i thought they were awesome in my opinion.

and that is?

Me. I'm the third and most impotant element. When I left, there was a drop of 10, expecting to hear Peters jolly laugh, saddened by the loss, they vanished.

har har, may be so, but they all came back and brought their friends when they found out how awesome i am.

If they did why is the server now empty? Did you like... Show them your penis and wave it at them?

That's an Escape map. The only escape we have is like, Atix_Helicopter?
And I know if a zombie escapes on the helicopter it screws things up.


I think you guys should put Megabox back into rotation, I know, some people don't like it.
But "I think we need maps that encourage teamwork, not hide and seek"
Isn't that Megabox? You have to work as a team to defend yourselves, not just sitting in A godly room with enough stuff in the way of the door.

In megabox, you can't hide, all you can do is get into a corner with enough people and Try and win as a team.

I haven't played in about 2 months because of school and other things, I'll add to the population when i get some down time.

the true third element is everyone has gone back to school, people dont get on until later in the day and they leave earlier cause they wake up earlier. happens to everyone this time of year

I thought so as well, but we were still peaking out at 56 players on nights after school started. The changes in population have been more recent than that. School started almost months ago(some places 1 1/2 months) and the population has dropped off in the past week.
Gametracker's stats

This server was always in the 99th percentile. Now look at the server rank in the bottom right. Somewhere around October 8 the server just started tanking in population. Were any changes made to the server that may be preventing people from connecting?

I personally think it's school, that's why I don't play that much anymore.

When did we remove Wtf_Hax? That COULD be it,I doubt it though.

i agree that it's school. plus people have end of the quarter exams to deal with and mid terms and it definitely is around that time. maybe people have been taking the time to study.

I'm sorry, but the evidence just doesn't seem to be supporting the theory that school is the cause. Maybe if we see a rise back to almost normal levels this week, then the mid-term idea may apply. But i'm doubting it. What i'm concerned with is player populations after school started as opposed to current player populations. looking at game tracker(and from my memory) we would have population peaks(and staying at the population cap) from 7PM EST to 12 PM EST(sometimes later). Now we aren't even hitting the population cap for the server.

Yah, I haven't seen the server maxed in a bit. I remember a while ago trying to jump on and the server was completely full without even having 1 admin on.

I think most of the maps that are missing these days, are ones with lots of rooms with lots of items to build cades with. Most of the maps only have one or two defendable spots these days, but they are cheap spots on hard to jump to places, or bridges that are easily defendable by 3 guys. I do think the recent map update helped get rid of some of those, but there is still work to be done on the map rotation before we can attract new players, and old ones back.

Also, As much as I love the escape maps, you really start to notice how much they lag up once you guys added them back in. Does anyone actually know why this happens? I can't see escape maps being as popular as they are if every server had these problems with them.

it is school, though..
Reason being I only log onto the forums 3-3 a.m.
It's definitely school.