Being a server owner myself, I'm looking for a way to improve my server.
It's not about getting more traffic, but most of my players prefer to prop-kill or generally dick about. I know mingebags are inevitable but how would I go about making the server more accessible to experienced gmod players?
So what do you think makes a Garry's Mod server Facepunch worthy?
A competent, and even more importantly, mature admin staff goes a long way. A player who has a bad experience with an admin, like being kicked for a silly reason such as "disrespecting me", probably won't be coming back to that server any time soon.
A good selection of addons is always nice. Custom tools like Stacker, Weight STool, Gravity Hull Designator, Easy Precision, Waterizer STool and others are always appreciated by builders. Wiremod is a bit of a double-edged sword, it's very popular and allows players to do many advanced things that wouldn't be possible otherwise, but it also opens up potential for abuse especially without an admin around to keep things under control. Luckily, most mingebags lack any sort of competence with wiremod so this shouldn't be much of an issue. Combat addons such as PewPew or ACF can encourage players to build bases and vehicles instead of throwing cargo containers at each other, but again these can be abused if left unmanaged.
Prop protection is important, but care should be taken to prevent it from being too overbearing. Some servers outright won't allow you to spawn explosive barrels or most larger props such as cargo containers, and that can be incredibly annoying to somebody who needs those parts.
A selection of maps besides the staple gm_construct and gm_flatgrass can be a breath of fresh air for players, but be aware of their size as people probably won't join if it takes a long time to download the map. A map-voting system that doesn't require admin input to function is rare in GMod servers and would probably be quite a popular feature if you could implement it.
I would recommend having a fast download server. It helps people join a lot faster. Also, make sure you zip up your files on said server (in the .bz2 format) and they can join even faster/experience less lag when someone joins. That, plus what Raznor said will make for an enjoyable experience for all.
I really want to make a fast dl server, but I don't know how to. can anyone PM me telling me how to, plz?
Not have a staff that are a bunch of twelve year olds.
you know, not all 12 year olds are bad, I know a couple who RP WAY better than most people I see who are at least 20 years old.
People need to stop being so prejudiced against kids, they're not all bad.
[QUOTE=Spikem59;31620127]you know, not all 12 year olds are bad, I know a couple who RP WAY better than most people I see who are at least 20 years old.
People need to stop being so prejudiced against kids, they're not all bad.[/QUOTE]
They invariably are bad when given any sort of position of power. Also, how well you can RP doesn't really have anything to do with how well you can manage a server.
Besides, part of being a good server admin is being able to command the respect of the server's playerbase, and if you sound like mickey mouse then that simply ain't gonna happen.
FYI, I know a 10 year old admin, and he's really good at it, a lot of people on the server like him, and think he's really good
But you see what I mean? Prejudiced! We were all kids once, too, and didn't you hate how adults always treated you like crap on games? like I see a crap load of vids on youtube of people who troll kids, and try to make them rage, ONLY because they're kids, it's just prejudice.
I didn't talk on my mic when I was a kid because I knew damn well that I sounded like mickey mouse
But doesn't give people the right to dis kids just because their age, they can't help it, if they're 12, or 14, or whatever, no one can control what age the are, but yet people be jerks to little kids just because their age
[QUOTE=Raznor;31619304]A competent, and even more importantly, mature admin staff goes a long way. A player who has a bad experience with an admin, like being kicked for a silly reason such as "disrespecting me", probably won't be coming back to that server any time soon.
A good selection of addons is always nice. Custom tools like Stacker, Weight STool, Gravity Hull Designator, Easy Precision, Waterizer STool and others are always appreciated by builders. Wiremod is a bit of a double-edged sword, it's very popular and allows players to do many advanced things that wouldn't be possible otherwise, but it also opens up potential for abuse especially without an admin around to keep things under control. Luckily, most mingebags lack any sort of competence with wiremod so this shouldn't be much of an issue. Combat addons such as PewPew or ACF can encourage players to build bases and vehicles instead of throwing cargo containers at each other, but again these can be abused if left unmanaged.
Prop protection is important, but care should be taken to prevent it from being too overbearing. Some servers outright won't allow you to spawn explosive barrels or most larger props such as cargo containers, and that can be incredibly annoying to somebody who needs those parts.
A selection of maps besides the staple gm_construct and gm_flatgrass can be a breath of fresh air for players, but be aware of their size as people probably won't join if it takes a long time to download the map. A map-voting system that doesn't require admin input to function is rare in GMod servers and would probably be quite a popular feature if you could implement it.[/QUOTE]
Sorry for quoting the large text but thanks for the advice. I thought that having extensive building addons will attract more experienced players but increase join times, but I guess the trade-off isn't all that bad.
[QUOTE]FYI, I know a 10 year old admin, and he's really good at it, a lot of people on the server like him, and think he's really good
But you see what I mean? Prejudiced! We were all kids once, too, and didn't you hate how adults always treated you like crap on games? like I see a crap load of vids on youtube of people who troll kids, and try to make them rage, ONLY because they're kids, it's just prejudice.[/QUOTE]
It's not prejudice, it's just an observation that generally people that have lived longer seem to be more mature. While there are exceptions, it's simply a law of nature.
[QUOTE]But doesn't give people the right to dis kids just because their age, they can't help it, if they're 12, or 14, or whatever, no one can control what age the are, but yet people be jerks to little kids just because their age[/QUOTE]
Seniority is a common aspect in many cultures, as mentioned before, you can't just assume that everyone younger than you matches your maturity. And we can agree that on the microphone in squeaky, prepubescent voices can be annoying for other players and demeaning for yourself.
[editline]9th August 2011[/editline]
In case you're wondering, the server is
Brandons Legit Build | Fast Download | Wire
at:
74.63.220.44:27015
[QUOTE=Spikem59;31620230]FYI, I know a 10 year old admin, and he's really good at it, a lot of people on the server like him, and think he's really good
But you see what I mean? Prejudiced! We were all kids once, too, and didn't you hate how adults always treated you like crap on games? like I see a crap load of vids on youtube of people who troll kids, and try to make them rage, ONLY because they're kids, it's just prejudice.[/QUOTE]
12 year olds and whatnot have no sense of professionalism or rationality. Every server I've ever gone on, has at least one 12 year old admin who abuses the shit out of everyone.
Hey you know what makes a successful server? Me. If you want ill go on your server and help it out.
Aren't you busy with your own DarkRP server or something
[editline]9th August 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=Toastermach10;31626965]Sorry for quoting the large text but thanks for the advice. I thought that having extensive building addons will attract more experienced players but increase join times, but I guess the trade-off isn't all that bad.
[/QUOTE]Things like models, texures and sounds will have the biggest impact on loading time. Wiremod in particular has a lot of custom models and materials to go with them, but most experienced players are going to have already downloaded them anyways. Addons that are just Lua scripts (most STools, etc.) aren't going to affect download times by any significant amount.
[QUOTE=Raznor;31635888]Aren't you busy with your own DarkRP server or something[/QUOTE]
Im never too busy to help someone.
[B][U][I]Hey Fuckers news flash we were all kids at one time! that means we were all kids so stop calling yourself a squeaker[/I][/U][/B]
[highlight](User was banned for this post ("Please check the topic date before posting/shit post" - NiandraLades))[/highlight]
1: A good host. Nothing ruins a game quite like being unable to enjoy the car you just built because the ping spikes to 450ms the moment you sneeze in its general direction
2: A [i]good[/i] smattering of mods that align with your interests. Not to be confused with mod spam, as that makes joining the server tedious.
3: A good staff. KEeps minges at bay, of course!
4: Good players. There are times when there just aren't any staff on the server. Good players will behave themselves at these times. Bad players will take the chance to act like a dick the moment they think the coast is clear.
5: No obnoxious MOTD/loadscreen. Keep it simple and straightforward, and realize that most of the time it gets closed the instant it pops up.
As a player, some things I would like on a server is a good anticheat, because once cheaters get on, they can make players not want to get on the server for a while.
A good community, not just staff, because a server shouldn't just only be controlled by staff, trusted users should be able to temporary ban or kick players, because sometimes, staff might not be online.
Some good addons can make people that don't want to play on vanilla server join too, not too much addons, because nobody wants to wait all day downloading weapons and playermodels, but a nice selection of guns and tools would be nice to have.
Good staff members are also very important, without them, the server will go crazy, for example, whenever I play on my main TTT server and no staff are online, people RDM way too much.
A thing I haven't seen:
[B]NO FUCKING LOADING SCREEN MUSIC[/B]
I kinda need help guys :( i have a really nice TTT server ( garrysmod ) with a lot of addons,cool features,and really nice staff members. but it seems i cant get ppl to play in my server.... sometimes i get 5 players to play but not very often... my server has a lot of potential but i dont know how to bring players.... can anyome help?
[QUOTE=ISR Mafia;47828005]I kinda need help guys :( i have a really nice TTT server ( garrysmod ) with a lot of addons,cool features,and really nice staff members. but it seems i cant get ppl to play in my server.... sometimes i get 5 players to play but not very often... my server has a lot of potential but i dont know how to bring players.... can anyome help?[/QUOTE]
You are at the hardest stage of making a Trouble in Terrorist Town server. I currently am also struggling to get a decent player base. I suggest that when ever you play on your server, play with friends. Having any amount of people in your server automatically helps attract people. Once those people join, do not bombard them with "Go to my Website" "Go join my forums" "Donate" Etc. get to know them and after sometime add them as a friend and tell them about the server and introduce them to the forums. Lastly the best way to get players is patience and diligence. There are thousands of TTT servers all the same so the only way you can draw people is becoming that unique "factor" that makes your server stand out.
Here are my points however they are my own opinion feel free to disagree with them.
No loading screen music, this is because I think that people should have a choice whether they listen to music or not and since music taste is an opinion server owners will like the song that is playing (makes them feel happy) and think that because of that, others will feel happy when the song is played however this is not the case it just annoys them. Also people who are already listening to music (windows media player, ect) will be annoyed when their songs are interrupted by other songs.
Fair administrators who are doing their job to protect the server. I don't like admins and moderators that actively look out for trouble, or enjoy punishing people well in my opinion its a bit weird those people. I would like adminstrators who are kind to players, and will act upon reports done in @ or ooc or any form of chat by players, the adminstrator would then teleport to the person, ask what happened. Bring the potential offender and player, and they would tell both their sides of the story then the admin would use his judgement and reading the damage logs and decide if the offender is guilty or not and dish out a FAIR punishment.
Players who are not insulting/rude. Well this is hard to ask because you can't decide who joins your server. But I'm really its bad when people join the server and they are insulting and calling people names all the time its just immature and makes a bad gaming environment, sure swearing every now and then not directed at ANYONE is fine but just constant insults towards players is surely not right and can be punished for this.
Not too many scriptfodder addons. Well I think that its important that server owners learn how the game code works itself and try coding their own things using lua, its a very easy thing to learn actually and you don't have to be an genius so I think people should learn to use lua for their servers and add addons. Often the best server owners are ones who are fluent in Lua and know how to use it for the server. Also more unique content on the server is much better because it makes each server more interesting than the other and not just all the same all the time.
Owners who play the server or play gmod. Some server owners will just play CS:GO all the time and spend all the donation money on CS:GO this is not good behaviour at all and the owner will never play the server or if you try to contact him in any way (even teamspeak) you are' not banned. It is not good behaviour and he doesn't care about the server at al and wants to just make money from the donations and he has made thousands of pounds from donation and not played server at all... It is especially true for some of the "bigger" darkrp servers that are on the list, I have information.
1: [i]Quality[/i] addons. Yeah, sure, it looks impressive to have 89538068048969 things in the addon list, but I really only need SProps, Wire, Dupe2, ACF, Joystick to have fun. Propellor Model Pack is nice but I can live without it.
2: Quality staff. It's pretty self-explanatory and others have gone into detail, I needn't parrot them any further than saying it's also something I look for.
3: Quality server. A server that's always crashing is a server that's going to encourage people to not do anything that they care gets lost. Similarly, trying to enjoy my creations when the ping is excessive is a major issue(And one thing I will point out as a fault on the servers I do frequent)
4: Quality playerbase. Most often, players will do what other players are doing. If someone joins for the first time, sees everyone screwing around with exploding barrels and ragdolls, whaddyathink they're also gonna do? Yup. Barrelspam. But if they join and see everyone else is building cool shit they're far more likely to whip out their STool Gun and build cool shit of their own.
5: No noclip restrictions. Drives me nuts when servers do this and it's a pretty effective means of making me hate the server. I need to noclip to build my contraptions properly, if I can't do that I'm going to go find somewhere else to play.
6: Reasonable STool restrictions. If I join a server and I can't get out Dupe 2 I'm probably going to nope right the fuck back out again. I can understand restricting things like the balloon tool, or Gmod's built-in duplicator, but useful tools like Dupe 2? Hell no. Any tool that would prevent building a car if not present is a tool that should be allowed to any user.
7: No donation bullshit. I know server bills are a thing, but when I see 'DONATE X FOR Y' plastered all over the MOTD I start to wonder if the administration is really up to snuff.
8: Simple rules. Complex rulesets reek of powertripping mods, not only that they encourage and enable powertripping. Keep the ruleset simple.
[QUOTE=TestECull;47830648]
7: No donation bullshit. I know server bills are a thing, but when I see 'DONATE X FOR Y' plastered all over the MOTD I start to wonder if the administration is really up to snuff.
[/QUOTE]
[i] Warning. just my opinion below this line -[/i]
To be honest, i know that servers aren't free, as an owner myself. But... If you want an Server, then you want it because it's your hobby. And like every hobby, you need to spend a bit in the long term.
it doesn't matter if it is an scriptfodder addon, your time or the server bill. If you can't afford an server, then don't make one.
What I've noticed over time (esp. with darkrp servers) is that there are some common problem areas with many gmod servers that people might not see right off the bat...
[B]1) Administration[/B]
I think there was a very nice thread about this before, but servers these days tend to focus more on rules and ways to restrict the player instead of gameplay and the actual roleplay that goes down. This is a major shift from how I remember it in 2010-2012. If you want a server that's friendly and open to new players, don't hand out weeklong bans to people for breaking into someone's house with two people instead of three...
And for the love of god, don't let people pay for the ability to manage players. If you want to attract mostly lower-quality players who are more fixated on "ranking up" and not actually roleplaying, then go for it. But if you're not, then don't let 9 year old Thomas spend $20 of his parents' money so that he can ban anyone who insults him.
[B]2) Donations[/B]
Ties in with the paid administration thing. Again, it's your choice as to whether or not you plaster ads for VIP ranks all over the place, but at the same time, it makes your server look like shit and it makes you seem desperate for money. You can literally tell the general quality of a DarkRP server (both management and gameplay quality) by counting up all of the 3d text screen ads for silver and diamond VIP and such.
If you want an extra tip, nobody is really buying that all of that money is going to pay for the server... this is why when I ran/run my servers I made sure that I went and accepted all donations through the NFO coffer, which doesn't allow you to take that money out. It gave people some peace of mind that their cash was going to actually help pay for a game server in the first place, and not for a carton of cigarettes or something. If people expressly state that they want to pay for your cigarettes, then by all means let them do it, but if you're accepting "donations" on the false pretense that they're gonna help the server stay alive, and not actually using those donations to pay for the server, then you're basically stealing from people.
[B]3) Rules, jobs, and general restrictions[/B]
Also ties in with number 1...
If you keep thinking of elaborate ways to keep players from actually having fun right off the bat, then they're not going to come back. This is especially true when it comes down to the jobs on your server. If you want to give your server a good name and want people to have fun, don't put 2/3rds of your server's jobs behind a "VIP" paywall. That kind of quid-pro-quo bullshit is the main reason I dislike most DarkRP servers, is that half of the shit on the server requires you to give xXx#BILLY#SWAGxXx $20 just to access it. A few VIP jobs are fine, but again it makes you seem much more desperate to make a little cash off of your playerbase if you just shove everything behind a paywall. If you really cared about your players instead of treating them like bags of money, then you wouldn't require people to pay to play on your server.
Stupid rules such as "respect the admins" also allow your admins an avenue to unjustly punish players in RP settings... I've seen this happen too many times before. If someone is on your server just to fuck around and cause trouble to your players outside of RP, then boot them.
[B]4) Community image[/B]
If you're running off of a free enjin or freewebs domain (not necessarily talking about using the software) and constantly asking for "donations," it's going to really people wonder why you're so stingy and shit at money management. At least drop the free domain and make sure that your site's design isn't doing any injustice to your site's content. Bad designs and free domain names can really turn people off from coming back.
[editline]29th May 2015[/editline]
Forgot to add: make sure you know what your admins are doing. Check the ban list frequently and watch them in-game. It's all too easy to exploit administrative powers to do nefarious things like interfere with roleplay or fuck with the server.
Any server that that codes their own content has my support.
Fun, pretty much. If people can have fun and enjoy their experience on a server, that's enough for it to be good. These days it feels as if most Garry's Mod admins seem more interested in enforcing rules for the sake of enforcing rules rather than taking into consideration the context of certain situations and acting accordingly. As an example, I remember an incident where some kid tried to kidnap me on DarkRP and kept taking potshots at me whilst screaming over the mic despite the fact I wasn't resisting in any shape or form (It's difficult to follow instructions when some Eurotrash 12 year old keeps screaming over the mic at you), and when I saw he'd left a shotgun shipment nearby I quickly picked one up and used it to kill him since he'd lowered my health down enough to worry me. Instead of leaving it at that, he calls an admin and reports me for "FailRP" even though, realistically, if you had an armed kidnapper who turned his back you'd take the opportunity to cap him in the back of the skull ASAP.
I ended up explaining my situation to the two admins involved but despite that I'd somehow broke a rule by picking up the gun and even though both of them were sympathetic (and were p cool guys, elsewise) they said "rules are rules" and issued me with a warning as punishment. It worked out in my favour in the end though because I wound up finding a similar excuse in the rules to have him punished and both admins were willing to help me since he'd p much screamed and shouted all the way through and to my joy he wound up getting teleported to the admin sit whilst the PD were raiding his base, smashing up all his stuff. Eventually they kicked him for being abusive (he started insulting me in the chat when they asked him to type since his mic violated their ears) and gave me 100 grand ingame as compensation and he later got banned for deathmatching me, but all the same my point is that a lot of servers seem to give more of a fuck about enforcing petty rules over the players' enjoyment, to the point even decent admins wind up doing it for one reason or another.
[QUOTE=circuitbawx;47832053]Stupid rules such as "respect the admins" also allow your admins an avenue to unjustly punish players in RP settings... I've seen this happen too many times before. If someone is on your server just to fuck around and cause trouble to your players outside of RP, then boot them.[/QUOTE]
Just gonna say, this is probably one of the greatest issues with administrators on Garry's Mod these days. Most servers seem to have some sort of variation of "Respect/don't dispute admins" that makes it seem as if they're more important than regular players and it allows situations where players end up getting punished for calling out admins on their shit. As an example, a few months ago I was on a server where an administrator killed me on some piss-poor pretense and earlier gave out a harsh punishment to a player who boxed himself in so he could run a DJ booth without being killed, so I snapped and told him to stop acting like a dick. He proceeded to pull me aside five minutes later and demanded I apologise or face a ban. When I said I'd only apologise on the condition he apologised for killing me on piss-poor pretenses and posted a log of the killing, he proceeded to ban me. Like so:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/Pz9g85t.png[/img]
Of course, a simpler solution would just be to avoid DarkRP overall and stick to places like TTT and ZS.
no admins
No generic scriptfodder shite
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