What does it mean to run a community?

[$atanic $pirit]

I have been on the Counter Strike 1.6 community circuit for a long time now. In my time, I have played lot of important roles, and I’m proud of what I have accomplished. At this stage, a question has crossed my mind multiple times, so I wrote this article to get others opinions about this.

What does it mean to run a community? 

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I understand that the concept is intriguing at first, and it feels really great, but what does all this mean? You can’t do much with all these accomplishments and it’s not like communities make money by running servers. In fact, it is the opposite and almost all community owners end up paying for the servers out of their own pockets. Been there lot of times when there is a shortage of money and you try your record best to pull it off somehow. Now, the thing is what does it actually do for you? What if your community does survive, and then what? It’s the same cycle over and over, but where is the return of doing all this?

Counter Strike 1.6 communities are the worst of the bunch. You can’t generate revenue to pay up the bills. Yet, it’s a standard to have 6 servers or more + website + Amxbans, which is full of bugs and hasn’t been in development for years. Not only that, but add to the fact that there is extra cost and effort involved to make it available for non-steamers. We aren’t even finished yet, what about the expectations of players? They want servers to be patrolled 24/7 by experienced admins and would tear the roof off if they don’t get that.

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I got three very big issues that I’m going to discuss to some extent.

• Cost
  
• Respect and Appreciation
  
• Boosting
  

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 Let’s go a little deeper into the rabbit hole and do a little cost analysis.

• Server or VDS Cost = At least $50
  
• Website Cost = Let's take an average of $5
  
• Boosting Cost = At least $20 per server
  
• Total Cost = Average $70
  

From that basic analysis, it seems that communities end up paying an average 70 bucks per month. This cost does not involve domain cost and I have only taken the basic boosting into account. The ones who boost know that it’s not even 50% of what they end up spending on boosting. Again, my question is what do we gain by doing all that? Where is the return that I’m supposed to get for all my hard work? I don’t see any inflow of revenue nor do I see servers sustaining themselves, so why am I still pouring money into this?

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Players don’t appreciate your hard work. They don’t realise that the owners have been trying their best to make things work, but players will always be arrogant. I’m not saying this about everyone, but there are a lot of players that fit this category.

You will always hear players asking for a new server with this new shinny mod with no mention of the cost. I always look at them and think what have you done to ask this favor? I say that because most of the time it’s the new guy trying to make a name for himself, but you don’t even know me and you want me to spend my hard earned money on something that you want. How is that fair? Yet, we see every single mod that was ever made been used on tons of servers and funny thing is that none of those servers would have players, unless someone boosted them.

Then there comes the regular players of your servers. I might be pissing a lot of players with this comment, but they need to hear it. You have played countless hours on the server and you love playing in them. You help by bringing more players to the servers, but how many of those regulars even think of donating? They are all good guys and that’s why they are allowed to play regularly without any problems, but seriously. None of them actually consider donating and the ones who get admin think its ok not to donate, because someone is already paying the bills. All communities have a huge number of admins and if they all started donating 1 dollar per month, then all cost will be covered.

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This is my final grievance with running communities and I promise I will shut up after this.


WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BOOSTING CRAP?


Whoever is running these boosting sites is making a ton of money, and in my opinion he is a very smart person, but at the same time he has killed this whole game for his greed. What he did with boosting is he gave everyone a cheat code to get their community running in no time. Back in the days, you used to make a server and wait for months to get a stable player base. Now, it’s all about boosting and all that scum that it brings to the servers. Funny thing is that 99% of players that join via boosting are newbies. They never played this game to know any better that they are being tricked to join a server that they didn’t agree to.

That was just the direct effect of boosting. When you look at the larger picture then you would realise that boosting has done a lot more damage than you can see. Boosting has given rise to the prostitution of servers. Players don’t care and they don’t give a shit, if you ban them. Just think for a moment, how many players get banned in your servers on a daily basis. Now, do you get even 20% unban appeals from them? I mean, if players really enjoy your server, then they should at least try to come off clean, but they have no reason to do that. There are tons of servers that are being boosted every min, so they can’t appreciate the hard work from community members.

What it has done is that it has hurt the demand and supply of servers. The way it should be is that a community introduces a new server when its main server gets over flown with players and players are looking for a new place to play, but instead what we are doing is creating multiple servers at the beginning and boosting them to create this fake demand. This all could have worked, if this fake demand was sustainable, but it’s not. Hardly 10% of people that join via boosting tend to stay, and I ask you again. Was this worth the cost, effort and hard work?

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I know this was a long read and some of you might not read the whole thing. I would like to thank the ones who did read it and understand where I’m coming from. I might have pissed some people with my words, but at the same time, this all needed to be said.

Here is a message for all the non-steam players. You are the reason, why this game is dying, if you really want this game to live, then buy a legit copy and play like it is supposed to be played.

Don’t think that I’m asking you to change your ways, that’s your call, but just think about it. Is it all worth it? Is running a CS community really that great?

[Ash]

I Couldnt have said it better....  Thank you Spirit, this is all i feel now, and the reason of why i quit playing 1.6 or caring about "suggestions" which are more like "YOU MUST ADD THIS"  

[BullsEye©]

Couldn't have agreed with you more on this!