What do you guys think of "scheduling" servers?

[That One Boss]

So I noticed how many people the 3v3 TLMS tourney server has been attracting recently, and I started thinking about all the underplayed (read, never played) gamemodes we have. Since tourneys usually run on schedules, I figured, hey, why not apply this to some of these other gamemodes? I feel one of the biggest reasons certain gamemodes aren't played is how difficult even starting a server can be. Your only options are, A: Sit around and wait for someone to actually join your server. This can take literal hours, or B: Solicit people to join from live servers which, 95% of the time, just annoys the people in the server.

So what I propose is this: Every Friday and weekend, we'll have a scheduled time for people to meet at a certain server. We'd only need 4-6 people to actually start the server, and it's definitely better than waiting around or soliciting. For example, on one weekend, we could have
 Friday: Roboenza, 6:00 PM Est
 Saturday: Mafia, 3:00 PM Est
 Sunday: LMS games, 3:00 PM Est
On another,
 Friday: Vanilla CTF, 7:00 PM Est
 Saturday: YD Classes TLMS, 4:00 PM Est
 Sunday: Vanilla Deathmatch, 1:00 PM Est
We could have a thread dedicated to scheduling servers, where people could discuss what servers they want scheduled. There would be rules of course, like not having a gamemode get scheduled multiple times in a row (since the last thing anyone wants is for one gamemode to start getting scheduled repeatedly, setting us back to square one).

The most important thing to remember is that this shouldn't be expected to make 20 person servers every night. The goal of server scheduling is to make frankensteining starting up a server easier so that more gamemodes will have a chance to be played.

What do you think?

[Russel]

Eh...in my opinion, things should just be put up as demanded. If you want to play Roboenza or something, go get some friends and host a game.

Just be sure to take down your servers when you think they'll be finished if you're hosting using Best-Ever or Grandvoid or whatever.
This last note is to all people who host on Best-Ever.

[Turbodude]

I think planning servers is a swell idea! It encourages folks to spend out and play different modes,

I've seen this work wonders for Zandro and ZDaemon, so I can imagine, with enough interest, this would share a similar success.

[Bikdark]

This has been done before.

People show up for the first few events, but the turnout slowly dwindles as people move over to Cancer Hale

[ice]

Or unholy >_>

Hosted a CTF server with the imbalance mod on best ever, sat on the server all day, not a single person joined

[Hunter Frags]

Want a better idea? Encourage people to set a "break period" on their servers, or at least ones like mentioned in the above two posts. If people actually took down their servers for a while, especially if it's something easily populated and has been played for a while, maybe people would do something else for a change.

[Bikdark]

Want a better idea? Encourage people to set a "break period" on their servers, or at least ones like mentioned in the above two posts. If people actually took down their servers for a while, especially if it's something easily populated and has been played for a while, maybe people would do something else for a change.

Probably not a good idea.

If you create arbitrary time periods where people cannot play a specific high demand gamemode, you will only leave a bitter taste in someone's mouth. You won't be getting people to like new gamemodes, you'll be bolstering their Hale/Unholy addiction by making them want more.

Here's another way to look at it:

In a mobile game, you get X amount of coins, with these coins you can play levels. Lose the level, and you lose your coin. Win, and you gain one. Lose all your coins, and you need to wait a few hours to get them back. Rather than players saying "I've had enough for now let's do something else" they are taken out of the game before they are ready to leave, and are only left hungry for more of that mobile game.

edit: actually you know what this is a great idea. just make the break period 10 years and ban unholy/saxton/other cancerous gamemodes from BE

[Orange juice :l]

This thread reeks of people trying to make others stop playing what they want to so they're arbitrarily forced/incentivized to play the poster's favored mode. That never works, not to mention how selfish it is. You can't make people do what they don't want to, and we've all found first-hand that assembling a group to "schedule fun" does not work in practice. If you truly can't sell people on a mode enough for it to be played, either in-or-outside of the current playerbase, it's probably a dead mode, sorry.

[Hunter Frags]

This thread reeks of people trying to make others stop playing what they want to so they're arbitrarily forced/incentivized to play the poster's favored mode. That never works, not to mention how selfish it is. You can't make people do what they don't want to, and we've all found first-hand that assembling a group to "schedule fun" does not work in practice. If you truly can't sell people on a mode enough for it to be played, either in-or-outside of the current playerbase, it's probably a dead mode, sorry.

If people thought like that, they wouldn't be keeping on about how so-and-so gamemodes are "cancer and need to die."

I already get that you can't force someone off of something they like, and I'm not going for that. The problem I have is that I hear enough from people about stuff like this, yet if it were such a problem, something would've or should've been done by now.

[That One Boss]

What if we were to assemble a Skype group for a given gamemode? That way, you could (hopefully) send the group a message if you want to start a server, it wouldn't intrude at all on people who want to play Saxton Hale, and it's way less convoluted than a schedule. Only obvious problem is getting enough people in the skype group to start a server.

[SmashTheEchidna]

Well advertising on here to get people to join the group might work.

[Hunter Frags]

A Skype group would actually be useful for those who would like to do something that isn't played as much/not played at all anymore (something I'd be interested in.) If there are enough that know about it, know there are enough others up for it, and they're cool with voting on what to do every whenever instead of giving a damn about what unrelated people are doing, it would make it easier to show a little lovin' for the old stuff.

...That, and seeing what old mods are V4-compatible or what can be fixed/patched that way (depending on whatever people want, or it'll depend on if this whole thing gets that far.)

[Bikdark]

and they're cool with voting on what to do every whenever

Typically people won't show up if what they voted for is not chosen

[Tengu]

This is the sort of thing that is successful for about 2 weeks then everyone stops giving a shit and it dies.

[Gumballtoid]

It depends on how badly people want variety. Lately the servers have been dominated by B-TLMS, Saxton Hale R++, and the occasional Duel Dojo. I myself would love to see some Roboenza and Bot Apocalypse.

I'd be happy to join a Skype group for this purpose. The only problem with this idea, though, is that groups crammed full of everyone ever tend to devolve rather quickly because someone picks a fight with someone and tensions rise and it just gets messy and unpleasant. If you manage to keep that to a minimum, however, then I expect you'll see some success.