Bommando

I thought I'd run through some of the things which help us seed the servers and keep them alive for longer. I reckon we could get the servers populated much earlier and for longer if we follow a few of these simple techniques and pay a little attention.

Full servers means more chances to play when you want on the server you love

Steam Friends:

This is probably the single best way to get the servers seeded early. Steam allows a max of 150 friends and you should take advantage of this. Add anyone to your friends list who uses voice, is a good team player, or is on at the same times as you. It's easy to do this via Steam Overlay while in game, choose "Add Friend" and list the players recently played with or currently playing with. I usually try to maintain around 140 friends to leave room for new requests. Cull any inactive friends as you see fit.

You can also check the Focused Gaming Steam Community to see if there's anyone you've missed or if there's anyone who regularly plays your hours. You can also invite others to join this group to allow them to see announcements and see who's playing from the group at any time.

People like to join on existing friends, especially during quieter times. Gameplay can be more enjoyable even if it's just 2 familiar faces rather than none. All the better if it's on a familiar server.

XFire:

XFire works similarly to Steam Friends and is yet another way to see who's playing what. Many admins make themselves available via XFire if they can't be on Steam Chat.

TeamSpeak:

TeamSpeak is used for casual ribbing, finding an admin and generally a lobby for voice comms outside of in-game activities. It's a good place to hang out if you're waiting for others to join and you can gas-bag to each other while you wait around. Just remember to keep conversations short during prime time when there are lots of people online concentrating on the game.

Please try to populate TeamSpeak even if you don't talk that much. A busy server is an attractive server. If you don't much enjoy the banter, set a keybind to mute your speakers and just idle there anyway to keep the numbers up and looking bustling.

Remember, if you wear an -F- tag, being on TeamSpeak is compulsory while in-game

Idling on Servers:

Quite often when I'm doing other stuff, I'll sit in spec and idle on a server. People will either join on you and help idle or eventually start filling it up. If you have nothing better to do or if your computer is sitting idle, jump on and sit in spec on one of our servers. You'd be surprised how quickly a server can fill if it starts with even 2-4 players.

Arena mode is a great way to seed, since it plays well with very small teams up to medium sized ones. If there is an admin around, give them a yell and ask them to load an arena map or just jump on the Always Arena Server for some small teams action.

We are looking into a way to modify the auto-kick to only start working when the server is nearing capacity, but until then, you may have to periodically rejoin the server if you get auto-booted.

Please add any suggestions here and if you see a bunch of people who seed the server with you, make sure you post their names here to thank them.

See you all in-game

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Bommando

... and with a little server hopping and seeding, this is what we were able to achieve:


(I didn't bother taking another screenshot, but they all filled to the brim about 5 minutes later)

Thanks to our hard-working seeders today:

• Darksteel
• Lyramion
• Ultrablue
• Shanksta
• Clockwork
• saik0
• Apollo
• Random
• Pengie

Sorry if I left you out. Quite a few names flew by as we were playing

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Beatnik

One thing that CP does which I think we could do more with regard to late-night seeding is using the -F- steam group to send out Event notices. Every time I've done this it's been successful, like last night when Bom hopped on the server. We (admins) could of course do this earlier in the day too if the server(s) need to be seeded.

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Darksteel525

I'll try to seed every evening (euro time)/ afternoon (US). I will most likely be idle on one of the servers, but will be on Steam/ -F- group chat, Xfire and Teamspeak.

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-F- Darksteel

PANDAmonium

Just a thought but if you're gonna go out and grab dinner/run an errand/etc. and you leave your computer on, you can easily change your name to include (seeding) or include a message like "kick when full", so you can help seed, but not stand in the way of new non-subscriber arrivals later on when the server fills up (This way even those without a reserved slot can join, hopefully adding more to the community).

I've missed so many days that I've dropped off of the HLstatsX. My heart is heavy with pain.

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