Post by Peace-=Of-God=- on Dec 28, 2005 0:57:06 GMT -5
[NOTE: I wrote most of the following while informing a forum member via PM about what goes into the process of selecting the maps for each of our servers. Since there's apparently a lot of confusion about the process, I figured that I might as well share it here as well.]
You may not be aware of it, but there is actually a lot of thought, preparation, and research that goes into the task of deciding which servers should be on which maps at what times. There's a lot more to it than just saying, "Oh, put a good server on Hospital / Bridge / Extraction / Favorite-Map-Of-The-Hour and it'll stay full all the time." I've had members tell me that in the recent past -- but I can show them logs of several 1-day and 2-day and even 3-day stretches where we had a server on Hospital / Bridge / Extraction / Favorite-Map-Of-The-Hour (and running well, at that), yet it sat empty for 90-95% of that time. So obviously, just determining what's "popular" isn't necessarily going to guarantee a full server.
Part of our selection process is based on server history -- what maps have gotten good play on our servers in recent weeks? what maps have left our servers barren of players for days? etc. This is based on my own personal knowledge gleaned from monitoring our servers over the last two years, as well as a couple of months' worth of server log files (all logs since we started with GD) that I keep readily accessible on my Desktop.
Another major factor in the selection process is how many of our members actually like a particular map. For example, we currently have only 8 (out of 213) members who list SF Hospital as their favorite map (along with 26 who list it second and 10 who list it as #3). Therefore, it would not be cost-effective for us to dedicate one $72/month server to keeping those 8 members really happy (and the other 36 somewhat happy). Yes, we will have a server there occasionally, and hopefully enough to keep all 44 of them somewhat happy -- but not all of the time.
On the other hand, we always have a server on MOUT McKenna -- so why is that? Well, perhaps it's because 197 out of 213 members in this clan rank this as one of their top three favorite maps. Also, most new players play a lot of McKenna, so keeping a server there gives us the opportunity to recruit the good candidates before they pick up bad habits (and before they start playing on other clans' servers
). And by the way, these "favorite map" numbers are based not on estimates, nor on some secret hidden data -- all of these numbers are all available to the forum public, in our Clan Member List board.
There are few things that I hate worse here (excluding seeing forum and server rules broken
) than to check the server monitors that we have set up and find that fewer than a third of our 54 slots are currently in use 
-- that's just not good stewardship of God's money! So by combining the two data sets above, we try our best to come up with a way to try to keep people happy with the map selections, while still trying to keep our servers as full as possible and "get our money's worth" out of them, so to speak.
I hope this helps to clear some things up for you fine folks out there as to some of the "behind-the-scenes" stuff that you don't really see very often or very much.
Believe it or not, there is more method in my madness than madness in my method. 
You may not be aware of it, but there is actually a lot of thought, preparation, and research that goes into the task of deciding which servers should be on which maps at what times. There's a lot more to it than just saying, "Oh, put a good server on Hospital / Bridge / Extraction / Favorite-Map-Of-The-Hour and it'll stay full all the time." I've had members tell me that in the recent past -- but I can show them logs of several 1-day and 2-day and even 3-day stretches where we had a server on Hospital / Bridge / Extraction / Favorite-Map-Of-The-Hour (and running well, at that), yet it sat empty for 90-95% of that time. So obviously, just determining what's "popular" isn't necessarily going to guarantee a full server.
Part of our selection process is based on server history -- what maps have gotten good play on our servers in recent weeks? what maps have left our servers barren of players for days? etc. This is based on my own personal knowledge gleaned from monitoring our servers over the last two years, as well as a couple of months' worth of server log files (all logs since we started with GD) that I keep readily accessible on my Desktop.
Another major factor in the selection process is how many of our members actually like a particular map. For example, we currently have only 8 (out of 213) members who list SF Hospital as their favorite map (along with 26 who list it second and 10 who list it as #3). Therefore, it would not be cost-effective for us to dedicate one $72/month server to keeping those 8 members really happy (and the other 36 somewhat happy). Yes, we will have a server there occasionally, and hopefully enough to keep all 44 of them somewhat happy -- but not all of the time.
On the other hand, we always have a server on MOUT McKenna -- so why is that? Well, perhaps it's because 197 out of 213 members in this clan rank this as one of their top three favorite maps. Also, most new players play a lot of McKenna, so keeping a server there gives us the opportunity to recruit the good candidates before they pick up bad habits (and before they start playing on other clans' servers
). And by the way, these "favorite map" numbers are based not on estimates, nor on some secret hidden data -- all of these numbers are all available to the forum public, in our Clan Member List board.There are few things that I hate worse here (excluding seeing forum and server rules broken
) than to check the server monitors that we have set up and find that fewer than a third of our 54 slots are currently in use 
-- that's just not good stewardship of God's money! So by combining the two data sets above, we try our best to come up with a way to try to keep people happy with the map selections, while still trying to keep our servers as full as possible and "get our money's worth" out of them, so to speak.I hope this helps to clear some things up for you fine folks out there as to some of the "behind-the-scenes" stuff that you don't really see very often or very much.
Believe it or not, there is more method in my madness than madness in my method. 
