Meeting Minutes (September 3, 2009)

Kaz-Ka said:

And Mitch about the new server, im thinking that we could possibly hold a poll/nomination sort of thing and see what people would like to have if we could add more games if we get a new server? How does that sound?

Please do. We can run almost anything but some games would require that the club purchase copies.

The problem with us admins is that initially we will not abuse any powers. If there is a small period where the CL is not available anymore (Look back a year and a half ago) the admins will do whatever they want. There were several admins that had been with the servers as long as they were up, but these admins would abuse the rules, change the map without warning, spam csay, and ban without demos all because they knew there were no repercussions. The population was greatly affected by it and Liam was a good man and fixed most of that by removing several abilities including the votemap ability. Right now things are great and adam37 is on the ball, but eventually he will retire from being CL and future CLs may not be in control of the server as adam37 is. This is just the situation that many people still remember in the club as the main reason why admins will abuse.

my 2 cents

as a compromise, I think we should reenact something we had in the past, which was the option for admins to throw up a map vote to change to certain popular maps, i.e. de_dust2, cs_office. I think this is a fair comprimise because if the server is on an unpopular level, we can get it back to a popular one, and since its a server vote, it can’t be abused nearly as badly as simply being able to change maps at will.

ON ANOTHER TOPIC: Why wasn’t the Webmaster position voted on?

Kaz-Ka said:

Ok, I see where you guys are coming from. I guess we could keep things the way they are now and just roll with it. As long we dont have a massive drop off of people on the servers I’ll just leave it be.

No don’t, you made a policy now enforce it. I think it’s a great idea. If people abuse it they are making it clear that they are admins that we don’t need and it takes less than 30 seconds to remove someone. You can’t go on letting these PC guys be afraid of change. That’s why the PC side is dying. New policy isn’t going to hurt anything and it’s so easy to change it if it doesn’t work.

Also @ Mitch: if Warcraft games “don’t appeal to the majority of gamers” Why are there over 10 million subscribers to World of Warcraft worldwide?

Kuros said:

No don’t, you made a policy now enforce it. I think it’s a great idea. If people abuse it they are making it clear that they are admins that we don’t need and it takes less than 30 seconds to remove someone. You can’t go on letting these PC guys be afraid of change. That’s why the PC side is dying. New policy isn’t going to hurt anything and it’s so easy to change it if it doesn’t work.

 

Also @ Mitch: if Warcraft games “don’t appeal to the majority of gamers” Why are there over 10 million subscribers to World of Warcraft worldwide?

LOL Kuros preaching about admin abuse, now there’s a pot calling the kettle black.

Under the proposed policy you’d have lost admin a few months back, if not a few years back. I’m just sayin…

I’ll answer your question with another, how many gamers are there worldwide?

Also, how would WoW help the club expand at LAN events? Haven’t you blocked WoW ports at events before?

Poseidon said:

I stopped reading like half way through Master P’s last long post because I got tired of reading. I really hate I missed the meeting. Once I found out there was a gaming group here at WCU, I badly wanted to join as I am very big on gaming. Currently the only game I own that WCU plays is CSS. I pretty much play nothing but CSS. If CSS were to be cut from the gaming list (Especially at the LAN’s) I would not attend. I know that I don’t matter much as I am probably one of the many WCU gamers here, but I’m just trying to give my input.

 

Also, as a former NC Gaming staff member and seeing many successful LAN parties (and some other not-so-successful ones), CSS played a major role in all of them. Killing Floor is also another fun game that seemed to popular. As for the console side, COD 4 and Halo 3 were the big hits and that is what most of the players came for.

 

As for the admins getting the ability to change maps, I’ve seen this work very successfully. The admin would start a map vote and if the majority said yes, then a random map vote would start. Or everyone would RTV or complain to an admin enough and he would just change it. I’ve never seen this ability get abused.

 

I don’t know how valuable my input was but it is here for your(plural) discretion.

thank you very much for your input!!

Just as a little heads up, I turned in the list of people allowed in the Gming Club Office so if any of my original 4 that volunteered to help run the office is allowed in there now, just give them you name at the desk and they will let you in. Also, If any of you would like to be added to the list, send me a PM and Ill add you.

They are always held in central to my knowledge, as for directions coming from the McKee/BB&T corner take a left at the byrd alumni house then a right, head down that walkway and look for a room on the left that has the door propped open by a chair. Im sure kazka could give much better directions though

Some advice on the PC side of things,

Some care needs to be given to the PC side game servers. Unlike the Consoles, servers for PC games actually have to be monitored regularly and a community has to be created over time for whatever game one is trying to host.

Several of the people who gave care to those servers have graduated and other people must be willing to put the time in to research and be creative for our gaming servers. It simply takes work and effort to host a successful PC game server. This includes learning how to configure the server, finding people to play on it, creating a community within that server, finding reliable internal and external admins to help keep the server interesting. If you are in charge of a server, make sure you are putting time and effort into these things or it is pointless for us to have the server. The best way to populate a server, I’ve discovered, is to play on other servers, make random friends and tell them, “Hey, I’ve got this server I’m working on and need to populate it, got any friends that would want to join?” Include admin for those you trust and more than -just you- will be trying to get the server off the ground.

Left 4 Dead needs more than one server (assuming the other one is full often).

The only way to have a successful server is to have at least one person who cares enough to find out what other ‘popular’ servers do, and imitate it OR do something original that attracts people. Once the server is setup, find people to play on it. As people play they will invite their friends and eventually it’ll be full often.

For a LAN there are many games that can be hosted, unfortunately given the -time- allocated to our LANs there is a need for quick paced games which typically come in the form of shooters. The problem with -regular- RTS games is that they typically require a large amount of time to have a successful tournament. This leads to reducing the amount of players available for any PC tournament hosted on top of that RTS tournament (since is is likely the tournament will last a significant amount of time).

Squad based RTS games that aren’t based on building a base (such as DOW2 and World in Conflict) lend themselves nicely to tournament play due to their quick pace (for DOW2 there should be concern for the fact that Windows Live could constantly disconnect people on the same network, though not likely).