Why again
Why you made this Change Bottiger and Why it Was a Carless One.
You made this change because you saw the growth when you were comparing the performance between the US and EU servers.
You're comparing apples and oranges like they are the same thing even though they are not. You have to consider a lot to dictate a server's performance. You also have to consider that people have jobs, and those jobs earn them money to survive, this has a greater priority over playing games. This is the reason why people don’t join in the morning, including people attending school to pursue an education.
It's also due to time zones because the EU is around 6 to 9 hours ahead of the US. We play when they're asleep, but they play when we are asleep, also including the massive player increase from holidays and vacations.
You also wanted Skial to stand out more by increasing the player count to 40 that's why there is a high number of players joining the 40-player server and is also another reason why others from the 32-player experience and it's because that is the only payload server you have at the moment.
Stats Stats Stats
Why is it that every time I come back to this forum, I only see one thing and that is Bottiger only seeing the stats/performance of a server. As of last time you said that payload only had 5% increase which is nothing compared to EU 40%, and you also said later that it was ok after you revert it back to 32 because there was not that much of an increase. And again, you change your mind like if it were betting on red or black if it was a game of roulette.
How you treat Skial
You treat Skial as this “community” but in reality, it's more like communities because each individual one is distinctively unique with all their own preferences and needs. Just because one person says they want to have chat spam Fridays doesn't mean everyone else wants it. Don’t let the minority of players speak for the majority of players.
Balancing
You have so much to consider, things like how a certain class will act and perform for example:
Performance Pros/Cons:
Scout:
Strong at close range.
Is easily overwhelmed by groups of players and Health.
Soldier:
High damage explosives and AOE of damage and Health.
If not at close to mid-range, rockets will deal low damage.
Pyro:
Somewhat strong at close range and the ability to reflect projectiles.
Weak against groups of players and a lacking ability to airblast spam and needing to be up close to do anything.
Demoman:
High damage explosives, having an arc to hit players at an angle, having a huge clip and can be overly oppressive with a medic constantly feeding them crits for non-damage falloff 3x damage.
Weak at close range.
Heavy:
Strong at close to mid-range and high health.
Slow and weak at long range and is easy to target.
Engineer:
Can build sentries to protect him and his team.
Spam can easily destroy his nest.
Medic:
Can heal and keep their team alive.
Harder to make pushes which are dependent on teams.
Sniper:
Very strong and long range and being able to completely shut down a part of the map.
Weak at close range, take more damage at long range to a larger amount of people shooting at him and harder visibility.
Spy:
Can insanely kill with a singer backstab and can go invisible.
It is the weakest class by far and team support and higher numbers make the spy almost completely useless.
This changes how classes interact and perform and is what a class would face but would be heavily increased depending on what it is. You may think buffing classes like the Spy would make him better like more sapper damage but would still have little effect on how he plays because he still has to worry about what I listed before but more overwhelmingly. And you also must consider how maps will play out. They will be more crowded considering that 32 players at times can be somewhat crowded. Choke points will be harder to push into and will be harder to defend. Games will be more determined by spam than skill and this is not considering things like class stacking and other things. As 32 was a stretch of what the game was designed for but now 40 is nowhere near it. This would make it into a horrible experience.
Possible Ideas to Satisfy the Old and New
There are multiple ideas you can do, One is to make another 40 player server and revert the old one, And if you see a high demand of players you can open another one to have even more players and you can please the people how like the old 32 and you can please the ones who want the new 40 player payload.
And if you don’t think you have enough reasons to go off, go back and read what the other players are saying about this change because those people bothered to say something because they care about this server and what a great time they had on it and they don’t want it to change for the worse.
What I Think of This Change
I think of these changes as Skial not listening to its players once again, not understanding how people interact with your servers, and you trying to change a player base that does not agree with those changes. But I must admit you have a high variety of experiences that can appeal to certain groups like death run or class war but is not the original game and does not appeal to players like me because we came for the 32-player payload experience not a gimmicky one. I will not be told that this new 40 experience is the “perfected/better” TF2 experience or go somewhere else because of the ones who listen to people like Uncle Dane or whoever they are because they don’t know the games history and all they believe is that TF2 is this “Silly Hat Game” where they think that the game is doing good even though it's not. I understand that when casual became bot free Skial has lost a lot of players and Bottiger has been changing his servers to accommodate for those losses, but you should not ruin the experience that many have liked for years because of a negative thing. one of the reasons Skial is still around because of the core player base because it offers an experience like no other. But changing it will make you lose some of that core player base. If a change does not happen, I will stop coming to Skial and I will tell anybody that are new or old looking to play TF2 or look for a new server not to go to Skial because of these clear issues. And I've been playing here for more than 2 years, I have made over 90% of my friends on Skial and had the best time on it, I don't want to leave but I feel forced to because of it. And I know a lot of people who play on your servers that will stop paying for premium and will leave.
And I am sorry if I'm not professional, but I felt like something had to be said about this problem once again.
