[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!