Official Map X is unbalanced/tedious/pointless why is it on rotation.
To some extent all the maps are tedious after you've played them a million times. We all have our special favourites and hates. All official maps are on the mapcycle and they will remain there.
There are a lot of different reasons for this and I'll try to sum them up:
- It increases the variation of maps without relying on downloads - which drop the playercount.
Some people like maps that others really dislike.
When players leave because the don't like map X it opens slots for people who do like it.
If you decide to remove one map because someone doesn't like it you end up removing other maps for the same reason, then you end up with a really boring mapcycle.
Why are there no custom maps in the regular cycle.
Custom maps require downloads, are on the whole full of bugs, and tend to be badly balanced. The download is the largest problem, because players who are new to the server will often just quit as soon as they are forced to download. Other players then don't join the server because they see a custom map is on, this slowly kills the playercount and thus the popularity of the server. Custom maps quickly become stale when players work out all the weaknesses inheritance in the maps.
Apart from poor balance most customs suffer from poor optimisation, exploitable glitches, and a relitively short shelf-life before thier popularity wears off. This means admins (read Fu) have to constantly be on the look out for new maps, test them, select which are worth replacing and so on. It's a major hassle, especially since in the end all it does is clear the server.
Can we have custom nights back
Yes, when we get around to it.
Oh, we did, they're on Wednesdays.
Why is the reg on the server so bad, when's the dedi coming
The reg is bad mainly because the server is horribly overloaded. There's nothing we can do about that, it's down to how MPUK assigns servers on the box. We could lower the tickrate, but it'd have to go down to 33, which would be very upopular.
Another alternative would be to drop the playerslots down to 16 instead of 32, but that just wouldn't be cool.
I don't know when the dedi's going to happen. I've done my best to chase it. alex says he's still trying. You could email him to find out how he's getting on with that. you can get his email from the magazine, I don't want to post it here as it will just get harvested by spambots.
It takes admin X too long to ban blatant cheaters from the server
Yes that can happen. There are a few reasons for this. Foremost is we don't want to ban anyone for just being good. There are quite a few players on the server who have been suspected of cheating by a lot of people. After being watched thoroughly it's often the case that they're just quite good.
In the case of people who are obviously cheating - speedhacking, aimbotting, spinning around madly while getting headshots - there is another reason it takes a while to ban them. We're part of SteamBans, which means our server is protected from known cheats, banned by SteamBans, but in return our admins have to contribute to the ban submission process.
In short that means whenever we see a cheater we need to make a demo we think shows them cheating, before we can ban them from our server. This can take a few rounds. It can take even longer when someone starts crying cheat in public chat, and the cheater starts toggling their cheats on and of to evade detection.
It's not perfect, but we're using it.
