Lettuce is credit to team!

by **courtham** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 2:11 pm

Hello dear CritSandvich donors, F2Ps, and most importantly, admins.

As mentioned in the previous post by toss, we are in a sort of a minor crisis that is getting worse by the day. The servers are empty and we are slowly dissolving in terms of what we would call our community, and the best server in TF2. Not to repeat too much of what toss has said in the previous thread but with people leaving and no new people coming through our doors, we are on a downwards turn. We need to change some things up here. There is hope and new possibility in change. I don't know if it's my place to say or not but I have a few proposals in mind.

1. Stick to one server. I know, I know SB2 frequenters, but if we downsize, we have more possibility to collect each other and grow from there.

2. Disable random crits. Well now that there is no more quickplay, we don't need to fit in the parameters of what quickplay requires so we could just turn the dang things off.

3. Put custom maps in the rotation. If we downsize to the one server we should add some if not all of the custom maps on SB2 to the server. It would also shake some things up so we don't have to play pl_thundermountain for 69420247365th time (it's still a great map though) this would of course also appease the hardcore SB2 fans.

I really hope that we can see real change for CSn because it is really a great community and I would really hate to see if fade. If you guys have any ideas, feedback or would like to simply agree, I would really appreciate it. Thanks all!

courtham

by **1#Scrub** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 2:40 pm

also plz fix the csn chat thing

by **Kaiuu** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 3:34 pm

What we need to strive for now is player population - regardless of how many regulars hop into the server at 6PM to pop it it wont stay popped.

Larger servers like no heroes or gshock or skial are doing well even without quickplay - because they have a larger playerbase. What we need to be doing now is reaching out to the community to get us on more people's server lists, whether thats from forum posts, or, especially, r/tf2. Whatever it is, the server is in urgent need of something.

It was widely agreed in the first make csn great again post that a reddit post would be a good idea, so - just make one. Just do it.

Think about the reason everyone plays on this server - because of the community, voice chat and good player quality - not because of fancy graphics or art ( although those do help

), and if people can see that's what makes this community great, the server will fill.

If we make the reddit post, people will come, and if a fraction of the flood of people like we saw after mym favorited us and maybe even became regulars, that'd be a huge help, regardless of if they're skilled or not.

I've started a google document where we can collaborate on this here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YZZ ... sp=sharing

also lol sb2

by **DerKrieger105** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 3:56 pm

I wouldn't bother trying to "court SB2 players" with custom maps (which most people actually don't like) and no crits. Why? Because no one plays on SB2 either. Less than SB1.

Really it is just a matter of advertising and getting the word out there. So anything that will help us do that.

Seriously someone with a fucking reddit account, or hell maybe I'll just make one, needs to post on reddit, or any other social media/forum you belong to, and get the word out to keep it popped.

by **courtham** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 4:18 pm

Okay so I have a reddit account and I'll be more than willing to make the reddit post. We really only have one chance with this post because if we make more than one it might be considered spam and i'll get banned or some stupid shit like that. What day should I do? I was thinking like if we could organise some of the regulars on the server and then I''ll make the post we could do it that way.

by **Kaiuu** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 4:42 pm

courtham wrote:Okay so I have a reddit account and I'll be more than willing to make the reddit post. We really only have one chance with this post because if we make more than one it might be considered spam and i'll get banned or some stupid shit like that. What day should I do? I was thinking like if we could organise some of the regulars on the server and then I''ll make the post we could do it that way.

Maybe post it here before posting on reddit.

by **Hooked** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 5:47 pm

I think with casual matchmaking being around you really need to enforce the "community" aspect of the server more than anything else. It's so easy to launch TF2 and find a casual no-frills game that people aren't going to join CSn just to play TF2. They'll play because of the friendly faces that are on. How you go about doing that though is a difficult question to answer though; in general it seems like people aren't as into community gaming as much as they used to be. Most games nowadays are competitively built around 5-6 player teams. (CSGO, DOTA2, LoL, Overwatch)

For one, encouraging people to join the forums would help. Being able to talk to people on a platform outside of TF2 is a huge part of feeling like part of the community - to me anyways. And as much as you guys love it, I feel like Discord has been killing the web chat. Most new member aren't going to feel like signing up both for the forums and discord.

Maybe have some sort of weekly event? Every Friday or Saturday host a unique event/game mode like dodge-ball or prop hunt. Post it on the forums and steam group ahead of time. Not quite sure what can be done on stock maps though. I was on a server last Friday where apparently they have a couple people come on to shoutcast every Friday, which was kind of neat. There's a guy around here who does that kind of thing isn't there?

Website · by **Balubish** » Thu Sep 08, 2016 8:41 pm

Balu's twocents- Right now the player base we have are spread over the whole day and sending out pop messages draws ppl to join a long time.
To pop me as an admin still need to spam ppl in my friendlist to ask them to join and help out basicly. And right now EU time its impossible to keep alive with no Quickplay.
Sure try the reddit thing, I doubt it will help but at this point im tired to spend hours to try pop of my free time and thats why I havent been around alot anymore.

If we had 40 EU admins that could help pop sure it would work but the player base is Amedican, so im tossing this problem over to the other guys, im tired of it.

Also Casual and the ranking have made ppl ranking horny and more and more seems to play lobbies or hl or 6's.

I mainly blame valve for killing the quickplay, and many of the player base we have only join if we have ppl in the server already. "I have asked several"

by **fingerman** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 1:25 am

I don't know how I would get kills if random crits were disabled. We can rename the site nocritsandvich. I will disable them.

Website · by **Balubish** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 1:54 am

fingerman wrote:I don't know how I would get kills if random crits were disabled. We can rename the site nocritsandvich. I will disable them.

Yes I have the same issue, I need em, and its like 5 ppl globally that dont like crits. That is not the problem here though

Crits I mean.

by **Lia_Rein** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 3:53 am

I like random critz cuz it's a bit more unpredictable ;P But a lot of people I have brought to the server in the past have complained to me about them

Also people seem pretty into the leveling aspect of casual more than anything I think. Don't know if there is anything we can do about that

by **MGunz** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 1:13 pm

Agree with 1.
Undecided on 2. Would nocrits draw more people in than drive people away that are used to crits?
Disagree with 3. Custom maps are server killers. Heck, even 50% (or more) of the stock maps are server killers. Also not convinced that removing random crits would help with population.

My server death theory ... a lot of bad timing:
1. A lot of people got worn out of TF2 because of the summer HLStats competition.
2. The update happened at the very end of the competition; even then you could see signs of server population dropping. Combined with the update dropping the population, some regulars started preferring to play other games for a bit to take a "break" from the hat grind.
3. There's been a higher interest in competitive play recently from a good chunk of regulars, which also doesn't help pop the server. Not trying to assign blame to this group of players by any means. However, it is harder to populate a server when you have 9 regulars who are in a scrim/match who would otherwise be popping SB1.

Now that the servers have been dead for a while, Lia's point comes into effect ... people would probably prefer to continue leveling than help get the server back up and running again.

Alone, any of these three factors would have been survivable... but it seems to have been a recipe for disaster *cue dramatic music*.

by **Kaiuu** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 2:21 pm

yo so I wrote a thing want to get some feedback to possibly improve before posting

Dear Reddit, Please Show Our Server Some Love

Dear Reddit Community,

I've played on critsandvich for almost a year and half now, and I have no idea if I'd still be playing tf2 if it wasn't there. It’s a simple server at heart - a voting system for stock maps, skilled regulars, and alltalk so people can chat and make friends.

You'd see the same people every night. The veteran soldier. The deceivingly good pyro. And best of all, everyone talking on the mic with a unique personality and having a good time. Sometimes, we would all go super tryhard and try to coordinate that push we just couldn’t pin down. Or, we’d just chat - Whatever it was, we talked about it and had fun. For the past year almost every night I would hop onto critsandvich to just relax and play with familiar faces.

But things have changed since MyM. Because there is no longer an option to tick “community servers” that was present in quickplay, we found that often we’d get on and try to pop the server, but time after time, no new players came to replace those that left. Things repeated themselves until the current situation, where the server is empty 24/7.

We invite everyone to come to our servers and experience some fun vanilla tf2 gameplay.

slay1.critsandvich.com

by **MGunz** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 4:23 pm

Kaiuu wrote:yo so I wrote a thing want to get some feedback to possibly improve before posting

Dear Reddit, Please Show Our Server Some Love

Dear Reddit Community,

I've played on critsandvich for almost a year and half now, and I have no idea if I'd still be playing tf2 if it wasn't there. It’s a simple server at heart - a voting system for stock maps, skilled regulars, and alltalk so people can chat and make friends.

You'd see the same people every night. The veteran soldier. The deceivingly good pyro. And best of all, everyone talking on the mic with a unique personality and having a good time. Sometimes, we would all go super tryhard and try to coordinate that push we just couldn’t pin down. Or, we’d just chat - Whatever it was, we talked about it and had fun. For the past year almost every night I would hop onto critsandvich to just relax and play with familiar faces.

But things have changed since MyM. Because there is no longer an option to tick “community servers” that was present in quickplay, we found that often we’d get on and try to pop the server, but time after time, no new players came to replace those that left. Things repeated themselves until the current situation, where the server is empty 24/7.

We invite everyone to come to our servers and experience some fun vanilla tf2 gameplay.

slay1.critsandvich.com

I like the personal feel of the post. I would recommend not advertising that our server is currently empty 24/7 ... a bit too honest perhaps, and a turn off after reading all the good stuff preceding it.

by **L0wsound** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 4:26 pm

Kaiuu wrote:yo so I wrote a thing want to get some feedback to possibly improve before posting

Dear Reddit, Please Show Our Server Some Love

Dear Reddit Community,

I've played on critsandvich for almost a year and half now, and I have no idea if I'd still be playing tf2 if it wasn't there. It’s a simple server at heart - a voting system for stock maps, skilled regulars, and alltalk so people can chat and make friends.

You'd see the same people every night. The veteran soldier. The deceivingly good pyro. And best of all, everyone talking on the mic with a unique personality and having a good time. Sometimes, we would all go super tryhard and try to coordinate that push we just couldn’t pin down. Or, we’d just chat - Whatever it was, we talked about it and had fun. For the past year almost every night I would hop onto critsandvich to just relax and play with familiar voices.

But things have changed since MyM. Because there is no longer an option to tick “community servers” that was present in quickplay, we found that often we’d get on and try to pop the server, but time after time, no new players came to replace those that left. Things repeated themselves until the current situation, where the server is empty 24/7.

We invite everyone to come to our servers and experience some fun vanilla tf2 gameplay.

slay1.critsandvich.com

Sounds pretty good to me. But where to post it?
I've put some notes in the google doc.

by **Kaiuu** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 4:29 pm

MGunz wrote:I like the personal feel of the post. I would recommend not advertising that our server is currently empty 24/7 ... a bit too honest perhaps, and a turn off after reading all the good stuff preceding it.

Id agree with that, will revise later.

Also thanks for the revisions on the doc lowsound

by **Ron Swansons Stache** » Fri Sep 09, 2016 5:47 pm

Kaiuu wrote:yo so I wrote a thing want to get some feedback to possibly improve before posting

Dear Reddit, Please Show Our Server Some Love

Dear Reddit Community,

I've played on critsandvich for almost a year and half now, and I have no idea if I'd still be playing tf2 if it wasn't there. It’s a simple server at heart - a voting system for stock maps, skilled regulars, and alltalk so people can chat and make friends.

You'd see the same people every night. The veteran soldier. The deceivingly good pyro. And best of all, everyone talking on the mic with a unique personality and having a good time. Sometimes, we would all go super tryhard and try to coordinate that push we just couldn’t pin down. Or, we’d just chat - Whatever it was, we talked about it and had fun. For the past year almost every night I would hop onto critsandvich to just relax and play with familiar faces.

But things have changed since MyM. Because there is no longer an option to tick “community servers” that was present in quickplay, we found that often we’d get on and try to pop the server, but time after time, no new players came to replace those that left. Things repeated themselves until the current situation, where the server is empty 24/7.

We invite everyone to come to our servers and experience some fun vanilla tf2 gameplay.

slay1.critsandvich.com

I think this is the best route to go, show WHY were great, promise nothing extra than what we provide, and explain why were currently where we're at. You may also want to mention how long this community has been together, I know you mentioned your stay but regulars have been here for many years. I'm not even close to the longest regular and I'm pretty positive I've been here at LEAST 5 years now (someone correct me if I'm wrong but I definitely remember crit sandviching during my college years which would put it closer to 6 or 7 years).

Also, if this is posted we as regulars need to make a constant push to ensure when newbies show up that were there. Maybe set up pop events to combine new blood with the community to make sure they're not entering empty servers

by **1#Scrub** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 3:11 am

Ok so last night the server had a load of people after Finger disabled random crits. So what Im thinking is either A. Everyone in the tf2 community loves me and wants to play on the same server as me or B. People really dislike random crits and came on cause its basically the only non-crit server with a map rotation.

by **Thirty-Two Ws** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 4:34 am

1#Scrub wrote:Ok so last night the server had a load of people after Finger disabled random crits. So what Im thinking is either A. Everyone in the tf2 community loves me and wants to play on the same server as me or B. People really dislike random crits and came on cause its basically the only non-crit server with a map rotation.

Since there are so few without random crits, if you specifically search for servers without them very few come up. It could attract a specific crowd.

by **Lia_Rein** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 7:13 am

Yeah a while back Tlar spent aaages trying to find a good server without random kritz and he only found one which only had pop events on specific nights

by **DerKrieger105** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 9:29 am

Sounds good. Although include the actual IP: 74.91.115.121:27015

Otherwise may not work

by **MGunz** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 12:03 pm

1#Scrub wrote:Ok so last night the server had a load of people after Finger disabled random crits. So what Im thinking is either A. Everyone in the tf2 community loves me and wants to play on the same server as me or B. People really dislike random crits and came on cause its basically the only non-crit server with a map rotation.

That's encouraging ... perhaps keep it like that for a while to see if that can be sustained?

by **fingerman** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 12:30 pm

CRITS!!!!

by **Mike808** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 2:24 pm

fingerman wrote:...crits... I will disable them.

Today is a good day

by **Lia_Rein** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 2:52 pm

fingerman wrote:CRITS!!!!

^

by **Hatred** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 3:22 pm

lol i couldn't care about crits but it was nice seeing you all again tonight

i'll stop by again when i soon.

BrokenGarbageCat

by **1#Scrub** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 3:48 pm

Wow so the solution to all our problems was just disabling random crits and raking in all the comp try hards, gg tf2 community.

by **Ron Swansons Stache** » Sat Sep 10, 2016 4:33 pm

Great to hear all this! Excited to get back home to play with y'all again, I miss playing TF2 with the community regularly!

by **MGunz** » Tue Sep 13, 2016 1:14 pm

So ... we now have two servers with no crits? Didn't SB2 already have no crits?

by **HausOfJoel** » Tue Sep 13, 2016 3:29 pm

I have discovered the real cause and reason for csn dying

look at that smug bastard

#BanWord

by **Ron Swansons Stache** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 6:58 am

Lia_Rein wrote:Yeah a while back Tlar spent aaages trying to find a good server without random kritz and he only found one which only had pop events on specific nights

Since apparently that no crit solution only worked for like a day I think we should explore the idea of daily pop events. Some examples could be Commentatary Wednesday where every Wednesday at a certain time there's a commentator for the pub. Another could be try hard Tuesday where we screw with some settings but still try hard and try and win the maps (slight modifications to gravity etc) because right now regular popping events aren't working anymore.

You also need to consider popping doesn't work like it used to - no longer do we need to hit that 6 or 8 person threshold before we get a slew of new players being filtered in from quickplay. Now we basically need to pop organically and keep it popped organically.

by **Lia_Rein** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 7:10 am

Ron Swansons Stache wrote:Since apparently that no crit solution only worked for like a day I think we should explore the idea of daily pop events. Some examples could be Commentatary Wednesday where every Wednesday at a certain time there's a commentator for the pub. Another could be try hard Tuesday where we screw with some settings but still try hard and try and win the maps (slight modifications to gravity etc) because right now regular popping events aren't working anymore.

You also need to consider popping doesn't work like it used to - no longer do we need to hit that 6 or 8 person threshold before we get a slew of new players being filtered in from quickplay. Now we basically need to pop organically and keep it popped organically.

Lia agrees

Though popping did seem a bit easier. I think we just haven't been cohesively trying to pop for a lil bit.

by **1#Scrub** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 10:47 am

Popping is a whole lot easier, but the problemo is people leave after the map changes. So maybe we could extend the amount of rounds in each map or somethin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

by **L0wsound** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 1:14 pm

1#Scrub wrote:Popping is a whole lot easier, but the problemo is people leave after the map changes. So maybe we could extend the amount of rounds in each map or somethin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or make Extend map the first choice on map votes?

by **Ron Swansons Stache** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 2:17 pm

None of the two above solve the core issue - eventually that map is changing and the server is dying. You need peeps to stick around, or give them reason to.

by **Lia_Rein** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 2:25 pm

Ron Swansons Stache wrote:None of the two above solve the core issue - eventually that map is changing and the server is dying. You need peeps to stick around, or give them reason to.

Ron is right. Fingerman should give everyone money for each map they play on.

by **Ron Swansons Stache** » Wed Sep 14, 2016 2:35 pm

Lia_Rein wrote:
Ron Swansons Stache wrote:None of the two above solve the core issue - eventually that map is changing and the server is dying. You need peeps to stick around, or give them reason to.

Ron is right. Fingerman should give everyone money for each map they play on.

Or just me. Either or.

by **Buzz** » Sat Sep 24, 2016 6:07 am

sv_gravity 100

by **Lia_Rein** » Sat Sep 24, 2016 6:14 am

Buzz wrote:sv_gravity 100

+1 This is our pre-scrim practicing tactic. Always works.

Lettuce is credit to team!

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