Azy

Evening Strangers!

Hi there fellow DM players, my names Jamie I’m a final year student and I go to Nottingham Trent University. I love to play games such as deathmatch and I share your pain for what seems to be some neglect on Valve's side. I've played games my whole life and as a result I have become a game designer, always looking for good level design and games that are really worth someone’s time.

For my final year research project I am looking into player trends over dedicated servers in relation to custom made content. So for my first artefact I produced a level for this game and waited to see if players would react to this map but unfortunately I’m getting nothing because my server is lost in a haze of empty servers and even though its 24/7 i get no clients unless I’m on the server to make up numbers but even then 90% wont download a map for such a quiet server (aren’t we all the same ) and finally my friends get quickly bored of 2vs1 or 1vs1 on such a big map so it’s hard to get the ball rolling if you know what i mean.

I guess what I’m asking here is for advice or help, I’m already behind in my work and i need to get results! So how do i attract more clients to my server? I've already tried posting on forums like the official steam forum but i get no real response and there isn’t anyone out there it seems that can give a brother a hand.

If anyone is interested in looking at my server its at IP: 93.174.138.125:27015
and shows up as Crypt Azy's 24/7 dm_extraction team deathmatch PUBLIC SERVER on the steam server list. (Note: we are aware of the too many vertices problem with the map, finding it very hard to fix.)

Hi Azy, Welcome to the DMU.

Yea, getting a server populated is tough. People these days have little free time for fun pursuits and to make the most of the time few will join an empty server and wait. The only thing I can suggest to you is to have some friends of yours join you and sit on the server to get people. Servers with more people tend to attract people. There really is no other way around it. Also if you have a way to bzip the map and put it on a fast download server, people are more likely to wait if doesnt take forever to download the map. Also advertise your map in our Dept of Architecture with some screen shots and a link to download it from.

Good luck

Having an event and posting about it on these forums might be a good way to kick things off. People who still like to play might want to check it out. I also recommend getting feedback from players about what maps they like to play, and keeping a short rotation of consistently popular maps. Too many maps and the server will empty as soon as one that nobody likes loads up.