As the title says… 1.0 is failing. Build and shoot is picking up their lost players. Because of this, most babel servers are filled to the brim.
Between minit, call of liberty and aloha… the servers are nearly always at capacity during primetime, with no other servers hosting babel at all.
Aloha tends to be THE most popular babel server due to it’s lack of a time limit and team killing. (Shown by even in off hours holding twice as many players as the other servers).
Which leads me to believe it is time to open up an aloha.pk babel “2” server. Rather than waiting around for 45 minutes to get in on a game, we could at least have a lower population server to play on.
Last night ( editing this sunday morning) as an example… Primetime saturday night hours. It took 2 hours before I could manage to snipe a spot in any of the only babel servers running. And rather than it being based out of the US where I am, it ended up being in sweden and extremely laggy. This has been the case to a lesser extent for close to two weeks now, but is only getting worse as time goes on.
Sure some people donate but most of the playerbase here don’t. Even when some donate, it’s in small amounts, But it’s still March so…
Oh yeah and they have their own money but do you still think of other expenses for them other than keeping the server alive? Bills, electricity, taxes, food, etc. so you can just think that they also donate a rather small amount, too
Money doesn’t seem like it’s really relevant in this thread. At any given time, there are 5-6 aloha servers I have NEVER seen anyone play in. (check now, tell me how many empty aloha servers you see) Any one of these could be re-designated to an additional babel server, costing no additional money as the server hardware is already there and the electricity to run them is being used whether or not they are actually used.
I’d run my own, but I have no idea where to even start, and the aloha name is already branded within the community as being quality servers to play on. Let’s not re-invent the wheel.
As for manpower… Again seems like a non issue looking over the requests for trusted status and such. You have a community here which wants to keep the game moderated and hack free (other than a few bad apples now and again) Put the community to work rather than claiming it’s this huge pressure on the back of the guards to keep the servers hack free.
Even now, I got glitched out of my spot on aloha babel, someone sniped my spot from me, and I’ve been trying to get back in for 45 minutes. Minit and GS are both full, So i’ll just go watch tv instead.
I don’t see why you HAVE to play Babel… there are plenty of other great gamemodes with TONS of space open… whatever happened to tug of war? That was an awesome gamemode but no one is ever on it anymore!
Just mix it up a little bit… try some new gamemodes, and seriously… waiting 45 minutes is NOT a big deal… just do something else for a little while… jeez
I do not object to the idea of a second babel server. It does not cost any money to add another server. The term “server” used here refers to a piece of software that is being run, not new hardware. All Aloha “servers” are run on a single computer. Recently we’ve been adding experimental servers with new game modes, courtesy of Danko and others.
Nevertheless, it does cost money to keep this place going, so contributions are always welcome. Nobody is making any profit from any of this.
26 Mexicans, the next time babel is full and you’d like to join, stop by the IRC channel and see if an admin will do a /kickafk for you to get rid of idle players.
I have played all the other game modes. But I do not see why it is such a bad thing to have personal favorites either. If you enjoy riding a bike, should you ride a skateboard instead just to mix it up? Even though you hate skateboarding?
As to waiting 45 minutes, it may not be an issue for you. And that’s fine. But those of us who have full time jobs, families and errands to do… 45 minutes takes a very large chunk out of our already limited playtime. Being that there isn’t a “queue” system in place to join a server, I can’t simply just enter the queue and go do laundry or cook dinner for 45 minutes till I am in game, I have to actively sit in my office refreshing the page until a spot opens up.
That said, “Assassins spade” babel server was re-launched shortly after I made this post on B&S forums. So the need for additional babel servers is no longer what it used to be (45 mins-2 hours waiting during primetime; which is the only time I can really play due to work). But I will keep the IRC in mind if it happens again in the future, I’d just hate to inconvenience someone when there are more important things which could use an admins attention.
I actually remember up to 4 babel servers hosted on aloha, about a year ago.
I rarely have difficulties to get into the server these days (but i guess this might differ for the timezones), seems to me the server was more busy in the past.
When you are in between the west coast players and the european players like I am, 5-9pm EST it gets pretty tough to get a spot in babel, hallway and counterstrike maps due to the fact there are players from both europe, the west coast and east coast all trying to play. As you progress later in the night european players start falling off due to the 5+ hour time difference, and before that “sweetspot timeframe” most western US players are still at school/work, so it’s predominantly european players with a few east coasters playing. This can also be seen via rakiru’s playercount graph. Being that this is a US server, it kinda makes sense.
I’d do up a venn diagram to show what I’m talking about, but my brain hurts.