More than 10,000 Unique Steam ID's connected!

[markg]

So recently we passed a major milestone, more than 10 THOUSAND unique steam id's have connected to one of our servers.

I run a monitoring program that captures all id's (used for managing bans etc.) and although it has crashed a few times over the last several months losing literally thousands of id's, we have now official crossed the 10k mark!

unbelievable. when i originally put these up i thought a few hundred at most would play.

congrats to everyone who has helped populate them!

[Charmander]

Sweet. This is great news

[Egg McMuffmin]

If ten thousand unique steam ID's have connected to the server....how come no one ever joins.

[markg]

thats for all three servers; two left 4 dead, one tf2, and not just since NBS has existed, rather for the time the servers have existed (about 8 months?)

the left 4 dead ones use the lobby system, so they dont care what ip address you use or if you even like the group. L4D connects based on ping/location, not by favorites (that is unless you force a connect via the 'connect' command or search key). So those servers get constant traffic (both were public for quite some time; now just one is public, the other private). The only issue with ip changes is the loss of tracking data on sites like valve/gamemonitor/etc. which doesnt affect the connections.

the tf2 server is a different story. the 'favorites' are memorized by ip address/port, so when the ip address recently changed, everyone who had it as a favorite lost it. they will have to either browse the server list and find it again, or be invited by someone in the server. (and those connects are a sum of ALL people connected, whether they connected for 10 hours or 10 seconds.) that said, our server has done better than most; i can name two right off the top of my head that has been dead empty since inception. doesnt help us i know; that will come by us seeding it and inviting others.

i have seen several cycles of filling/emptying the server over the last year of running them.
short term, it empties when it crashes, and takes time to get back. thats why i removed several plugins that were suspect; better to lose functionality than players.
the other short term issue is that people join where other people are already. if you 'seed' it with people (clan members?) then others will join. once there is a base of 10 or so it feeds on itself. thats probably what we need to do now.

long term, we need people to add it to their favorites like they did before. unfortunately the loyal following we had (the server was usually busy in the afternoon and early evening) lost us in the ip change, and we need to get them back. the way to do this is to get it busy short term.

[Egg McMuffmin]

Oh, yeah. Too bad the server IP got wiped out. >_> If it didn't we would still have many more people playing on the 2fort server.