How to attract people to a CounterStrike Source Server?

[Layabout]

Does anyone know of any documentation out there on how to run a succesful public CounterStrike Source server?

I have a 20 member clan with a 40 slot CounterStrike Source server based in the UK. On some nights, up to 15 clan members can be playing.

I have all the nice mods installed (Mani, NemoD, Beetle, XAD) and run standard maps most of the time, but have never seen us get more than 20 people in.

Before anyone asks, I have sv_region set to 3 !

Any pointers / help would be gladly appreciated.

[scout121]

You and your clan are going to have a week+ of being in there as much as you can each day. You can also get a pluggin that creates fake spectators so your server will always appear as through at least 16 people are in.

[Dygear]

Moeny makes moeny. People gets more people.
Get your ass on the server ALL of the time, and you'll get a game going.

[Extremeone]

make the name of your server in all caps and also put like ten spaces infront of it
like this:
AWSOME CS:S SERVER
:D

also:
http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=37452

[Rebell]

just have a good mapcycle and good admins !

:wink:

[Fatty]

what he said, but add in a good pipe. Nobody wants to play if the latency is high. How do you sort your servers when you pub? When I used to play on pub servers, I sorted them by ping. I would bet that most others do to.

Also, keep your servers as lean as possible (ironic place to say that, in a mod forum) so it runs as efficiently as it can.

It also depends on what kind of crowd you want to attract....just want people in a server with your name on it? But a big server on a big pipe, and everyone and their brother will love playing for free on it. However, the larger servers will mainly (there are exceptions) attract the non-team type player, the ones that just want targets, and lots of em.

We've settled back to 24 players on all of our CSS servers....for all of the above reasons.

Your mapcycle is another thing. Your "I want the high kills" guys mix with the "pub-allstar" guys and only want to play a small set of maps. We are fortunate enough with a solid community to have the luxury of putting 3rd party maps into our rotation without a decline in players.

I actually spend more time on the quality of our servers / community than I do playing anymore. Population with the right kinds of people is my business....and again, like the guy above me said...good admins will make or break your server. When pubbers that want a good game w/o the e-thugs, they'll come back when they see your server being policed regularly.

We're going through this on the West coast right now...we just introduced our first CSS server out there in San Jose. It's a job, but worth it to achieve the type of atmosphere we require at GC.

Good luck to you and your new server. Feel free to contact me with any questions or if I can help you out.

Speaking of UK, we have a few regs from there that tolerate their 100 ms ping just to be part of the community! Be fun, have fun!

[Layabout]

Thanks for all your input people.

Something rather strange and quite nice happened today.

I woke up, had breakfast. Started sipping my coffee.......read my email......logged on to my clan site and checked out the server status.

40/40

:shock:

It's like 11:30 AM in the morning! I've been struggling to get 20 players at prime time and all of a sudden I've got 40 players and it aint even lunchtime!

Anyway.......I did add bots in reluctantly. I didn't want to go down that route at first, as I didn't want the server to be known as "that server with the bots". I put on 8 bots, configured to be auto-kicked when humans turn up.

Now, someone said to me today, that server uptime is important. You see, the server is new. I've been constantly changing files, adding and removing software. To be honest, it's been rebooted at least once every 24 hours for one reason or the other.

An American friend told me, that servers should be up for 48 hours. Then the Steam server list takes the server seriously.

Can I have a second opinion on that?

Is that the reason why I have players now? Because my server has actually been running for more than 48 hours without a reboot?

That being the case, am I likely to see a drop the next time I reboot?

Cheers.

[Fatty]

I've never heard of that. I like to reboot our CSS servers each morning if I remember because they're windows servers. A day or two goes by and the player IDs are past 3 and 4k and you can start to notice.

I've never heard any claims like this.

One way to test? Look for your own server in the master server list! What's the IP?

[Layabout]

I've never heard of that. I like to reboot our CSS servers each morning if I remember because they're windows servers. A day or two goes by and the player IDs are past 3 and 4k and you can start to notice.

I've never heard any claims like this.

One way to test? Look for your own server in the master server list! What's the IP?

85.133.16.62:27175

Don't get me wrong. I really do think setting up 8 Bots had a lot to do with it. I found 4 just too few. I've got quite a few logs to go through. I reckon things got a bit busy on cs_italy and then when it came to de_dust, they kept extending the maps. At the moment I have unlimited extends and my clan is pressuring me to allow only 1 extend per map. The only trouble is, I don't want to kill a de_dust2 map in the afternoon, if it's attracting a lot of players.

[Layabout]

Oh yeah...remember, I havent rebooted it for at least 3 or 4 days now. I don't want to reboot the thing, if I don't have to! :P

[manorastroman]

phermones work everytime. the gamers can't resist a server with those good phermones

[Fatty]

What are phermones, precious?

[kingpin]

http://www.answers.com/pheromones&r=67

[band325]

I think that that is a brilliant idea.

[sniper_strike]

use fake clients instead of auto kick bots

you can have custom names and there always in spectate

http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=38563

@ kingpin: by that u mean run dust2? cuz it will attract cs players?

[kingpin]

use fake clients instead of auto kick bots

you can have custom names and there always in spectate

http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=38563

@ kingpin: by that u mean run dust2? cuz it will attract cs players?

amen to that

[FlyingMongoose]

*sigh* I wish it wasn't only dust2 though, I personally much prefer well made objective oriented custom maps...I wish more people appreciated them like I do...but he is right.

[ichthys]

I dislike dust2. *hmmpf* but lots of people do like it