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Prince Of Whales

Scarcely Lethal Noob
Why not take one of those dead servers (cough cough jailbreak) and give it a good server rotation rather than the usual 24/7?.

Nightfall, Converge, Sunshine, Offblast, Watchtower, Glassworks, Pier, Swiftwater, Snakewater and even Byre or Haarp

You almost never see these maps anywhere, on any servers. And if you do find one running the map you are looking for it's ALWAYS empty. Skial can fix this with no risk. So what if you change a dead server and it continues to be dead?
 

Meowcenary

Gaben's Own Aimbot
Contributor
Why not take one of those dead servers (cough cough jailbreak) and give it a good server rotation rather than the usual 24/7?.

Nightfall, Converge, Sunshine, Offblast, Watchtower, Glassworks, Pier, Swiftwater, Snakewater and even Byre or Haarp

You almost never see these maps anywhere, on any servers. And if you do find one running the map you are looking for it's ALWAYS empty. Skial can fix this with no risk. So what if you change a dead server and it continues to be dead?

You can blame quickplay

Read over this quote:
If your favorite server was removed then it was because it was losing players and eventually going to end up completely empty. Unless you can prove that the map is gaining in popularity on other servers, it will not be coming back.

Valve servers do not count. On January 23rd 2014, Valve defaulted quickplay to official servers which killed off all but the most popular maps. Before this, we used to have every type of rotation server and for less mainstream maps such as gravelpit and barnblitz.

It is up to you to keep your favorite server filled. We have done everything humanly possible to make sure that our servers are the best and that's why we have way more players than everyone else. If you can't do that, then you should complain to Valve to stop quickplay from defaulting to official servers.

Even if we had unlimited money, what's the point in keeping a server that no one wants to seed?

Why can't we just keep the server up until it is completely dead? Because everyone would have removed it from their favorites and it will become 100x harder to replace it with something else.

https://www.skial.com/threads/why-c...-server-why-is-my-favorite-server-gone.62583/
 

Prince Of Whales

Scarcely Lethal Noob
Yea I read over that before I posted. That's why I included the whole thing about dead servers, Skial has a few of them so why not experiment and see if they can't bring one back to life with maps like the ones I mentioned?
 

Meowcenary

Gaben's Own Aimbot
Contributor
Yea I read over that before I posted. That's why I included the whole thing about dead servers, Skial has a few of them so why not experiment and see if they can't bring one back to life with maps like the ones I mentioned?

I should of elaborated a bit better, my fault.

What I'm trying to get at is if the maps aren't being played elsewhere, Skial running them isn't going to suddenly make them popular again.

Running the maps on a big community like Skial won't change that because the reason why Skial is so big in the first place is partly because Bottiger doesn't run failing maps. When a community runs dying maps, fewer people play on the servers. Entire server communities have faded into obscurity because they refused to get rid of their unpopular dying maps
 

Pedro the fabulous

Totally Ordinary Human
Contributor
Master Mapper
If people like to only play some maps, then it's because they prefer them over the others. This is perfectly natural and trying to satisfy a minority just doesnt's work in the long run
 

Renegade

Australian Skial God
Contributor
What about surf? There are some of those servers that are gaining popularity again. Don't know if it's a big enough thing yet though.
 

Meowcenary

Gaben's Own Aimbot
Contributor
What about surf? There are some of those servers that are gaining popularity again. Don't know if it's a big enough thing yet though.

I don't think one would fill well enough to meet Bottiger's standards

There's only 3 somewhat active surf servers which is the first 3 on this list, and the first one is only ranked TF2's third most trafficked server in the game because the server force unlocks certain items when people connect to it (achievement items, director taunt, etc) The server itself runs like complete dog shit tho and it only runs one map 24/7 so I wouldn't even count spirit's surf server.

Azelphur and resurfed's servers are the only somewhat active ones and they're usually only full on weekends. I used to be a regular on Azelphur's surf server but it's only been declining in player traffic over the years along with all the other surf servers

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DaivdBaekr

Moderator
Contributor
There used to be UGC Maps NY which had a similar role and it completely died. Jailbreak is erratic and only peaks for an hour or two a day, but there is still reason to keep it around with summer breaks approaching.
 

Bottiger

Administrator
We used to have a top surf server along with a custom maps server but our NY host went bad and we had to switch ips before non-ip favorites existed and they all died.

Maps like nightfall were never popular even before the quickplay disaster.

We do not have any "dead" servers except Jailbreak which is borderline.